Imagining the West in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union [1 ed.] 9780822973911, 9780822961253

Citation preview

Imagining the West in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union

PITT SERIES IN RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN STUDIES Jonathan Harris, Editor

KRITIK A HISTORICAL STUDIES

IMAGINING THE WEST IN EASTERN EUROPE AND THE SOVIET UNION EDITED BY

GYÖRGY PÉTERI

University of Pittsburgh Press

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260 Copyright © 2010, University of Pittsburgh Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Imagining the West in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union / edited by György Péteri.    p.  cm. — (Pitt series in Russian and East European studies) (Kritika historical studies)   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-0-8229-6125-3 (paper : alk. paper)   1. Europe, Eastern—Relations—Western countries.  2. Russia—Relations—Western countries.  3. Soviet Union—Relations—Western countries.  4. Western countries— Relations—Europe, Eastern.  5. Western countries—Relations—Russia.  6. Western countries—Relations—Soviet Union.  7. Geographical perception—Europe, Eastern— History.  8. Geographical perception—Soviet Union—History.  9. East and West. 10. Transnationalism.  I. Péteri, György.   DJK45.W47I45 2010   303.48'24701821—dc22 2010031525

CONTENTS

Chapter 1. Introduction: The Oblique Coordinate Systems of Modern Identity  1 György Péteri Chapter 2. Were the Czechs More Western Than Slavic? Nineteenth-Century Travel Literature from Russia by Disillusioned Czechs  13 Karen Gammelgaard Chapter 3. Privileged Origins: “National Models” and Reforms of Public Health in Interwar Hungary  36 Erik Ingebrigtsen Chapter 4. Defending Children’s Rights, “In Defense of Peace”: Children and Soviet Cultural Diplomacy  59 Catriona Kelly Chapter 5. East as True West: Redeeming Bourgeois Culture, from Socialist Realism to Ostalgie 87 Greg Castillo Chapter 6. Paris or Moscow? Warsaw Architects and the Image of the Modern City in the 1950s  105 David Crowley Chapter 7. Imagining Richard Wagner: The Janus Head of a Divided Nation  131 Elaine Kelly

v

vi

contents

Chapter 8. From Iron Curtain to Silver Screen: Imagining the West in the Khrushchev Era  153 Anne E. Gorsuch Chapter 9. Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall . . . Is the West the Fairest of Them All? Czechoslovak Normalization and Its (Dis)contents  172 Paulina Bren Chapter 10. Who Will Beat Whom? Soviet Popular Reception of the American National Exhibition in Moscow, 1959  194 Susan E. Reid Chapter 11. Moscow Human Rights Defenders Look West: Attitudes toward U.S. Journalists in the 1960s and 1970s  237 Barbara Walker Chapter 12. Conclusion: Transnational History and the East-West Divide  258 Michael David-Fox Notes  269 Contributors  329

CHAPTER  1

INTRODUCTION THE OBLIQUE COORDINATE SYSTEMS OF MODERN IDENTIT Y

György Péteri

Few today would deny the importance of the study of images, perceptions, and mentalities on which the modern social order rests. A possible approach to these entities leads through an understanding of the processes of mental mapping. In 1905, Endre Ady wrote, Ferry-land, ferry-land, ferry-land . . . even in its most daring dreams it is only roaming back and fro between two shores. From East to West or, rather, the other way around. [. . .] Sporadically, there have already been souls who have engaged with the West. [. . .] Some 10,000 people have run ahead. They have become European in nerves, blood, thought, pain, and thirst. An overdeveloped type of human has established itself here: they are ahead of Hungarian society by at least 100 years. These holy forerunners did not even dream of not being followed by hundreds of thousands. [. . .] You are great, my people; you are great. You have been continually struggling with Europe for 1,000 years. In the meantime, you have been recruiting troops. Although you were bleeding. But you have never allowed Reason to triumph over the heads of your children—you live in the middle of Europe as a living protest against piercing the virginal membrane of barbaric existence. [. . .] The Tartars are moving on turbulently under the Carpathians.1 1

2

györgy péteri

Nearly a century later, Péter Esterházy was asked, in a 1992 interview, “What kind of country would you like to live in?” He replied, “I share the helplessness that constitutes Europe today. This empty head, this shoulder-shrugging, this shy gaze toward the ground—this is Europe. Therefore, my answer can only be a practical one, and rather suspicious too. I prefer to cite my friend who says he would like to live in a country like Toscana inhabited by Englishmen speaking Hungarian.”2 Symbolic geographies reveal how human agents, in particular historical and cultural contexts, define themselves by locating themselves spatially as well as temporally, drawing the boundaries of social spaces where they are within, and relating themselves and their spaces to others and to what lies, in their discursively constructed spatial/temporal order, without, behind, and ahead. What makes these socially and historically situated processes really important is their intimate relationship to the formation of identities and, indeed, to identity politics (including the regular attempts in all kinds of modern political regimes to manage identities through the projection of images about themselves and the others). The definition with any exactitude of any location in a physical space is a rather complicated matter, as is clearly demonstrated in the history of geographical coordinate systems. Moreover, any point’s exact location on, in, or above Earth can be defined only on the basis of a set of conventions contested, negotiated, and decided on by humans. There has been nothing of an “objective necessity” forcing modern geographers of the 1880s to choose the line passing to the rear of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, U.K., as the prime meridian (the 0° longitude), defining everything that lies east of it as the Eastern Hemisphere and everything that lies to its west as the Western Hemisphere. If even our ways of “bringing order” into the natural world are so contingent, so highly dependent, on social interaction (negotiations producing and reproducing conventions—more or less generally shared understandings—as to various reference points, reference lines, and/or procedures of mapping), it comes as little surprise that the regimes (criteria, standards, and procedures) defining the very “coordinates” of our symbolic geographies exhibit a overwhelming level of variability and exposure to human agency and never-ceasing contestation. Mental mapping in the modern and late modern era can and should certainly be understood and studied as consisting in at least four distinct, although partly overlapping operations.3 The first of these is the construction of regionlike units by associating alleged constituent parts of an area (like “the West” or “Eastern Europe”), whereby resemblances producing apparently

introduction

“shared patterns” are emphasized at the cost of differences/deviations marring these patterns. Moreover, a position is assigned to these parts (and the coherent whole they are imagined to constitute) in the prevalent “developmental hierarchies” of the time, localizing the region thus construed on an axis between “barbarism” at one extreme and “civilization” at the other, between “Asia” and “Europe,” between “traditional” and “modern,” between “backwardness” and “development.” Karen Gammelgaard’s study in this volume of Czech travelers to Russia at the end of the long nineteenth century describes their increasing disenchantment as they found social conditions in the empire, which was expected to act as the enlightened and modern patron of all the smaller Slavic nations to its west, to be generally backward and despotic. As the Czech visitors articulated their perceptions of Russia in contrastive terms, and as they (at least Havlíček and Mrštík) associated the negative Russian characteristics with the notion of “East,” “Asia,” and/or “Byzantium,” the position of the Czechs (and the Czech lands) was “mentally transferred . . . westward.” Havlíček’s, Mrštík’s, and Stašek’s challenges to the contemporary Czech literary intelligentsia’s cherished idea of Slavic unity with Russia implied and brought with them the redefinition of the very system of coordinates used to identify the place of the Russians and the Czechs on Earth: the former appeared, more and more, to have been lost to “Asia” at the same time and to the same extent as the latter’s claim to be part of “Europe” grew firmer and more obvious. Mental “regionalization” is also shaped by “peopling” our arealike constructions, that is, by naming and characterizing physically, mentally, and culturally the humans who populate them.4 Advocates promoting two different models of public health in Hungary of the 1930s, as is ably shown by Erik Ingebrigtsen in this volume, did not hesitate to promote their own favorite solution by depicting it as an authentic Magyar model, developed on Magyar soil in response to Magyar needs and conditions and/or, even, to “the unconscious desires of the Hungarian race.” Some of the arguments defined this imagined Hungary, in an effort to devalue the alien (American, French, or German) models of public health, by claiming that foreign models could hardly work in the backward Hungarian countryside, “where you first and foremost do not find mothers possessing sufficient intelligence” for a successful adoption of the Western model of general public health. In “addressing” a region, the region is posited as lands “where everything remained to be done” and as a place that needs to be told and taught what to do (as in Voltaire’s Russia). The region may instead be cast as lands from

3

4

györgy péteri

where salvation, wisdom, “best practices,” and beauty originate (as the Soviet Union was imagined in various accounts, travelogues, and particularly in propaganda works translated from Russian and published in East Central Europe in the 1950s).5 Much has been (and even more will be) written on the history of the East-West division, with all its complications and complexities, in the minds of modern and late modern Europeans.6 Considering the great variation by period, country, and sociocultural milieu from which the analyzed corpus of texts and/or other forms of cultural expression (cartoons, films, photos, music, and other types of art) comes, it is little wonder that we find it hard to agree about the significance of this binary, or even the place(s) and time(s) in which it originated. It should be easier to agree, however, that the Cold War era was the unique period when “East” and “West” became the constituting elements of the most important single bipolarity in terms of which various communities and major political and cultural projects and movements tended to define themselves and one another. THE OCCIDENT WITHIN—OR STATE SOCIALISM’S DRIVE FOR E XCEPTIONALISM AND MODERNIT Y

A majority of the essays in this volume discuss “Eastern” (communist, statesocialist) perceptions of the “Western” (capitalist) world. Barbara Walker’s perceptive essay on the relationship between Soviet dissidents and Western journalists reporting from the USSR stands out from this set in that it alone focuses on the microdynamics of East-West encounters and interaction. Emphasizing the role of Soviet isolation in general and the constant stress dissidents were exposed to by the regime, Walker shows clearly the role that the insider-outsider distinction played in this interaction as well as the high demands placed on the Western journalist if he or she wanted to establish a workable rapport with dissidents (and the high expectations of involvement and shared values one had to face if accepted and identified as an insider). Rewarded with an excellent analysis of the culture of dissidence and the dynamics of group formation along the boundary between insiders and outsiders, the reader is eager to see future reports from Walker’s research discussing in greater detail what it meant for the dissidents to be Soviet, how they related to the socialist social order, and how all this affected their relations to Westerners (and Western journalists). All the other essays confront the issues of systemic divide  or systemic identity when discussing various social fields’ histories under state socialism in terms of the symbolic geographies they yielded. Without wishing to turn the wheel of historiography back to the times when a great deal of theoriz-

introduction

ing about the Soviet-type political, social, and cultural order emphasized the “ideocratic” nature of these regimes, the “despotic implications of Marxism,” these new studies on identity formation and identity politics demonstrate unequivocally the supreme impact of the Marxist-Leninist view on the social universe of the modern and late modern era in prevalent discourses of identity throughout the career of the state socialist project. Although we strongly believe that the discourses of socialist society need to be taken seriously, this claim is not about the “primacy of ideology” imposed from above. It is about a common structuring feature or shared tendency of discursive practices (the practices of imagining) observable in various walks of life in state-socialist societies. There is no direct path from this claim to suggestions that try to assert anything like an ontological priority of “ideology,” even less of discourses, over all other practices in these (or other) societies. A discussion of the ways in which discursive and other practices combine to co-produce and reproduce a social order is beyond the scope of the studies included in this book. The findings presented here offer valuable observations concerning the dynamics of discursive processes of identity formation along the Cold War East-West divide. The Marxist-Leninist theory of social development tells a relatively simplistic story about a sequence of social formations. The sequence is ordered along a timeline between the extreme points of a society characterized by unstructured, primitive communalism and another one structured by the free and voluntary association of free individuals (communism). Between these points the drama of history plays itself out in the course of four acts: slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and socialism. Each act is propelled forward by the antagonism between classes of “haves” and “have-nots,” exploiters and exploited, rulers and ruled, oppressors and oppressed. As the latter fight themselves into the position of the upper dog they undergo a metamorphosis from a progressive social force (bringing down a retrograde ancient regime and promoting a new social order conducive to general economic and cultural development) into a reactionary one (clinging to the status quo and resisting the “demands and requirements of socioeconomic progress”). The most important single property of each class is its position in terms of ownership with regard to the “means of production.” Indeed, each social formation is defined by its underlying “mode of production,” which in turn is structured by the prevailing type of ownership. Thus the “cycles” of progressive and retrograde phases in the history of social classes, and of social formations, are determined and driven by the dynamics of the “economic base”—that is, the trajectory of the mode of production (with type of ownership as its most decisive single dimension). In this narrative of universal social development, socialism is distinct

5

6

györgy péteri

from any preceding social formation, and most emphatically from capitalism. It is conceived of as a “transitory society,” a formation between capitalism and communism—it is no-longer-capitalism and not-yet-communism. Its historical role is to eliminate capitalism as well as to put an end to all forms of exploitation, private ownership (of the means of production), and oppression of humans by humans. Like other transitions between modes of production, even the transition from capitalism toward communism is seen by MarxistLeninists as a process of sublation (Aufhebung)—that is, as a “dialectical” process that includes elements of destruction/negation as well as preservation (the East German discourses appropriating various legacies of high culture analyzed in this volume by Elaine Kelly and Greg Castillo constitute two cases in point). Also, socialism is expected to be and regarded as (in MarxistLeninist developmental terms) superior to capitalism because of its socially optimal use of resources based on collective ownership and central planning. In this view, socialism is there to bring history to its conclusion and to emancipate and thus to enable humankind to embark on its real history: communism. This, in a nutshell, constituted the master narrative of the state-socialist project. The point I wish to make here is not about the cognitive status of this narrative. The point is, rather, that this narrative had an immense sig­ nificance in shaping the discourses of state-socialist regimes. It had this significance not merely because generations of professionals and intellectuals, who grew up and obtained their education during the years of communist rule, were exposed to it in a variety of forms (having to read during their university years such subjects as “historical materialism,” “political economy,” “scientific socialism,” etc.). Just as important is that this narrative provided the state-socialist project with a general historical legitimacy and explained and justified the power position and avant-garde role of communist elites. The identity of these elites was anchored in this narrative as was their consciousness of their historical mission and call. The master narrative of state socialism delivered all these goods thanks to its capacity to discursively create and assert a meaning for socialism as a historical project—and to its ability to provide, over a long historic period, a powerful mental mechanism for constructing a systemic identity for socialism. This master narrative asserted itself as a paradigmatic core to which discourses of various social fields tended to assimilate. As Anne Gorsuch’s illuminating contribution on Khrushchev-era Soviet films about tourism shows, this tendency of assimilation could assert itself in attempts at domesticating such “Western traits” of life as were deemed tolerable and, most important, compatible with the state-socialist social order. Indeed, as Gorsuch claims, it was characteristic for this era to “combine cautious optimism about permit-

introduction

ting a now Sovietized ‘difference’ with profound anxiety about the threats too much of this might pose.” Elaine Kelly’s and Greg Castillo’s exemplary discussions of the efforts of East Germany’s music and architecture establishments competitively to appropriate Wagner and disown-then-embrace the Bauhaus legacy in architecture not only confirm this claim of a tendency to assimilate but remind us also of all the complications stemming from the changing concrete political (and identity-political) context within which this assimilation to the master narrative was attempted. Highly pertinent to this point is the presentation of Edmund Goldzamt’s book on the architecture of city centers and problems of heritage in David Crowley’s essay, or B. P. Mikhailov’s Great Soviet Encyclopaedia entry on architecture, turned into a booklet by the Deutsche Bauakademie, presented and discussed in Greg Castillo’s contribution. The master narrative defined the norms and patterns according to which the (capitalist) “West” and (socialist) “East” were imagined and contrasted with each other in spatial as well as temporal dimensions. It was the language in which the discursive practices of mental mapping were exercised: the category of (capitalist) West was defined; hierarchies of economic and cultural progress (and potentials of such progress) were constructed; and the socialist “East” was staged as the future matrix of the yet-only-capitalist “West.”7 This was the language that helped populate this “backward” region of the “West” with selfish, profit-seeking capitalists, educated middle classes characterized by alienation, and working people turned into slaves of consumer desires and haunted by Angst about losing their jobs, becoming ill, or failing to secure a good education for their children—as opposed to their Eastern, socialist counterparts. In the East, according to this view, central planners (the apparatus of the party state) worked hand in hand with socially engaged intellectuals and professionals in the best interests of socialist society as a whole; workers acted as rational, socially conscious, and responsible consumers and enjoyed the benefits of a fully developed institutional system of social protection and security, of a public infrastructure offering free access to health care, child care, and education; and no one ever needed to fear unemployment or for the fate of the next generation. The power of such imaginings is clearly demonstrated by Catriona Kelly’s discussion of the Soviet “missionary advocacy of its own provision for children as an international model.” She shows ably how such contrastive images may lead to policy failures both because policy makers might become hostages of perceptions generated by their own propaganda about the Other, and because the domestic success of discourses of systemic superiority tends to define (raise) popular expectations (and thus undermine the regime’s legitimacy) at home. Susan Reid’s essay analyzes utterances that reflected and shaped the

7

8

györgy péteri

discourses of the Khrushchev era on socialist domesticity and consumption, as a new “front” of Cold War–era systemic rivalry opened up: that of the “living standards race.” The decade of Khrushchev’s New Course distinguishes itself first of all by its attempts to abandon the productivist bias of the Stalinist socioeconomic order and to allow greater room for and devote more resources and attention to the development of consumption. Khrushchev, and some of the communist leaders in East Central Europe, obviously recognized the dissatisfaction of the peoples ruled by them. Their consumerist turn, I believe, had as much to do with East Central Europe’s uprisings between 1953 and 1956 as with demonstration effects from the West (the “Nylon War”). It is an interesting observation by Reid that discourses around the modernization of domestic life tended to revive the ideas current during the 1920s, inasmuch as they pleaded for collectivist solutions for not only child care but also laundries, cleaning agencies, and the establishment of publicly owned and run rental services for household appliances. This is, then, the other distinguishing feature of Khrushchev’s consumerist turn. Whereas the emphasis on the collective share of consumption (free health care, child care, and education, strongly subsidized communal housing, etc.) was sustained in almost all the countries of state socialism throughout the communist era, discourses aimed at developing and offering collectivist institutional solutions in newly emerging areas of consumption in the late 1950s and early 1960s—where personally (privately) owned durables (various household appliances but also, in several countries, housing itself and, which is quite important, cars) became major items indicating the growth of personal (family) well-being and wealth—constituted a remarkably short-lived feature of the post-Stalin order of socialist societies. In my view, this shows the unease with which communist elites allowed the societies they reigned over to join and partake in modern trends of consumption and domesticity (where the capitalist West was not merely ahead but was the trendsetter), being concerned with the integrity of the distinctive systemic identity of the state-socialist social order. What we are dealing with here is the fundamental tension of the state-socialist project: the tension between the push for modernity and the profound need to steer modernizing developments so as to produce and reproduce systemic exceptionalism rather than to blur the distinction between capitalism and socialism. In this regard, what seems to me to be intriguing is that (a) Khrushchev had a premonition about the dangers that a consumerist turn might bring with it for the identity of socialism, and (b) the remarkable absence of this same kind of concern in the aftermath of the coup against Khrushchev. The Brezhnev-Kosygin leadership’s decision to enter into the “deal of the century” with Fiat to transfer a complete set of car production to Togliatti heralds an

introduction

era in which satisfaction of consumer desires took precedence over systemic identity. It appears as if Khrushchev’s ideas and policies of a “socialist car” (based on a radical expansion and development of public transportation, taxi services, and the development of a large network of state-owned car rentals) were simply forgotten. The change benefited private mass automobilism— that is, the Western pattern of modernity, to which even some commoners in Khrushchev’s Soviet Union had given a system-conscious, highly critical reception, as is well shown in Susan Reid’s discussion of the American National Exhibition in Moscow’s Sokol´niki Park in 1959. While under Khrushchev there were still attempts to define a “socialist mode of consumption” at least in some dimensions of everyday life, in its immediate post-Khrushchev edition, “socialist consumerism” throughout the “Eastern bloc” had precious little to offer when it came to distinctly socialist characteristics. I believe that the contemporary New Left critique of the consumerist turn in the socialist countries made some acute observations in this respect. André Gorz wrote in 1967, Socialism, in short, had to cease to be a state of scarcity, austerity, and drabness; it had to satisfy individual daily needs so that the emphasis laid on cultural and collective needs, and their collective fulfillment, might be seen to be genuine. But as it moved in that direction, it also had to demonstrate that the socialist pattern of consumption was not a tardy imitation but an innovation qualitatively superior to the capitalist pattern. Thus far, this demonstration has been lacking. Everything has happened as though production and consumption policy, even in its long-term implications, was mainly an imitation of capitalism. Priority has been given to the type of individual equipment popularized by so-called affluent capitalism. This was normal in the case of such things as bicycles, motorcycles, radios, and canned foods but less so in the case of cameras, refrigerators, and individual washing machines, since the housing shortage and smallness of apartments create acute problems for the town dweller, and since the installation and improvement of cheap collective services—such as public transport, shops, nursery schools, house canteens or restaurants, delivery laundries—would free women from domestic chores and hold greater advantage on all levels. Why, for example, was it thought necessary to produce washing machines, notably in the U.S.S.R. and Czechoslovakia? And why, since the dismissal of Khrushchev (who had different views on this particular matter), has the U.S.S.R. been concerned with the development of private motoring?8

Indeed, as David Crowley puts it in his contribution in this volume, a “hybrid form of modernity” seemed to be emerging and was generated by what Václav Havel saw as “the historical encounter between dictatorship and

9

10

györgy péteri

consumer society.” Of course, in terms of the master narrative of the socialist project, this kind of modernity was not only unbecoming (such “hybrids” were produced at the time at a number of places—e.g., Franco’s Spain or the Colonels’ Greece) but also quite displeasing and disturbing, because of its obvious destructive potential for socialism’s systemic integrity and identity. In Paulina Bren’s rendering, the communist leadership of “normalized” Czechoslovakia appears to have found an answer to the vexing problem of combining the consumerist turn with sustained systemic exceptionalism. According to Bren’s argument, Gustav Husak and his regime recognized that competition with the West in terms of consumerism would have been a futile enterprise. Therefore, and unlike their East German counterparts (who were compelled to take up the glove of the West because of their population’s much more direct and intensive exposure to demonstration effects from West Germany), the Czechoslovak normalization regime put the emphasis on what it termed “the socialist lifestyle,” with “self-realization” at its core. Normalization’s “society of social comforts” (full employment, blind or half-blind eyes turned toward low work discipline, low work intensity, low productivity and quality, cheap subsidized housing, and services, etc.) was supposed to provide things the West did not. Although this fits well with the “timeless” and general pattern (also found in the German Democratic Republic) of emphasizing (and overvaluing) items of collective consumption and socialist welfare as opposed to personal/ individual consumption, it did not, because it could not, constitute an effective way to absorb all the insecurity caused by the advent of consumerism and the lack of collective (systemically correct) forms of appropriating (consuming) the goods that constituted the icons of modern everyday life. In terms of discursive practices a response in fact came in the late 1960s and during the 1970s: first, in the form of a major wave of publications that tried to assert the exceptionalism (systemic identity) of socialist society against contemporary social (“bourgeois”) theories of modernity (such as “stages of growth,” “industrial, consumer, postindustrial societies,” and various convergence theories); second, in the form of ambitious national and international (COMECON) projects, conducted mostly by sociologists, to study prevailing “ways of life” or “lifestyles” in the socialist countries empirically, in the hope of generating insights that could be helpful in defining what the “socialist way of life” or “lifestyle” might be and what it should be; and third, by way of attempts to develop a Marxist-Leninist theory of the “socialist mode of consumption.” Part of the failure effectively to meet the systemic challenge of the West on the “fronts” of everyday life and consumption, I believe, had to do with the fact that these discursive responses came too late to be able to affect what had

introduction

by then become well-established practices of policy and everyday life. To cite an example from the history of automobilism—in Hungary, in the mid-1950s, when there were only 1,800 to 2,400 cars in private ownership, it would still have been feasible to try and steer the development of automobilism along a collectivist design similar to Khrushchev’s (with major investments to develop readily available and accessible taxi- and car-rental services side by side with the expansion and thorough modernization of the infrastructure and services of public transportation). By the early 1970s, however, when the number of cars in private hands topped 250,000 and constituted almost 90 percent of all personal cars, the chances of offering a genuine alternative to the “Western” pattern had been reduced to nil. Although economic-technological inertia is an important consideration, we would be mistaken to believe that it alone could explain the blurring of systemic boundaries when it came to basic patterns and tendencies of consumption. In the societies of state socialism, where the middle classes (the state-dependent Bildungs- and Statusbürgertum) were the main beneficiaries of the consumerist turn of the 1960s, where the party-state’s elites were commuting between their homes, workplaces, and dachas in the latest models of Mercedes cars, and where even lower-level officials enjoyed and used privileges to jump ahead of commoners in the lines for private cars, the West was not merely a “mirror” where contrasts and comparisons could be seen. However, many discourses of systemic identity had to insist on construing the West as the constitutive other, on mapping it without, and on representing it as socialism’s past, the Occident was also part of the self; it asserted itself within, and appeared to be ahead rather than behind. State-socialist socioeconomic modernization followed deliberately and programmatically the universal standards of technological and economic success. In this respect it had never transcended, nor aimed beyond, the material culture of capitalism—rather, it defined itself as a faster, because more rational and more efficient, path in the same direction. Thanks to its early, strong productivist bias (economic and discursive) toward pacifying societies that had been exploited, oppressed, and harassed during the Stalin years and toward satisfying the middle classes (particularly the political class), the feeble attempts in the late 1950s and the early 1960s to define new socialist forms for modern everyday life and consumption, to develop an alternative, socialist “mode of life,” remained unfinished. Later, the efforts of the Khrushchev years were altogether abandoned. The retrograde nature of the Brezhnev era in this respect is manifest in the nervous and brutal reactions of these regimes, particularly against those who tried to use a Marxian platform to discuss problems of alienation, everyday life, and human needs and to present arguments

11

12

györgy péteri

for and ideas of social experimentation in order to promote the development of alternatives to (capitalist) consumerism.9 Due to the discursive and policy vacuum thus created, the Occident could assert itself also in the dreams, desires, values, and practices of various social groups. Having been to a great extent the child of and shaped by the standards and patterns of the Occident, the rebellious project of socialism not only failed to be “antimodern” (which it never wished to be), it also failed to provide a workable way toward an alternative modernity.10 It lost the race for modernity as it failed to assert its systemic exceptionalism by offering viable alternatives for people’s everyday life. The result was aptly summed up in a joke that circulated in Budapest in the late 1980s: “Q: What is socialism? A: It is a particularly long and painful transition from capitalism to capitalism.” Remarkably enough, what makes this joke really funny is its sarcastic resonance with the language of the master narrative of socialism.

CHAPTER  2

WERE THE CZECHS MORE WESTERN THAN SLAVIC? NINETEEN-CENTURY TR AVEL LITER ATURE FROM RUSSIA BY DISILLUSIONED CZECHS

Karen Gammelgaard You knew my views before I crossed the border, and therefore you must feel distraught when you hear me sing a different tune! Just come here! And let he who wants to do the Czechs a good turn send them at his own expense to Moscow. —Karel Havlíček Borovský

During the second half of the nineteenth century, three Czech travelers, all of them gifted writers, visited Russia. Their encounters with Russia caused disillusionment. The travelers struggled with presenting their disillusionment to their compatriots, since it contested the literary elite’s image of the Czech nation. This image was constructed on the belief that the Czech nation shared a heritage (cultural and linguistic) and perhaps therefore aims with the great eastern Slavic nation, Russia. Karel Havlíček Borovský (1821–56) left Prague in November 1842 and went to Lwów, from which he planned to enter the Russian empire. Passport formalities forced him to stay two months in Lwów, until he was finally granted an entrance permit at the end of January 1843. Traveling by horse, he arrived in Moscow in early February. He worked as a tutor in the family of Stepan Petrovich Shevyrev, a professor of Russian and a devoted Slavophile. Havlíček stayed in Moscow until 6 July 1844. He then went to live in Prague. His travelogues from Russia appeared in the Czech press in 1843–46.1 Havlíček was involved in the Czech patriotic struggle as a journalist and editor of the daily newspaper Národní noviny. His harsh criticism of the Habsburg imperial 13

14

karen gammelgaard

absolute rule caused his imprisonment in 1851. After his release in 1855, his health broken, he died aged 34. About 30 years after Havlíček’s journey to Russia, at the beginning of the 1870s, Antal Stašek (1843–1931) accepted work as a tutor in the noble family of Ivan Aleksandrovich Brilkin in St. Petersburg, where he stayed from May 1874 to May 1875. He had left Bohemia because he felt isolated and depressed by the contemporary political situation. Moreover, he was uncertain whether he should continue pursuing a recently commenced legal career. After his return to Bohemia, Stašek was engrossed in national and social issues, particularly those of the countryside. Such issues also came to mark his novels, which earned him a reputation in the decades at the turn of the century. In the autumn of 1889 and the summer of 1897, he went, both times as a tourist, to the southern parts of the Russian empire. A well-known public figure, Stašek lived to see both the 1917 Russian Revolution and the establishment of Czechoslovakia. His Memoirs from a Stay in Russia appeared as a chapter in his 1925 memoirs.2 The third and youngest traveler, Vilém Mrštík (1863–1912), was engaged by the editors of the daily Politik in 1896 to report as a correspondent from the “all-Russian” exhibition that was to take place in Nizhnyi Novgorod that year. Mrštík left home in June 1896 and traveled through Cracow and Warsaw before entering Russia proper. From Warsaw he went by train to Moscow where he stayed a few days. He then went to St. Petersburg and from there to Nizhnyi Novgorod. He returned in July after four weeks abroad. His travel essays, compiled under the title A Journey to Russia, stem from this, his only trip to Russia.3 Already before his journey, Mrštík was involved in polemics concerning the preservation of old Prague architecture. The public knew him also due to his literary works, translations, and literary criticism. Yet he grew increasingly isolated from leading artistic circles.4 His suicide in 1912 is attributed to persecution mania and a sense of insufficient recognition.5 Before the three travelers set forth, their passion for Russian culture was well known to the Czech public. Havlíček thought of his stay in Russia as a necessary part of his plan to write a three-volume work titled “Travels Undertaken to All the Slavic Lands,” as well as other works on Slavic and East European peoples.6 Stašek admired Russian literary realism, and he had authored the first Czech study on Turgenev.7 Mrštík was a renowned propagandist of Russian literature. Before his journey to Russia, he had translated works of Pushkin, Dostoevskii, and Tolstoi into Czech.8 Nevertheless, their stays in Russia stripped them all of their initial illusions concerning the prospects for any Czech rapprochement with Russia. This chapter shows how Havlíček, Stašek, and Mrštík described their ex-



were the czechs more western than slavic?

periences from Russia in their travel literature.9 Their accounts document how their perceptions of Russia changed. Ultimately they characterized Russia as different from the West and from the Czech nation they increasingly saw as Western; hence, they dissociated themselves from Russia.10 When Havlíček, Stašek, and Mrštík perceived themselves as part of the European standard against which Russia was positioned, they implied that they perceived themselves, and the Czech people, as part and parcel of the West. Their dissociation and perception also had a reciprocal effect that moved the Czechs mentally westward. The travelers’ rejection of Russia contrasted with the prevailing attitude among the contemporary Czech cultured public who saw the Germans as the Czech nation’s constituting Other and who idolized Russia as their pivotal ally. In this situation, the travelers and their confidants were conscious of the troubles their accounts could pose to the national movement. Therefore, the three had to maneuver cautiously when they wrote their accounts and published them. The rejection of Russia also turned Havlíček, Stašek, and Mrštík’s travel literature into accounts of disillusion.11 Their disillusionment related to the construction of the Russian Other in a particular way. Initially they perceived the Russian nation as relatively similar to the Czech one. Russia was only more prototypically Slavic; and, because of its size, they viewed it as ensuring the existence of the Slavic people. When they began to perceive differences within the imagined Slavic community, they had to come to terms with the fallacy of their original perception. The nature of travel literature differs fundamentally from the external world that the literature represents. When authors convert journeys and destinations into accounts, they assign meaning to them. This operation enables mental mapping: countries and people are assigned ideological constructs and evaluated. To investigate Havlíček, Stašek, and Mrštík’s operations of mental mapping, this chapter focuses first on how they mapped Russia and the Russians as essentially different. This resulted in the establishment of a bipolar scheme whereby Russia was positioned against the European (Western) Czechs. Yet the issue is more complicated. The construction of the Other takes place under specific historical conditions; however, those conditions change. Therefore, the chapter looks at instances in the travel accounts that undermine the tempting facileness inherent in bipolarity schemes and examines how conventions constrained how the authors turned experiences from Russia into travel accounts. Finally, the chapter surveys the publication history of the contributions by Havlíček, Stašek, and Mrštík.

15

16

karen gammelgaard DOMESTIC CONTE X TS

Analyzing how Havlíček, Stašek, and Mrštík represented their disillusionment means following part of the history of how Russia emerged as the constituting Other in Czech elite discourse. In the nineteenth century, Czech patriots positioned themselves against the Germans, not against Russia. The obstacle to Czech national aspirations was Germanness. The leading historian and politician František Palacký (1798–1876) defined the clash with Germanness as the essence of being Czech, stating, “The main content and fundamental course of all Czech and Moravian history is . . . conflict with Germandom, or the acceptance or rejection of German ways and customs by the Czechs.”12 Nonetheless, Palacký argued in favor of staying in the Austrian state to ensure the Czechs’ and other small nations’ security against Russia’s expansive urge.13 He thus kept ideas of cultural identity apart from Realpolitik. Many Czech compatriots, however, found it difficult to do likewise. The main obstacle for them was that the Czech revivalist movement focused attention on language.14 Therefore, in the cultural and literary elite’s patriotic discourse of the time, borders between linguistics and politics were easily blurred. Cultural aspirations merged with political ones. Consequently, it became conventional wisdom among the leading men of letters that the Czechs should build themselves as an independent nation by dissociation from their German neighbors. Conversely, Russia was given prominence by virtue of being Slavic, great and independent. The notion of the Czech nation in the linguistic and ethnic sense coexisted with the broader notion of a Slavic nation.15 In this Slavic nation, Russia was seen as the first among equals and as the guarantor of success of the smaller nations. Ján Kollár (1793–1852), one of the ideological fathers of the revivalist movement, gave this idea a literary expression in his collection of sonnets, The Daughter of Sláva (final version, 1824). In the prologue, the Slav bard complains that his land is now only “a coffin of his nation” where “the Slavic tongue has been silenced” due to robbery by the “envious Teutonia” that has thus disgraced “the whole of humanity.” The bard finds hope for the future in trust in the “great oak,” the symbol of Russia: Aj, zde leží zem ta před okem mým smutně slzícím, Někdy kolébka, nyní národu mého rakev. Stoj, noho; posvátná místa jsou, kamkoli kráčíš, K obloze, Tatry synu, vznes se, vyvýše pohled, Neb raději k velikému přichyl tomu tam se dubisku, Jenž vzdoruje zhoubným až dosaváde časům.



were the czechs more western than slavic?

[Oh! here the country lies before my sadly weeping eyes, Once a cradle, now a coffin of my nation. Halt, foot; there are holy places wherever you walk, Son of Tatra, lift your eyes to the sky, Or better, cling to the great oak That stands up to the present cankerous times.]16

Thus Russia became a symbol of Slavic peculiarity and strength that would secure the Czech nation against Germanization. Simultaneously, all dignified values of humanity were assigned to the Slavic nations. Also a vision of the future characterized the discursive construction of Russia: in the future, the dreams of unity were to be realized. The Czech literary elite constructed Russianness and Germanness in asymmetrical ways. On the one hand, they found that the Russian and Czech nations had a linguistic heritage and myths in common, but they had limited direct contact with the Russians. On the other, Czechs met Germans in every aspect of their daily life. In the late nineteenth century, one-third of the population in the Bohemian lands was German.17 The ratio of Czechs to Germans remained stable even though their relative strengths in economic, political, and cultural life gradually changed in favor of the Czechs. Bilingualism was common, especially in the educated Czech population.18 Many prestigious social and cultural functions were carried out in German only; Czech patriots regarded the spreading of their language into prestigious functions an important goal. This linguistic character of the Czech revival was based on an emphasis on all things Slavic. Accordingly, all things Russian were admired. In broad terms, the admiring construct of Russia remained remarkably unchanged in Czech literary discourse throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. Russophilia was challenged by Russia’s use of force in foreign policy, particularly its crushing of the Polish rebellion in 1860. But the idea of Slavic unity under the patronage of Russia continued. In the late 1880s, the immensely popular poet Svatopluk Čech (1846–1908) still celebrated the glorious Slavic future unity as a weapon in the national struggle, using, as Kollár had, the mythical goddess, Sláva, as a symbol of Slavic unity: věřme jen vítězství slovanské síly, která si podepře krajní tu hráz, věřme, že národ náš, veliká Sláva, s korouhví lidskosti za štítem práva, dobude korunu velebných krás!

17

18

karen gammelgaard

[Let us believe only the victory of Slavic power that supports the outermost dyke, let us believe that our nation, the great Sláva, with the banner of humanity behind the shield of truth will gain the crown of magnificent beauties!]

Owing to their adoration, the Czech world of letters longed for information about Russia. During his stay in Moscow, Havlíček experienced that “they press me from all sides for correspondence and depiction of Russia etc.”19 The Czech public’s unabated interest in reports from Russia is documented in the massive stock of contemporary travel literature.20 The accounts analyzed here constitute only a small portion of contemporary Czech travelogues from Russia. Additionally, several Czech authors used Russia as the setting in their fictional works, though some had never been there.21 From the 1860s onward, many poems with Russian subjects were published. The linguistically and culturally based construct with Russia as the leading Slavic nation faded with the emergence of new political forces at the turn of the century: the social democrats and the Realist Party. The co-founder of the latter, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850–1937), who later became the first president of Czechoslovakia, firmly placed the Czechs in the West: politically, historically, and culturally. Masaryk perceived the Russians as essentially different from the Czechs. After visiting Russia in 1887, 1889, and 1910, he wrote a comprehensive “sociological sketch” of Russian philosophy, history, and religion.22 In the introduction he expressed his astonishment at the Russian otherness: Slav as I am, a visit to Russia has involved many more surprises than a visit to any other land. In England and America, for example, I had no feeling of surprise. The latest novelty seemed to me nothing more than an obvious development of something with which I was already familiar at home. Yet in Russia, although as a Slav I am competent, I believe, to grasp in Russian literature what is termed the spirit of the language and of the nation; although Russian life, as revealed in the creative works of the Russian authors, is intimately congenial to my own moods, in so far as these are Slav, and arouses harmonious echoes in my own Slav nature—yet in Russia I ever and anon feel surprise! The European, one who lives in the present, has the current of his thought involuntarily directed towards the future and anticipates the conclusions that will follow from the given historic premises. But in Russia he finds himself back in the past, often in the Middle Ages, finds himself in a life utterly different from that of the modern and progressive West.23



were the czechs more western than slavic?

Masaryk’s surprise at what he perceived as Russian otherness thus went handin-hand with a growing realization that he, as a Czech, belonged to the “modern and progressive West.” Travel writing leans on the notion of home because home is the standard by which experiences are measured.24 Moreover, when travelers depict the foreign, they simultaneously reinvent their domestic point of departure. These general features of travel writing apply to the three Czech accounts, too. Havlíček was well aware of the relational nature of his account from Russia: “Traveling to different foreign lands, we recognize more thoroughly our own fatherland. Normally you do not take much notice of what you see constantly and everyday around yourselves; but he who has stayed among other nations knows to appreciate his own nation.”25 As Mrštík began his Russian journey, he quoted Havlíček, adding that also he himself was “guided by this and by nothing else” in his sympathies and antipathies to Russian phenomena.26 More specifically, when Havlíček wrote his travelogue from Russia, he was preoccupied with the German cultural, political, and economic oppression of the Czechs: when he depicted a Russian problem, he tended to argue that the Czechs had similar problems. Mrštík’s appeals to the domestic audience were just as evident. He repeatedly commented on the question of slum clearances in Prague.27 The urgency of this issue for him was reflected in 2 of the 14 chapters of A Journey to Russia. In them, Mrštík contrasted Parisian urban culture with Prague’s. The only trace of Russia was the initial place name “Moscow” that merely referred to where the act of writing took place. Also Stašek explicitly addressed Czech issues in his Memoirs from a Stay in Russia. Yet in his case there are two diachronic dimensions: the political and national situation prevailing in his homeland in the mid-1870s (when he undertook his longest journey to Russia); and the political and cultural questions in Czechoslovakia at the time of writing, the 1920s. At the time of writing, his center of interest was to balance his literary works, their birth and destinies. CONSTRUCTING THE RUSSIAN OTHER

The travelers’ preoccupation with the domestic audience strongly influenced their choice of topics. As indicated by the titles, Russia was indeed the foremost subject of Sketches from Russia, Memoirs from a Stay in Russia, and A Journey to Russia. But the travelers left out many aspects of Russian reality. Geographically, Havlíček focused on Moscow. The only other location that he described was Sokol´niki, an “area outside the town.”28 How he journeyed to Russia was not described. Stašek focused on St. Petersburg, the

19

20

karen gammelgaard

setting for his yearlong stay. He barely mentioned the southern parts of the Russian empire that he visited later.29 Mrštík wrote in detail about his train journey to Moscow, about Moscow and about Nizhnyi Novgorod. He did not refer to his stay in St. Petersburg.30 Thus the authors’ choice of areas was governed by their mental construct of Russia; it did not reflect exactly where they actually spent their time. While Havlíček and Stašek omitted the border crossings, experiences from traversing the frontier remained a crucial subject for Mrštík. Going from the Austrian empire into Russian Poland, he portrayed the unrest and worries that clutched him and all passengers on the train. He minutely described the Russian officer and gendarme who checked passports. The border experience was to Mrštík a portent of disillusion: “But the joyous feeling that you expected at the sight of the country that you perhaps even love does not materialize.”31 The Russian countryside, scenery, and nature were, at best, referred to only cursorily.32 Havlíček and Mrštík mentioned Russia’s natural resources only when explaining the country’s industrial progress. Mrštík ended his ostensibly neutral depiction with an uneasy evaluation: “The Russians themselves regard their annexed areas in Asia as their future economic power. And military power—I add.”33 Instead of natural conditions, the travelers focused on human-made phenomena and human relations. Havlíček and Mrštík commented on Russian fashion and clothing that they found ridiculous. In contrast, they both held Russian architecture in high regard. Havlíček preferred it to the dull Czech buildings: “You, too, should share my opinion because to him who always looked only at our prosaic towns that deserve but the German term Wohnmaschinen, where every house is like another—only wall, window, door and pipe—to him the Russian town is sheer heaven. Here every house has its particular and beautiful form, not to speak about Moscow!”34 Mrštík shared Havlíček’s admiration, and Mrštík’s general concern for architecture made him link his description with a reflection on the social and political Russian otherness as seen from a West European perspective: The passionate enthusiasts of Russia did not see anything in Paris other than a den of sin; and the glorifiers of France, for their part, found nothing in Russia but a country of barbarian obscurantism. Here and there I have already suggested where this obscurantism really exists (the feudal discipline, the terrorism, the use of the kurbash, the disproportionate administration that all humiliate the right of human dignity, the administration’s bullying and militarism), elsewhere I will have the possibility to



were the czechs more western than slavic?

refer to the means by which Russia outshines Western Europe (the love of splendor, luxury, the excessive love of comfort), but the opportunity will also arise to say much about how Russia surpasses other countries: the strongly well-developed and illustriously proven love of art, to an extent that I did not believe before now.35

The most conspicuous phenomenon widely reported by the Czech authors concerned Russia’s social order. The conditions of the Russian peasants and servants left painful impressions on all three. Bureaucracy was also a frequently invoked motif. Stašek described how bureaucrats had hampered his first attempts to go to Russia. Mrštík wrote extensively about difficulties in trying to retrieve his lost suitcase. Havlíček was less annoyed by such things. He kept a boyish enthusiasm for all things new. Nevertheless, the effects of governmental incompetence on the Russian population were clear to him as well. All three mentioned criminality: in the forms of prostitution (Havlíček and Mrštík), theft (Mrštík), and corruption (Stašek). Clearly, all three experienced social issues in Russia so strongly because social matters differed considerably from those they knew from home. Accordingly, in their treatment of social issues they most noticeably used a domestic standard as a basis of evaluation. Comparisons with home greatly influenced their evaluations of Russia. Yet their shared domestic standard did not inspire them to explain Russian social injustice identically. Havlíček explained it by Russia’s being part of the East; and the East to him was linked with despotism: “This way of thinking in the eastern areas may be explained by despotism, and it is completely connected with that.”36 Stašek pointed at the “rottenness of the tsarist system,” which to him was like other political systems built on social injustice.37 Mrštík related Russia very closely to the Byzantine empire, both by using “Byzantine” as almost synonymous with “Russian” and by explaining Russia’s Byzantine heritage: “that Byzantine empire whose annexations run through the whole history of the Russian nation as a regular dream.”38 Yet the decisive trigger of disillusionment for all three was the Russians’ image of the Czechs. Expecting to be met with sympathy for their patriotic case, which was to them so closely linked with ideas of Slavic unity, all three came to realize that the Russians knew hardly anything about the Czechs. They all lamented that the Russians did not distinguish Czechs from other foreigners. Russian ignorance was even more hurtful since the Russians simultaneously perceived Germans as the sole representatives of Europe. Stašek noted that for ordinary Russians almost all foreigners were “Germans,” and he went on to describe the attitude of young Russian intellectuals: “It was superfluous and useless to explain our Czech fears, our Czech danger of being swal-

21

22

karen gammelgaard

lowed by the Germans. There was no interest in us. As Holeček tells us in his memoirs from Petrograd, even the Slavophile professor Lamanskii explained that it would be good for the Slavic people if Prussia occupied Bohemia, and I believe Holeček.”39 All three noted that the Russians perceived all ethnic groups and peoples inhabiting Russia as belonging to the Russian nation. The Czech travelers interpreted this as a refusal to accept any deviation from the Russian norm as well as a denial of the possibility of foreign contributions to Russian society and culture. In Mrštík’s slip-of-tongue imitation: “Concerning the foreigners, they were truly long ago condemned to swallow everything Russian hook, line, and sinker if they were not to be regarded as an enemy of the Slavic people, as a traitor and a slanderer of the holy Russian land. . . . Therefore . . . let us change the subject. It was just a momentary repugnance. Perhaps I am alone in it.”40 Stašek, to his disappointment, even met Czechs in Russia who had accepted the Russian self-image and uncritically admired everything Russian. This attitude had vanished among Czech emigrants, however, when he returned to Russia in 1889.41 Around the same time, Mrštík found that other Czech travelers’ perceptions of Russian arrogance corresponded to his own. One episode he referred to concerned Czech musicians appearing at the allRussian exhibition in Nizhnyi Novgorod, where they felt patronized by their Russian hosts: “‘Sir,’ he said to me, tears in his eyes, ‘I would not give away one grain of sand from our country for the whole of huge Russia.’ And all 40 men of his orchestra seemed to be of the same opinion.”42 Thus all three felt that they had been expelled from a presumed Slavic community. In turn, all three perceived the Russians as different from their domestic Czech standard. This standard was more or less openly depicted as Western. It also worked as the basis for evaluation, such as in the travelers’ discussion of social conditions. The travelers’ new perception of the Russians was displayed in their identification of numerous dichotomies. In these dichotomies Russia functioned as the Other. The travel accounts contain many bluntly worded contrasts, such as Havlíček’s: “the holy solemn silence that the Russians keep in their cathedrals (the very contrast to our prattling in church).”43 Often, Havlíček coupled Russia with the East in an explicit manner: “Russian merchants do not even know that which in business is called honesty. Business is to them, as to all eastern nations, a war without bloodshed.”44 To Havlíček, moreover, Russia was connected with archaic conduct. For instance, he considered the Russian merchants’ partiality for women’s girth as equal to the partiality of “ancient Czechs” for thick trees.45 Furthermore, he considered the Russian style of family life (which he appreciated) as an indication of Russia’s having been bypassed by the “manufactory, speculative spirit” that as a “curse of civi-



were the czechs more western than slavic?

lization and refinement of manners” had emerged in Europe, “swallowing up all beauty, childishness, innocence, and affection of bygone, blissful times.”46 In his numerous appeals to Czechs to stand up against German repression, he repeatedly argued that, compared to the Russians, the Czechs had vastly superior conditions; therefore they should feel more obliged to react against injustice. Also Mrštík underlined the discrepancy between his native country and Russia. By means of synecdoche (“whole for part”) he often turned the discrepancy into a difference between Europe and Asia, as when he depicted his departure from home using “Europe” for “Bohemia” and “Russian Asia” for “Russia”: “And before one day met the next, I did not have to wait anymore for Saturday when I intended to leave, and a small black horse harnessed to a country carriage drove me away from Europe and into Russian Asia.”47 He used a similar technique when he described Russian individuals: for example, of a visitor at the exhibition he wrote, “sweet dreams orbited around the broad face, hirsute to the ears and colored in the type of the Asians,”48 and of a coachman, “he does not have a whip (that is a European invention).”49 Stašek did not use the concept of the East to characterize Russia, nor did he put Russia on a par with Asia. But he definitely depicted tsarist Russia as hopelessly alien to the ideals of Czech national aspirations. This applied to the government circles that he considered as absolutely against the Czech national endeavors. More depressingly, he also found the Russian intelligentsia ignorant to such a degree that a “completely insurmountable gap” divided the aspirations of the progressive Russians from those of the Czechs.50 Accordingly, the difference among Havlíček, Mrštík, and Stašek consisted not in how they perceived Russia, but rather in how their respective perceptions affected their views on the Czechs’ national strategy. They agreed that the Russia they experienced was barbaric. But their conclusions differed as to how the loss of the Slavic vision built around an imagined Russian patronage affected Czech national aspirations. In Havlíček’s concept, the Czechs should disengage themselves both from the Russians and the Germans if they were to achieve their rightful place in Europe. He launched a tripartite understanding consisting of “Russian,” “German,” and “small European nations.” Thus he rejected the dichotomy prevalent at the time of “Slavic” versus “German.”51 This way of reasoning was intertwined with the emergence of a cluster of new dichotomies: small versus big, and educated versus uneducated. Most clearly, Havlíček expressed his attitude in the article “Slav and Czech”: “We are an inconsiderable nation in number and mightiness as against the Russians and the Poles. Nonetheless, we Czechs are held in greater esteem by all rational and educated people.”52

23

24

karen gammelgaard

To a large degree, Stašek avoided formulations that would entail a strong dichotomy between the Czech and Russian nations. The Czechs should not expect any help from Russia in their national struggle. But to Stašek this was due to the Russian power structure, rather than to any inherent Russianness. He commented that even liberal Russians were ignorant of Czechs, but he considered their ignorance to be a result of the inhuman tsarist system. The Czech nation could base itself only on a changed Russia. Although Mrštík, too, operated from an implied European standard, he was uncertain whether the Czechs deserved a place among the most developed European nations. This skepticism must be seen in the light of his political conservatism, which governed his peculiar aesthetic program: Mrštík made an effort to redefine Europe in a way that corresponded to his ideas of beauty. He argued that a feature of European culture was that it allotted a role to aesthetic qualities, whereas what he regarded as “pseudo-Europe” was devoid of this.53 In the same way he sought to redefine the notion of “modern.” According to him, modernity meant the ability to preserve human dimensions and retain diversity, whereas “pseudo-modernity” meant monstrous dimensions and uniformity. Mrštík found that this pseudo-sense of modernity applied to the Russians; therefore, he found Russia, in this regard at least, abominable.54 THE AMBIGUITIES OF OTHERING

Above, the mental mapping of our three nineteenth-century Czech literary travelers has been arranged into two neat categories: the alien, barbaric, and ignorant Russians versus the Western and European Czechs. However, this dichotomy applies to Havlíček, Stašek, and Mrštík’s contributions only superficially. The travelers dissociated themselves from Russia and located the Czechs in the West, but they did so in dynamic and ambiguous ways. Accordingly, their accounts are not based on stable oppositions and a simple bipolar system. The use of the word “Europe” alone demonstrates this. Havlíček and Mrštík, especially, used it inconsistently. At times, it included Russia, as when Havlíček stated, “in the East of Europe, in Russia and in Poland, a beautiful, cordial family life still prevails.”55 A few pages later, he contrasted Russia to Europe: “here the most different European fashions alternate with the national costume that is no less diverse.”56 Similarly Mrštík, having pointed to many features whereby Russia differed from Europe, in the last part of his travel essays nevertheless viewed Russia as (still) part of Europe: “also the economical power of Russia moves toward gaining independence and emancipation from the rest of Europe.”57 Stašek, for his part, turned geographical concepts into social ones. This applied even to the metaphorical



were the czechs more western than slavic?

stratum of his account. When he witnessed with horror the Russian peasants’ behavior toward the civil servants, he used an East-West metaphor to describe the behavior as an inherent feature of the tsarist system: “One hundred fifty years ago, the English seafarer Cook witnessed how the savages on the Sandwich Islands, which he had discovered, lay prostrate before him as if before a higher being. At that time, the tsarist civil servant was such a higher being.”58 The travelers further avoided a clear-cut dichotomy between Russia and Europe because they refused to see the peoples of Russia as a monolithic entity. In line with the attention they gave to social differences, they had a keen eye for the national heterogeneity of the inhabitants. Havlíček named Tatars, Gypsies, Cossacks, Germans, Ukrainians, and Poles and discussed their distinguishing characteristics and living conditions. Stašek included Germans, Estonians, Romanians, and Poles. Mrštík commented on the Poles, Tatars, and Germans of the Russian empire. Disillusionment triggered the travelers’ inconstant Othering of Russia. They attempted to describe their feelings of disappointment on discovering that Russia could not act as a cultural model and a patron of Czech independence. Accordingly, in their accounts, they emphasized dissimilarities. Doing that, they could not help but evaluate those newly discovered dissimilarities, most often changing their views from positive to negative. Yet they found it difficult to write about their change of view. Pondering his own as well as Havlíček’s disillusionment, Mrštík concluded that only the readers’ personal experience with Russian reality could make them share his disillusionment: It seems that the secret of every rozčarovanja consists precisely in the fact that it cannot be defined, it cannot be supported by exact reasons, and nonetheless it exists. It is initiated by something about which Havlíček so aptly stated that he did not know “whether it is in the water or in the climate or in something else.” . . . Something may be substantiated, but the main realization will always be left to the mere success of personal experience. We have no other recommendations than to send the entire Czech nation to Russia and if possible—directly to Siberia.59

Authors cannot, however, send all their readers to foreign countries; instead, they must render experiences in words. Gifted authors, Havlíček, Mrštík, and Stašek rendered their growing sense of disillusionment in complex ways. All three frequently used the word “disillusion” to describe their shift in attitude. Mrštík used desperate humor to reflect on his disillusion. Joking about his own possible destiny as a heretic, he wrote: “Was he maybe so impertinent in the foreign country that he buried his irony over the Russian porjadky somewhere in the Siberian mines? Or did he maybe, because of

25

26

karen gammelgaard

bitterness over his désillusion, throw himself into the bottomless abyss of those pleasures that the beautiful eyes of Polish women promised so tenderly?”60 The authors kept their individual writing styles when they represented their disillusionment. The most famous and most often anthologized paragraph from Havlíček’s Sketches from Russia is a good example: “What is that turmoil on the street? Hey čelavěk!” the master yells at the servant. Čelavěk is a word that in Russia they will call a servant when they do not know or do not want to use the Christian name. Thus having deprived the servant of almost all human rights, they leave him the mere title of a human being. The titular man comes running up in a wonderful tailcoat, well groomed and, as we see him here with everything, it costs about 1,200 rubles. “At your service!” “What happened?” “Nikolaj Nikolejvič’s horses bolted!” “What? My English horses?” exclaims Mister Nikolaj Nikolejvič, startled. “But nothing happened, the coachman did not let go of them.” “Well, thank God!” “But the coachman was badly injured, Vaše Prevoschoditělstvo!” “The rogue! Why didn’t he take care? Nobody battered him, he battered himself!”——I put these two dashes there to give every reader some time to consider what he prefers to be in Russia—lord, coachman, or horse? Oh Perun, if I may ask! An English horse!61

Many of Havlíček’s characteristics as a writer are displayed here: the use of direct discourse, irony, appeals to the reader, the explicit narrator (“I”), and the transition from concrete observations to conclusions of a more general kind.62 The adjective “English” in the concluding answer represents a technique Havlíček also resorted to later in alluding to European democracy.63 In the paragraph from his Russian travelogue, “English” immediately activates an image of the civilized West as opposed to Russian barbarism. This image enables readers to look on the whole preceding scene from the standpoint of a Westerner, the standpoint where servants are (or should be) evaluated as superior to horses. The general style of Mrštík’s fictional work has been described as pervaded by irascibility, improvisation, interest in details, and the use of sensory subjects and dreams.64 His style both emphasizes the immediate, subjectively expressed experience and attempts to depart from the tangible. It is aptly suited to portraying the encounter between the individual, on the one hand, and the urban and social environment, on the other. This style is present in Mrštík’s travel essays as well, together with some special means. Frequently, in A Journey to Russia Mrštík quotes verbatim bureaucratic rules and regulations, thus adding factual credibility to his impressionistic prose. His use of direct discourse has a similar result. Mrštík also uses foreign words with a powerful effect. For instance, he resorts to French and German words in describing his



were the czechs more western than slavic?

departure for Russia. In so doing, he underlines the Czechs’ attachment to the West: “adieu, mein süsses Vaterland—already here begins the Tatar people.”65 Yet the most notable feature of A Journey to Russia is the difference between the opening and the conclusion. The parts describing Mrštík’s journey to Moscow and the first day at the exhibition in Nizhnyi Novgorod are lively and humorous. The last parts are more reflective and contain more sarcasm. In the first parts, Mrštík still evaluated the Russian otherness in a relatively sympathetic and charitable way; in the last part he focused on its negative, ridiculous expressions. For instance, the Russian sense of aesthetics that he had praised in the chapters from Moscow was a target of sarcasm in the parts from Nizhnyi Novgorod. Havlíček’s change came across in his choice of subjects in Sketches from Russia. He moved from the Slavic themes of linguistic unity and the Orthodox Church to contemporary political and social subjects: merchants, outdoor parties, and foreigners. This change was accompanied by a remarkable shift in the use of verbal tense. The Slavic themes are rendered in past tense, whereas present tense adds to the freshness and immediacy whenever political and social themes are discussed. There is a bitter irony in the fact that the Czech travelers’ disappointment stems in part from their command of Russian, which also allowed them to use Russian expressions without restraint. In that way, they overcame at least part of the problem of using Czech words to describe Russian reality.66 Stašek rendered whole sentences in Russian, and Havlíček even gave two of his essays Russian titles. Often they combined Russian and Czech. Since the two languages have identical structures, Russian words may be used in the Czech text organically, as when Stašek explained how Russian intellectuals achieved their knowledge: “Valná její část žila nějakou dobu ‘za granícej’ a být za hranicí bylo totéž, jako studovat zpravidla v Německu.”67 By means of the same technique, Mrštík depicted the crowds at a Moscow station: “Izvozčici v hejnech tábořící pod Nikolajevským fokzálem ukládali hlavy zase k zdřímnutí.”68 In addition, the authors commented on the origins and historical development of words. Havlíček was not alone in expressing his amazement at the Russian use of the word čelavěk. Also Mrštík explained in a footnote that in Russia čelavěk meant the same as “servant.”69 Both Havlíček and Mrštík were masters of irony. Irony undermines simple dichotomies, because it activates two meanings at the same time: the literal one and the opposite one. But the opposite one is accessible only to those readers that may grasp the irony.70 Havlíček’s irony has been demonstrated in the long quote above. Mrštík did not fall short of him: “The difference is only that no one is allowed to touch the Kremlin because it is the tsar’s—and ev-

27

28

karen gammelgaard

erybody may touch Prague because it belongs to everybody who has a lot of money. What is holy on the one side (and the Kremlin is also holy to us) is left on the other side to the mercy of even the most ordinary bricklayers. Look what is needed to rescue old beauties. The tsarist eagle!”71 The true meaning of Mrštík’s apparent claim—that the tsarist eagle is needed to rescue old beauties—was evident only to those informed enough to understand that he held the opposite opinion. Thus by the use of irony he could appear to say one thing while meaning quite another. THE CONSTR AINTS OF GENRES

In rhetorical studies, genres are viewed as sociocultural norms. Genres predetermine what aspects of reality may be selected to enter a specific text and how these aspects may be treated.72 Havlíček’s works on Russia fully demonstrate the importance of genres. He used a wide range of genres to convey his experiences: private notes, letters, travelogues, newspaper articles, epigrams, and a lyric epopee.73 In his private notes, he criticized the Russians directly and with a distinct emotional tone: “At lunch (as usual) I supported the Germans against the Russians because they noisily ridicule them and revile them, even though from foreign languages the Russians know only German words. The longer I stay here, the more I will purge myself of diverse gross hatred against the German nation. I also ventured to think that the Poles might be happier than they are!”74 Compare this with one of Havlíček’s epigrams with a Russian theme: Ruská konstituce Odjakživa dovoluje ruský cár velmožům míti třebas tisíc duší, jenom žádný rozum. [The Russian Constitution From time immemorial, the Russian tsar allows the feudal lords to have perhaps a thousand souls but no reason.]75

Fully in line with the demands of the genre, the epigram is compact and it displays a polarization between the opening line and what follows. Compared to the notes, in the epigram Havlíček’s attitude is revealed more subtly and with greater intellectual distance from the subject matter. The travelogue genre is traditionally seen as relatively reliable when it



were the czechs more western than slavic?

comes to genuine representation of personal experiences.76 The travelogue has a visible, explicit experiencing subject who is expected to air his personal perceptions and evaluations. In Stašek’s account of his journeys to Russia, he blends genres: it is both travelogue and memoir. Although Stašek shared Mrštík and Havlíček’s disillusionment, his way of representing his disillusionment differed remarkably. He lost faith in Russia many years before the actual writing took place. Thus he could add later rationalizations and explanations to his experiences. Stašek’s portrayal of his disillusionment is based on skillful work with chronology, as in the following sequence in which he moves with the greatest ease between the initial experiences, earlier expressions of them, and his attitudes at the time of writing the memoirs: When everything fizzled out, I took my leave forever of the tsar’s empire. During the Russian–Japanese war, I did not restrain myself anymore and spoke about my Russian experiences. I did not do it among the public at large, nor did I write about them; but because I knew the rottenness of the tsarist military administration, I did not conceal my feelings about the outcome of that war among the circle of my acquaintances. I ran into protest, even mockery. Nevertheless, I was right.77

Stašek projected the attitude of his human maturity onto his personal past. He was able to rationalize after the event his original actions and his impulsive and emotional outbursts and proclivities. For instance, contrary to Havlíček and Mrštík, Stašek did not comment on everyday troubles at all. It would be wrong to infer from this that such problems were not encountered. But in retrospect they had faded away to the point of irrelevance for the purpose of the memoirs. Another example from Stašek’s recollections further illustrates his subsequent rationalization. He claimed that he set out to find the “Russia of secret societies; the Russia of dreaded, spiteful, meditative malcontents; the Russia of the working people’s monumental power and fantastic resoluteness.”78 Already prior to the journey, he thus had a preconception of the political situation in Russia. His experiences in Russia confirmed it. He also realized that his compatriots had an illusory belief in Russian aid: And then, some months after my arrival, I concluded that our Czech hopes for help from Russia were pure illusion. We knew Russia only superficially; we did not know its innermost will. If Czech people sometimes visited Russia, or if they settled there, they let themselves be charmed by the appearance and did not penetrate the surface. In most cases they admired Russia’s apparent wealth, based as an illusory spectacle on the suffering of the masses.79

29

30

karen gammelgaard

Nevertheless, the verb “concluded” reveals that earlier Stašek must have harbored the same hopes, at least to some extent. Therefore, it is quite possible that his alleged intention to find prerevolutionary tendencies in 1875 was made up after he had experienced the 1917 revolution. A different perception of Russian reality appears in a poem that Stašek wrote in St. Petersburg 50 years earlier under the influence of the beauty of the white nights.80 It contained no reference to the power structures in tsarist Russia that are so central to his memoirs. Genres also instruct readers how to understand a text. When initially published, Havlíček’s articles on Russia belonged to the travelogue genre. In 1886, his five texts were published together under the title Sketches from Russia.81 This placed them instead in the sketch genre. The author’s subjective attitudes may be directly voiced in both genres, but the travelogue is primarily based on a single, concrete journey, whereas in the sketch the author reflects on the characteristic way of life in a specific locality. Thus the sketch has a more general application. Mrštík’s writings had a similar destiny. Initially, they belonged to the travel essay genre, a genre that in the Czech tradition is characterized by close contact with the audience, topicality, multiple subjects, contrasts, punch lines, aphoristic bon mots, improvisation, and association. The travel essay genre is strongly subjective, but this lends it a certain autobiographical credibility. These characteristics apply to each essay in A Journey to Russia. When the essays were collected and republished as a book, though, they were endowed with broader authority. ENTERING DISCOURSE

Havlíček, Stašek, and Mrštík did not write in a vacuum, nor should their travel literature’s effect on the discourse of the Czech cultural elite be seen as isolated from their specific historical setting. Prior discourse influenced more than these travelers’ writing style and choice of genres. Cultural criteria concerning what to write about influenced what they perceived.82 Havlíček and Mrštík filled their accounts with concrete details that appeal to all senses, not only the visual one prevalent in travelogues. They referred frequently to the olfactory sense, very often the smell of iuft (Russian leather). Havlíček noted: “iuft is the national Russian stink or fragrance; it flavors all of Russia.”83 Mrštík noticed the same smell when he entered Russia proper: “throughout the train, the world-famous smell of Russian iuft wafted for the first time.”84 It is unclear whether the travelers actually perceived the smell so acutely, or whether their senses were already attuned to it as a result of existing collective ideas about Russia.



were the czechs more western than slavic?

In their endeavors to have their contributions published, the travelers could not evade Russian secret police and censorship. Stašek depicted his troubles with the tsarist intelligence service in some detail; and Mrštík probably hinted at the danger of censorship when, in one of his first travel essays, he remarked: “About Polish affairs I may write only after my return.”85 More crucially, the travelers had to cope with the pro-Russian atmosphere of Czech domestic cultural circles. How they dealt with this atmosphere had substantial consequences for the impact of their accounts. From the outset, Havlíček’s disillusion went hand-in-hand with reflections to his fellow patriotic combatants about the possibilities of publishing his altered opinions. He explained to a friend: I will have nothing to do with the Poles and the Russians. However, this is my opinion only sub rosa, and not until after some years have passed will I dare repeat it in print and in the face of those gentlemen and fulminate against Kollár’s whole idea of the Slavic people. For I am able and keen to demonstrate that the Russians, and mutatis mutandis the Poles, are not our brothers as we call them, but far greater enemies and more dangerous to our ethnic group than the Hungarians or the Germans. We may use their language and literature as we want, but all cronyism must be done away with. Admittedly it looks bad—I tell you this only privatim now; we will go into greater detail when we meet face to face.86

Despite his initial fear to oppose publicly the enthusiasm for Slavic unity, Havlíček published several accounts based on his experiences in Russia. His travelogues consist of five pieces that were printed separately in Czech magazines.87 Two newspaper articles also concentrated on the relationship between the Czechs and the Russians: the manifesto “Slav and Czech”88 and the essay “The Russians.”89 Havlíček wrote several letters from Russia. Some of them probably never reached their addressees because they were intercepted by Austrian censors.90 A collection of Havlíček’s letters was issued in 1904 and reprinted several times.91 His private notes were not published in their entirety, but some excerpts appeared in anthologies. Havlíček’s epigrams, some of which were written in Russia and on Russian subjects, were published only posthumously, for the first time in 1870.92 Also Havlíček’s unfinished poem The Baptism of Saint Vladimír was probably inspired by his stay in Russia. It appeared in print in 1876.93 Probably the clearly political article “Slav and Czech,” as well as his outspoken letters and personal notes, influenced the interpretation of Havlíček’s Sketches from Russia. Moreover, interpretation of his work has been heavily affected by his being portrayed as the Czech nation’s martyr after his im-

31

32

karen gammelgaard

prisonment and early death.94 Today’s popular picture of the diehard antiRussian Havlíček is not solely based on Sketches from Russia. Yet the foundations for Czech skepticism toward Russia were certainly already made in this travelogue. Nevertheless, 30 years after Havlíček published his account, Stašek found it difficult to air his true stance in the continued climate of Slavic enthusiasm. He depicted the atmosphere in 1870s cultured Prague as uncritical Russophilia: “Whenever the Russian intelligentsia in those days came to Prague, they were used to ovations.”95 According to Stašek, fervent Czechs lacked real knowledge of the Russian empire. They covered their ignorance with “infatuation with the Slavic collective character and with purchased grammars of the Russian language that hardly anybody learned properly.”96 Therefore, Stašek waited almost 50 years after his journey to reveal his true impressions of Russia. His only written report about Russia is the chapter in his 1925 memoirs.97 Here Stašek explained that the motives for his self-censorship were strategic. He feared that revealing his disillusion would weaken the struggle for national independence: In Bohemia, the lilacs were still in bloom when I found myself in Prague. In the beginning, I did not conceal my observations of Russia. But our Russophiles reacted to the information as if someone had pricked their brains with a hot needle. They refused to believe it. Only two people understood me, namely Neruda and Vlček, so different in their opinions and in their worldviews. Václav Vlček, whom we had always regarded as a philistine, surprised me the most. He said to me during a conversation: “Yes, you are right, but we are not allowed to deprive the people of the belief in the Slavic people and of the hope of help from Russia.” These were prudent words that also covered my thoughts—in those days, of course, in a state of angry agitation. Therefore, I never spoke publicly about my Russian experiences. Until now I never revealed them in writing, even though Neruda invited me repeatedly to do so.98

Maybe Stašek was inspired to finally break his silence in 1925 by the contemporary flood of pro-Soviet travelogues, including one by his son Ivan Olbracht.99 Stašek, too, was positively disposed toward the 1917 revolution. In 1925, he could air his disillusionment with tsarist Russia without criticizing the Soviet Union. In one instance, however, he did criticize the Soviet Union: “the clerical question was and still is in today’s Soviet Russia one of the most painful aspects of Russian life.”100 Mrštík also met difficulties when, in the 1890s, he began to write critically about Russia. His travel essays were meant to appear continuously in the daily Politik, an organ of the Old Czech political party that advocated a



were the czechs more western than slavic?

pro-Russian political orientation. Mrštík’s first essays appeared while he was still on his journey. They bore marks of censorship. Criticism of the Russian church and of Russian colonial politics was left out (as well as some antiSemitic remarks). Mrštík’s original was also changed in perhaps an even more radical way. Mrštík wrote in Czech, and the editors provided a translation into German, the language of Politik. The German translation had none of Mrštík’s mastery of language.101 Dissatisfied with the editorial interference and with his fee, Mrštík ceased traveling and delayed publication until he returned to Prague.102 Yet the last essay of the series never appeared in the daily press, and Mrštík did not fulfill the plan to publish the entire series in Czech in a private edition.103 In fact, the last essay remained only in manuscript until 1992, when Mrštík’s Russian travel essays were collected and published. As a result, his essays are the most recently published account among those discussed here. The book was edited by Jan Vladislav, who titled it A Journey to Russia. Critics welcomed the book as “very topical and gripping reading”104 and a needed contrast to the tradition of pro-Russian and pro-Soviet travelogues.105 Some of Mrštík’s experiences from Russia were also reflected in his twovolume anthology of essays and literary criticism from 1902–3.106 In the posthumous collections of Mrštík’s correspondence, there were striking lacunae in his letters from Russia. These are attributed to communist censorship.107 In 1960, excerpts from some of these letters were quoted in an academic publication.108 So far, this remains the best public source of information for Mrštík’s immediate impressions of Russia. In their travel literature from Russia, Havlíček, Stašek, and Mrštík described Russia as obsolete, despotic, ridiculous, and lacking in culture and knowledge. Although they regarded certain aspects like family structure and aesthetic sense as positive, they perceived even those positive aspects as foreign and strange. Havlíček attributed the perceived Russian characteristics to Russia’s belonging to the East. Mrštík tended to include Russia in the categories of Asia and Byzantium. Stašek played down such geographical concepts, seeking rather to represent the situation in Russia as an instance of social injustice. His perception, however, may well be due to his seeing Russia through the filter of hindsight. Simultaneously with their mental mapping of Russia, the authors constructed an image of the Czechs as more advanced, mature, and democratic than the Russians. They constructed this image by means of overt comparisons and by using their home as the standard of evaluation. They seldom used the notion of the West to describe their standard. Instead, they used the notion of Europe when they referred to the valuable features of their own na-

33

34

karen gammelgaard

tion that they had not been aware of before they went to Russia. Since in their contributions they portrayed Europe as the opposite of Russia, they mentally transferred the Czechs westward: Havlíček, Mrštík, and Stašek, each in his own way, challenged the literary elite’s hallowed idea of Slavic unity, with Russia as the leading nation. Instead, Russia, the great Eastern and Slavic nation, emerged as the constituting Other. Clarifying dichotomies, such as “Russia versus the West,” may help us to grasp fundamental tendencies in discourse. But travel accounts of high literary quality are more complex than that. Havlíček’s and Mrštík’s travelogues achieve their intensity because they reflect the immediate turmoil of the travelers’ growing disillusionment. This turmoil contains many ambiguities. The ambiguities make their travelogues fresh today.109 Stašek’s account is more detached. Yet his memoirs gain dynamism from his explanation of why the Russophilia of the leading cultural circles made him refrain from publishing his travel experiences. In brief, the disillusioned travel accounts are capable of influencing today’s discourse on the Czechs’ self-perception precisely because the accounts have literary qualities. In this respect, they surpass many other Czech travelogues from Russia that may have enjoyed a wider and more enthusiastic audience when published. The three examples of travel literature discussed here demonstrate that discursive construction is not only about how authors construct dichotomies at the moment of writing. It is also about how the accounts are made known to the public. Looking back, Stašek justified his decision not to interfere in the discourse of the 1870s, suggesting that his interference might have disrupted the use of illusions in the national and political struggle: “We were drowning in illusions. Nonetheless, those illusions were a great service. Without the hope of help in Slavic unity and without the belief in Russian help, in national matters our predecessors would perhaps . . . have yielded in faint-hearted or skeptical resignation lacking ardor, passion, and struggle against imminent Germanization. Thus, too, the illusion performed its work.”110 His justification may indicate that the Czech elite’s national discourse of the late nineteenth century had two dimensions: one based primarily on cultural concepts and characterized by relatively clear and stable dichotomous images of Russians and Germans, and another one, wherein Russia was not perceived any longer as an ally. The former dominated the picture of Russia transferred from the elite to the broad masses, whereas the latter was a matter of discussion within the elite: Revealing it to the broader public was conceived of as a threat to the national struggle. There remains the intriguing question of what would have happened to the Czech cultural elite’s image of their nation had Stašek not withheld his travel experiences. Would they have been



were the czechs more western than slavic?

able to deal publicly with a self-perception that excluded reliance on Russia? Similar questions apply even more to Mrštík’s travel essays, since they were published in their complete original Czech version as late as 1992. This delay means that we can only speculate about their potential to alter the Czech public’s image of Russia. Only Havlíček managed to present his reflections on Russia to the public of the time. They were not blocked because of the cultural elite’s reluctance to change the public image of Russia. Consequently, his Sketches from Russia have played an extraordinary role. They initiated Czech discourse on Russia based on experiences by a Czech traveler, and they have been widely read for the last 150 years. It is Havlíček’s travel literature from Russia, far more than Stašek and Mrštík’s, that contributed to the Czechs’ construction of themselves as European. It was his shift of focus to spiritual and intellectual values that fundamentally influenced the subsequent construction of Czech nationality. Most clearly, this applies to the politics of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk.111 The Czech elite’s mental image of their nation as prototypically European and Western met a setback after the communist takeover in 1948, when many nineteenth-century images of Russia as the leading Slavic nation were officially promoted.112 Yet, in a longer perspective, the travel literature by Havlíček, Stašek, and Mrštík resonated in the intellectual discourse on Central Europe of the 1980s and 1990s, especially in the contribution by Milan Kundera, who by disassociation from (Soviet) Russia, mentally moved the Czechs toward the West.113

35

CHAPTER  3

PRIVILEGED ORIGINS “NATIONAL MODELS” AND REFORMS OF PUBLIC HE ALTH IN INTERWAR HUNGARY

Erik Ingebrigtsen

Studies in the history of public health often refer to clearly identifiable national models of public health organization in various countries.1 Drawing on Daniel T. Rodgers’s study of transatlantic exchanges within the field of social policy, it can be argued that the first decades of the twentieth century mark a period when national models in the field of public health, too, were in a state of constant flux.2 Opposing a predominant scholarly focus on the disuniting effects of heightened nationalism, Wolfram Kaiser has argued, “it is precisely in the second half of the ‘long nineteenth century’ that political transfer boomed in Europe, in the Atlantic world, and beyond.”3 In the interwar period, public health–oriented “brokers and intermediaries”—as Rodgers has termed the agents conducting the actual transfer of policy proposals across the Atlantic—traveled, studied, and returned with inspiration based on their interpretation of impulses from various political settings. This chapter addresses how a heated debate over reforms within public health care in Hungary in the late 1920s and early 1930s came to focus on the alternative solutions’ national origins and character. Images of Western modernity were a crucial element in this debate, as the new model of public health organization was presented as superior in terms of modernity and rationality, on account of it being shaped on an American model.4 The basis of this link was that since the 36



privileged origins

early 1920s the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) had cooperated with Hungarian medical scientists, politicians, and bureaucrats in introducing public health reforms, as they did in numerous countries all over the world.5 The existing public health associations regarded the new system as a threat to their continued existence, representing both an ideological alternative and a competitor for scarce public funding. Links to American public health solutions were used to discredit the suggested reforms. It was argued that the new model was an alien implant, ill adjusted to Hungarian conditions. Responding to this challenge, within a short period of time and through an intensive campaign, what was initially posed as an “American” model was successfully translated into a new, distinctly “Hungarian” model of public health organization. In this discussion I elaborate on the discursive strategies from the proponents of various policy proposals, focusing on the core issue of national origins or national character ascribed to the alternative solutions. This case offers an example of transnational transfers and domestication of a complex “package” of policy proposals and public health–related knowledge claims. Drawing on Michel Callon, domestication is understood as translation, but while Callon refers to processes crossing social fields, the concept here signifies the end result of a policy transfer from one national context to another.6 Following the fierce debate on the various alternatives’ national character and origins, a prerequisite for the new, American-inspired model’s rise to the center of political attention was the successful construction of this model as a new, Hungarian solution, carefully adapted to Hungarian conditions and particularly developed to serve Hungarian needs. Strategies for the promotion of and opposition to this domestication process is the focus of this chapter. Apart from archival documents from the Rockefeller Archive Center and various Hungarian collections,7 my analysis draws on a wide reading of Hungarian medical periodicals published in the period.8 The officers of the Rockefeller Foundation’s International Health Division (IHD) never participated directly in the Hungarian public debate. I argue, however, that through various forms of interventions and targeted donations the IHD officers, quite paradoxically, made a crucial contribution to the establishment of the new, IHD-supported public health model’s image as representing a genuinely Hungarian solution to the country’s health challenges. Similar to other nations of Central Europe, Hungary’s place on the East-West axis has historically been a decisive component in the nation’s relationship to the outside world and in the development of domestic policies. Hungary’s place in relation to the West has been given highly disparate interpretations: as firmly belonging to the West (e.g., as the last defender of Western Christianity) or as fundamentally detached from the West (as by the

37

38

erik ingebrigtsen

interwar Turán movement or the political elite under high Stalinism). The most common interpretation lies somewhere in between, placing Hungary as a nation on the fringes of Western civilization, selectively interpreting various social, political, or cultural phenomena as expressions of “Westernness” or “Easternness.” Reforms were presented as paths to modernization, toward a more prominent place in the company of Western, civilized nations.9 The country’s relation to the Western powers was, arguably, particularly complex in the interwar years. As a major loser of World War I, the general opinion in Hungary was that the country had been undeservedly mutilated by the Trianon Treaty. The reduction of the country’s territory to one-third of its prewar size had been implemented under the protection of the Western powers. Western powers also held the key to the country’s financial restoration, seen as a prerequisite to the future revision of the despised peace treaty. Disarmed and surrounded by hostile neighbors, the nationalist-conservative Hungarian political elite acknowledged temporary defeat. Aiming at regaining some of the nation’s lost strength, it opted for the reestablishment of political order, the permanent crushing of the communist revolution, and, thereafter, the curbing of the radical right-wing frenzy of the counterrevolution’s “White Terror.” As early as 1921, the first plans for economical restoration, based on international loans mediated through the League of Nations, were presented.10 The realization of this plan in 1924 marked a crucial step toward the consolidation of the regime of Prime Minister István Bethlen.11 A new cultural policy, based on the idea of Hungarian cultural superiority, aimed at legitimizing the country’s rightful place as a dominating force in the Carpathian basin. The policy of cultural superiority in the 1920s is generally acknowledged as the main contribution to Hungarian political thought from the powerful minister of religion and education, Count Kuno Klebelsberg.12 However, the massive appeal of Klebelsberg’s ideas, which led to unprecedented public spending on education and research in the late 1920s, should be understood as part of a larger political strategy. The revisionism of the Bethlen regime saw as preconditions the consolidation of the nation’s strengths, the reestablishment of relations with the international community, and the proving of Hungary’s value to civilization—in short, what György Péteri has phrased “the continuation of revisionism with peaceful means.”13 This desire for international recognition explains the warm welcome the officers of the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) received when they first entered Hungary in 1920. Both the political leaders and the academic community saw far-reaching potential for future cooperation with the world’s largest philanthropic foundation.14 The foundation was a source of scarce foreign capital, and its mere presence was interpreted as an acknowledgment of the counter-



privileged origins

revolutionary regime.15 Hungary was but one of many countries in which the RF was searching for potential projects in this period. A short introduction to selected research on the history of RF involvement in the region’s public health development may serve to place the Hungarian case in context. Ideas on the overall purpose of the RF’s entry into the region presented in 1993 by Paul Weindling16 have inspired later discussions, both on the projects in Hungary by Gábor Palló,17 and in a chapter dealing with the whole region in John Farley’s recent book on the global history of the IHD.18 Weindling’s argument is, briefly, that containment of German militarism as well as defense against expansionist Soviet Bolshevism through modernization and health improvement were the main objectives when the RF launched its projects in the region after World War I. Palló agrees, but he sees as an additional motive the establishment of a cordon sanitaire protecting the “West” from epidemics spreading from the “East.” Unfortunately, apart from a few quotations referring to the exceptionally tense situation in post–World War I Poland, there is no evidence that RF personnel conceived of German or Soviet politics as directly relevant to their entry into these countries.19 If the aim was to defend these societies against Bolshevism, one might expect the support to have been more intensive in periods of social and political unrest. On the contrary, the RF would wait to see some level of economic and political predictability before making commitments to various countries. Palló’s suggestion that the RF aimed at halting the spread of epidemics seems equally ill founded. When, during the initial discussions, Hungarian politicians urged for the IHD’s donations toward the reestablishment of border quarantine stations lost to neighboring countries, IHD officers appeared neither impressed nor worried. In contrast, it was repeatedly argued that Hungary misused public funds through the maintenance of outdated practices of disinfection and quarantine. As Peter Baldwin has documented, such “draconic” measures were prevalent in nineteenth-century continental Europe, in states with a weak economy, low level of government legitimacy, and a geo-epidemiological situation exposing them to frequent epidemics.20 Cordon sanitaire represents nineteenth-century continental thinking about public health, and there seems to be no basis for connecting these practices to the work of the IHD. Benjamin Page has opposed Weindling’s argument in a better-substantiated evaluation of the RF’s entry into Central Europe.21 Page claims that when the RF entered Czechoslovakia and shortly thereafter initiated projects in Poland and Yugoslavia, this was not the result of regional political strategies but part of a worldwide search for new fields of constructive work. As early as 1919, the IHD had several projects running in Czechoslovakia, appreciating its potential impact on the new state’s embryonic health administration. The

39

40 erik ingebrigtsen

first official discussions between IHD representatives and Hungarian public health authorities did not take place until March 1922.22 The board of trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation was ready to support the establishment of the new National Institute of Public Health in Hungary in 1925, only after the consolidation of the nationalist-conservative government of István Bethlen, the stabilization of the Hungarian economy in 1924, and the acceptance of the formerly ostracized enemy-state into the international community, symbolized by a major international loan through the League of Nations. In this respect, the aforementioned “continuation of revisionism with peaceful means” created the basis for the RF’s involvement in the country.23 Weindling and Page may differ on the question of the RFs overall aims, but they share the view that the IHD program did little to change the organization of public health in the recipient countries. Weindling takes the perspective of IHD officers, who are said have been particularly frustrated by turf battles between various public authorities and by a widespread lack of political commitment to health reforms. He states, for example, that the rightist government of Gyula Gömbös in Hungary in 1932 was disinterested in public health, leading to the near-extinction of all IHD projects in the country.24 As I document below, this claim is incorrect. Page describes an overall failure of IHD programs, resulting from lack of consideration for local conditions and needs: “In short, the Foundation has been charged with imposing upon countries with diverse cultures and needs the same values and approaches that other Rockefeller agencies were fostering in the US.”25 Not only does this negative evaluation of the IHD program hardly appear relevant to the Hungarian case, but both Weindling’s and Page’s criticisms are based on the perception of relatively uniform (however dysfunctional) national models of public health, being under the influence from an equally uniform (however ill-adapted) American model. Interesting aspects of transnational learning processes disappear with this dichotomy’s failure to appreciate how contemporary statements related to national origins can be studied as potent expressions of political and ideological priorities. Furthermore, several national case studies indicate that IHD donations were perceived as important by local public health reformers in a number of countries. Analyzing the IHD program in Yugoslavia, Linda Killen has found that the cooperation between IHD officers and the Croat public health reformer Andrija Štampar yielded a wave of reform proposals up to 1930, when Štampar, for ethno-national and political reasons, was unable to continue his work in the country.26 Killen does not focus on delicate processes of transfers but mentions one controversy on national models where Štampar’s opponent, quite unexpectedly, was not one of his many domestic enemies, but the IHD’s nursing expert Frances Eliza-



privileged origins

beth Crowell. Štampar argued that Crowell’s demands implied imposing public health solutions incompatible to Yugoslav traditions. The argument was mobilized in relation to the relatively prosaic question of minimum age for nursing students. Štampar argued that the low level of education among Yugoslav women necessitated entry into the study at 16 years. Crowell claimed that her demand for an age limit of 18–19 years was based on experience from numerous European countries, not motivated by a wish to extend American solutions abroad. The controversy never reached its conclusion, as the planned school was never built. Maria Bucur has written extensively on the IHD’s contributions to Romania, in particular to public health institutions in Cluj under the direction of Iulio Moldovan.27 Bucur’s book on Romanian eugenics forms a basis for comparison with the general development of Hungarian public health, as Bucur’s definition of eugenics includes all aspects of public health, even when actors opposed labeling their policies as being based on eugenic thought.28 Rockefeller Foundation–supported reforms, such as the establishment of an institute of public health and rural health demonstration units, are similarly interpreted within this eugenic framework. However tautological this approach may appear, Bucur’s discussion opens up interesting comparisons for the understanding of national models of public health. Public health policies (or eugenics) in interwar Romania are described in an almost recipe-like fashion: the Romanian model was mainly inspired by the German model (with a dash of “Berlin” and a little more “Munich”). It also contained elements of the British and American model and even some impulses from what is defined as an incompatible French model.29 The presentation of the Romanian model as a puzzle made up of pieces with various origins represents an obvious simplification. This may be somewhat legitimized, however, because the question of national models may have been less pronounced in interwar Romania than in Hungary. Medical education in Romania began in the late nineteenth century; and even after this time, a majority of medical leaders were educated abroad. Therefore, claims to represent a native Romanian medical tradition may have had less appeal than in the Hungarian case, where past achievements in medicine were regarded with great pride, and where quite a few medical scientists were national heroes. Furthermore, interwar Romania had been dramatically enlarged, not least as result of Hungary’s demise. Since Bucur’s analysis focuses on eugenicists working in the formerly Hungarian lands of Transylvania, there was no Romanian public health apparatus or Romanian civil society associations to be threatened by the suggested reforms. This makes an obvious contrast to the Hungarian case, where existing civil society associations opposed direct state involvement in public health.

41

42 erik ingebrigtsen

But even if controversies regarding national origins and native traditions may have been less pronounced in Romania, a quotation in Bucur’s book suggests that controversies along these lines were not completely absent. Shortly after the 1930 ratification of what Bucur defines as the most significant Romanian public health legislation in the period, a new political regime came to power that was unwilling to implement the reforms. A representative of the new elite explained: “Unfortunately, the 1930 law demonstrated a great degree of eclecticism in acquiring theoretical concepts from several European countries and the United States, disregarding entirely the slow evolution of the culture and hygiene of our population at all levels, as well as our rather limited possibilities for implementing these ambitious programs on the ground.”30 As I elaborate below, this echoes the opposition to reforms in Hungary at around the same time. Judging solely from this single statement, it does not seem unlikely that internationally oriented Romanian public health reformers faced some of the same challenges as their Hungarian counterparts in introducing proposals into a national context, but pursuit of such similarities requires additional research in Romanian sources. NE W INSTITUTIONS, NE W IDE AS

After the first meeting between Hungarian public health authorities and the IHD’s representative in Europe, Selskar M. Gunn, negotiations were initiated toward the establishment of an institute of public health in Budapest. Starting in 1922, Hungarian medical doctors and trained nurses were given fellowships for studies at prestigious institutions, mainly in the United States. Of the 154 fellowships granted by the RF to Hungarians in the period, 72 were within the field of public health. The majority of recipients were medical doctors, most of whom spent their fellowship at Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health and/or Harvard School of Public Health.31 The establishment of these institutions was mainly funded by the RF, and leading officers of the foundation had influenced the schools’ educational programs.32 In 1925, the Hungarian Parliament voted to regulate the establishment of the National Institute of Public Health. The RF covered building expenses, maintenance costs for the first years, and a school for the specialization of medical officers. Initially planned as practice field for these students, a model district for the demonstration of rural health work was established in Gödöllő, east of the capital.33 After the foundation supported the establishment of schools for public health nurses in Debrecen and Budapest, the number of model districts funded by the IHD rose to five. In the late 1920s, this new model for local preventive health care was named the “Green Cross,” and the new class of state-employed, professionally trained public health nurses were “Green Cross



privileged origins

nurses.”34 Crucial to the model district experiment was the establishment of full-time posts for local medical officers that gave them coordinating responsibility for all public health work in the community aiming at full control over all aspects of preventive health care offered in the community.35 In addition to the medical officer, the new professionally trained public health nurses would make up the necessary workforce, dealing with all major threats against the population’s health. Civil society organizations already involved in the field of public health strongly resented a future scenario that would replace them with this newcomer. In particular, the Stefánia Association for the Protection of Mothers and Infants mobilized against the proposed unification of preventive health care under public control.36 The Stefánia had been established during World War I. Already in 1917, the Hungarian Parliament acknowledged public responsibility for the health of women giving birth and for children up to the age of three.37 The implementation of this new policy was delegated to the Stefánia, but funding came primarily from the state budget. In the early 1920s, the Stefánia confined its activities to a small number of cities and larger villages. The extension of its network gained a strong impetus as the American Red Cross discontinued its postwar emergency aid in Hungary and donated 56 Red Cross stations to the Stefánia.38 Growth continued, and by 1930 the Stefánia had a massive presence, with almost 300 institutions nationwide. The organization employed more than 500 pediatric nurses full time, while 400 medical doctors provided services for the association, most of them on a part-time basis. The Stefánia’s school provided a one-year training program for its own pediatric nurses. A 1930 report noted that the association had conducted half a million medical examinations and more than 1.2 million home visits during the previous year.39 This was the opponent with which the protagonists of the new model, which by 1930 was limited to five model districts, picked a fight. FOREIGN INSPIR ATION VS. NATIVE AUTHENTICIT Y

Connections to American examples were stressed in the first public statement regarding the planned model district of Gödöllő, some 30 kilometers east of Budapest center. Press coverage was based on information from the project’s main protagonists: the director of the National Institute of Public Health, Béla Johan, and State Secretary of the Welfare Ministry Kornél Scholtz. Johan defined model districts as an “idea of American origin”: “The practically oriented United States was the first to turn the idea of the model district into reality. From there, the thought spread to Europe.”40 The Gödöllő project was given an even more tangible connection to the United States, as it was proudly stated that the Rockefeller Foundation would

43

44 erik ingebrigtsen

be carrying two-thirds of the total costs during the first years, leaving only one-third to be covered jointly by the state and the local authorities. In the periodical of the anti-Semitic National Association of Hungarian Doctors (MONE), the very idea of model districts as a catalyst for political changes was defined as American in origin: “The work [in Gödöllő] is mainly based on foreign examples. It is mostly in North America that the practice of presenting the ideal organization of public health work in smaller units has gained momentum.”41 In the text quoted above, the impression of American inspiration is enhanced by a quite exceptional direct use of English-language expressions in the text, such as “demonstration work” and “step-by-step method.”42 Furthermore, it was well known to the interested public that the Hungarians promoting the idea of model districts were closely cooperating with IHD officials in the erection of the new National Institute of Public Health, to be opened in the fall of 1927. The director, Béla Johan, traveled to the United States in the autumn of 1922 as one of the first two RF fellows from Hungary. In the following years, dozens of people who later became leading protagonists for public health reforms were hand-picked to spend a year or more studying the U.S. public health system in various American institutions. The statements presented in the quotations above illustrate a belief that health reforms based on the American model would spur improvements in Hungary. Introduction of American public health solutions to Hungary carried, from this perspective, the promise of a move toward the good life experienced in the United States. Even after the Gödöllő model district was supplemented with an additional four districts in the late 1920s, this district constituted the main “battlefield” for future local health reforms. The reasons for this were the district’s proximity to Budapest, its function as a practice field for public health nurses and medical officers, and the fact that the Stefánia was well established there prior to the introduction of the model district. The Gödöllő case also exemplifies an important obstacle to state coordination of public health reforms prior to the 1932 incorporation of the Ministry of Welfare into the vastly more powerful Ministry of the Interior. Responsibility for public health policies was placed in the Ministry of Welfare, but its implementation was delegated to the local arm of the Ministry of the Interior, the főszolgabíró (chief bailiff), to whom the medical officer was a direct subordinate. In Gödöllő the holder of this office was László Endre, a name known to posterity for his enthusiastic participation in the Hungarian Holocaust. This man, “whose vices and madness were well known,” was hard to win over to the cause of public health reforms, as he had little interest in this area of his administrative duties.43



privileged origins

During a visit Endre made to the United States in March 1928, the RF made arrangements for him to study U.S. rural health measures at the request of IHD representatives in Hungary. Testifying to the importance of securing Endre’s good will, John D. Rockefeller Jr., in response to a request from the RF’s president, George Vincent, reluctantly agreed to grant Endre a quite exceptional “audience.” Scandal reverberated through the whole RF organization, from New York through Paris to Budapest, when Endre preferred partying to inspecting rural health facilities, treated local RF officers as servants, and even failed to show up for the meeting with “JDR Jr.”44 After this unproductive start, it can be read as an expression of the Green Cross’s rising prestige when, from the early 1930s on, Endre publicly argued for the extension of the reforms from his own Gödöllő to all rural communities. After rising to the powerful position of Alispán (deputy lieutenant) in Pest County, Endre in a celebratory interview even presented the initial idea of rural health reform as his own.45 Not long after the model districts were first presented as an American idea, the first alternative interpretation of the model districts’ national origin was published, clearly illustrated by the title “The Hungarian Origin of the Model-District Movement.”46 It was acknowledged that the IHD, indeed, had contributed financially to a model district in Warsaw,47 but it was stressed, “as is widely known,” that the chief medical officer of Budapest had made identical suggestions several years earlier. Furthermore, as early as 1909, a Hungarian county official proposed the establishment of a model district to serve as a training ground for lawyers entering public administration. As the first American publication mentioning model districts is said to have appeared as late as 1912, the conclusion boosted national self-confidence: “The origins of the model-district movement must be placed in Hungary.”48 This statement was in no way intended to discredit the model districts; rather, their genuinely Hungarian character would smooth implementation: “Hungary’s old curse is that the rapid wing-strokes of Hungarian thought are not accompanied by equally swift processes of implementation. It will satisfy our national selfesteem, however, if we—whenever possible—stress the Hungarian origins of thoughts, plans, and ideas that were born here, then forgotten and only years later imported from the outside world.”49 This nativist interpretation of the model districts did not take hold. To my knowledge, this was the only occasion on which claims were made that the model districts represented the implementation an old Hungarian idea.50 This myth of Hungarian origins did not seem to serve the interests of either proponents or opponents of the reform. In contrast, concepts and perspectives introduced during the next contribution to the debate had a profound impact on

45

46 erik ingebrigtsen

the arguments held by both sides. In February 1928, the official periodical of the Welfare Ministry published an article presenting two mutually exclusive alternatives to the organization of preventive health care: the general model and the specialized model.51 This article introduced these central concepts into the Hungarian debate for the first time, and both sides of the debate adopted them as the main division between them. After this article, the search for adequate concepts was replaced by a battle over the meaning and consequences of the two alternatives. This article stands out also in another respect: the author was not a male medical doctor or lawyer but a female nurse, Alexandra M. Wacker.52 The article was based on her experiences in the United States as a Rockefeller Foundation fellow when she was training to become the director of a planned school for bedside and public health nurses in Budapest. The publication of Wacker’s study in the Welfare Ministry’s official journal enhanced the impression that her presentation had official approval. The difference between the solutions was described as follows: Under the general health care model, the geographical area is divided into smaller districts, and in each of these one nurse takes care of all aspects of disease prevention. In specialized care the different cases are grouped according to disease category (tuberculosis, venereal diseases) or according to age (infant, schoolchild, and so forth), and these groups are attached to one or several public health nurses, who take responsibility for all cases in their group regardless of geographical divisions.53

Wacker’s text is couched in an objective style, presenting the results of a major comparative study of the two models conducted in New York under the auspices of the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund.54 As the first mention in archival documents of the Stefánia being a direct hindrance to the new public health model dates to one month prior to the publication of Wacker’s article, her seemingly objective elaboration was highly controversial.55 Wacker suggested an explanation for why the specialized model, a solution demonstrated to be of inferior rationality, had won worldwide popularity: in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, numerous civil society organizations had been launched, each dealing with what their founders regarded as the most imminent threat to the population’s health. Each charity put all its strength into combating one particular challenge, be it infant mortality, tuberculosis, industrial hygiene, or venereal diseases. Later, Wacker observed, the specialized organizations, once life-saving missions, had become obstacles to a rational, integrated health policy under public guidance and implementation. Her conclusion was supported with results from the New York study, documenting in dollars and cents, minutes and seconds, the superior effi-



privileged origins

ciency and rationality of the general model.56 When Wacker chose to present the results of the New York comparison between the general and specialized health models in all its detail, the underlying assumption was the transferability of these results to Hungarian conditions. The Stefánia’s first counterattack was directed at this particular belief, denying the validity of the results of the New York study for Hungary. A staunch protagonist of the specialized model, the director of the Stefánia, Lajos Keller, noted, Although years of experience obtained through the Stefánia Association have removed any doubt as to the imperative demand to continue the system of specialized public health nurses, propositions based on foreign—mainly American and German—examples have suggested a shift away from the established specialized public health nurse system into the so-called general public health nurse system. . . . Experiments and years of experience have proved that this question cannot be solved through the adoption of foreign examples. What is a good system in America is not necessarily good in Germany and France, and it is most certainly bad in the Hungarian countryside, where you find neither electricity, roads, cars, nor satisfactory housing—and where you first and foremost do not find mothers possessing the sufficient intelligence to be of assistance to public health nurses and medical doctors in achieving their goals.57

Similar to the example from the Romanian case I quoted in my introduction, Keller here concluded that it was the undeveloped state of the Hungarian countryside that made the American model unsuitable to Hungarian conditions. This rather pessimistic perspective was not the only card up Keller’s sleeve. He argued, based on mortality statistics, that the specialized model did indeed facilitate rational solutions, stressing the need for each nation to form its own unique approach to health challenges. National variations in health conditions and mortality statistics would make a system developed in one national setting impractical elsewhere: “It is imperative that all countries adapt their preventive health care systems to fight what constitutes the most imminent threat to their nations.”58 The Swedes, with their low infant mortality rate and high prevalence of tuberculosis, had oriented their energy toward antituberculosis work. In Hungary, on the contrary, combating infant mortality was a mission to save the nation itself. In the late 1920s, it was an undisputed assumption that 26 percent of all deaths in Hungary resulted from infant mortality, 13 percent were caused by tuberculosis, and a mere 4 percent came from communicable diseases.59 This information could hardly be ignored in a political setting where both demographic and political threats to the nation’s survival were perceived as very real.60

47

48 erik ingebrigtsen SATISF YING “THE UNCONSCIOUS DESIRES OF THE HUNGARIAN R ACE”

In 1928 and 1929, the conflict between the opposing alternatives gained momentum. In the summer of 1928, the first classes of generally trained public health nurses from the new IHD-supported nursing school at the University of Debrecen received their diplomas. The following year, a new state-owned school for bedside and public health nurses at the National Institute of Public Health was being established with financial and organizational support from the IHD. The Gödöllő model district’s new health center was officially opened in the early spring of 1929, further antagonizing its opponents, as the Stefánia had been present in the district since the early 1920s.61 Following a ministerial decree in 1929, the model districts were no longer a detached experiment under the responsibility of the separate communes but were regulated as a ministerial initiative under the director of the National Institute of Public Health.62 Even before economic crisis struck in the autumn of 1929, economic reasoning was used to counter the Stefánia’s nativist approach. In the following quotation it is evident that the Stefánia’s attack on the general model as alien had made a profound impact on Director Johan, who abstained from even mentioning the planned reforms’ American inspiration: I do not wish to present foreign examples, as I would only get the answer that what is good elsewhere (only to mention a few of our neighboring countries —Yugoslavia, Saxony, Bavaria, Poland) is inherently bad here. . . . It is true that we live to some extent in isolation. Our language and strained relations with our neighbors have put us in this position. In spite of this, our political and social institutions are not so divergent from all other states that we have to reject all reforms suggesting the introductions of elements taken from the health-care system of other countries. . . . If we reject all foreign examples in this question, it is particularly imperative to investigate if the existing system is best suited to our finances, to our economic situation, and whether this system is superior to any alternative in this respect.63

Johan had until 1928 publicly stressed his own and other Hungarian experts’ close ties to the Rockefeller Foundation, their intimate knowledge of American conditions, and the willingness to use this experience to promote reforms in Hungary. By 1929, this aspect had completely disappeared. When he, seemingly reluctantly, mentioned foreign examples, these countries (or Länder) were all rather similar to Hungarian conditions in terms of infrastructure, infant mortality, and level of development. Johan elaborated on the latter point in the above statement, demonstrat-



privileged origins

ing the general model’s superior suitability to Hungary’s settlement structure and public finances.64 He stressed that the general model would be particularly well suited to the Hungarian settlement structure, as the many small villages could never afford the maintenance of several separate networks of specialized institutions. A future nationwide extension of the Stefánia would prove highly unsatisfactory, as it would provide health care only to children below the age of three, leaving the vast majority of the population unprotected. This focus on the general model’s rationality foregrounded the nation’s interests while downplaying the question of national origins: From the national perspective, the value of human life increases with age. Quite obviously, if an infant passes away at the age of one, this child will not reach the age of four or become an adult. But in the nation’s interests the developed, working, productive man carries a value. What good does it do, if our preventive health care protects children until they are three, only to let them die at the age of four? . . . Therefore, it would be a mistaken policy of health protection and of national defense if we were to focus exclusively on the earliest years, not concerning ourselves with older age groups.65

It is hard to present empirical evidence for the observation that the American connection to the general model disappeared from its supporters’ argumentation. As the argument’s nonappearance in a large corpus of text can hardly be documented, a substitute may be to give a rare example of a statement addressing this connection. A quotation from the obituary Johan wrote for his staunch defender, Welfare Minister Vass, illustrates the trend: “In Minister Vass’s days, with the consent of the Ministerial Council, a contractual agreement was signed with a foreign organization, in which it was stated that rural public health work was to be conducted by general public health nurses.”66 Substantial donations, the massive exchange of inspiration through fellowship experiences, and prolonged consultations with IHD officers had by 1931 been reduced to “a contractual agreement with a foreign organization.” Not only are all traces of input and inspiration absent from this statement, but the foreign organization even has no homeland. An alternative strategy to hiding the general model’s ties to the U.S. example was an attempt to make the Stefánia’s nativist attacks backfire by accusing the specialized model of being based on foreign impulses: “It is quite understandable that the public health work initiated 10–15 years ago exclusively focused on mother and infant protection, as this work was based on the dominating foreign examples of the time.”67 By the time this statement was made, in the early 1930s, the Stefánia had established its genuinely Hungarian character with such confidence that

49

50

erik ingebrigtsen

it did not bother to answer Johan’s “accusation” that it had links to international models. The Stefánia’s leaders coldly ignored Johan’s provocation and continued stressing their organization’s native origin as opposed to the foreign Green Cross. It is quite evident, however, that Johan was right in pointing out the importance of international influences on the Stefánia’s leaders during the organization’s formative years. The Stefánia was promoted by demonstrating ties to internationally accepted knowledge, most explicitly to German solutions.68 Stefánia even had direct links to American examples through the American Red Cross’s above-mentioned donation of 56 child welfare stations in the early 1920s. This magnificent gift, instantly doubling the Stefánia’s size, must have been known to all proponents of the Green Cross. Given the Stefánia’s continuous attacks on the Green Cross’s American connection, it is really puzzling that no one in the debate ever brought up the Stefánia’s ties to the American Red Cross. One would think this would have been a powerful counterargument to the Stefánia’s attacks on the foreign general model as inherently bad to Hungarian conditions. The explanation may be that such an attack would have implicitly acknowledged that connections to foreign agencies could be cause for criticism. Discrediting the Stefánia for its American ties would have stained the Green Cross even more. While ignoring Johan’s provocative remarks on ties to “dominating foreign examples,” the Stefánia camp vehemently attacked him for arguing that the general solution represented a more rational solution to public health challenges. Dealing with one single challenge thoroughly was, in their view, vastly more rational than a general solution dealing equally badly with all health problems. In a 1930 memorandum to the welfare minister, an impressive display of dignitaries from the Hungarian political and medical elite launched a devastating critique on the Green Cross. Their ethnopoetic fury against the foreign implant deserves extensive quotation: It was expected that infant and maternal health care, on which all health protection rests, would be completely developed when unexpectedly a new thought was brought up. There is a proposal to break with the principles used so far and establish a new basis for Hungarian preventive health care drawing on foreign, mainly American and German, models. . . . The present system was not constructed by copying a foreign system, which was built to meet different circumstances, but solely with regard to Hungarian conditions and Hungarian life requirements. This system, we dare state with absolute confidence, has grown together with the soul of the Hungarian people and the heart of the Hungarian society. The system of Hungarian mother and infant protection has emerged from the needs



privileged origins

of the Hungarian race. It has been created from the unconscious desires of the Hungarian race. It aims to combat and defeat the greatest peril to the Hungarian race, the high infant mortality rate.69

The repeated attacks on the Green Cross and Johan’s person provoked the editor of one medical journal to characterize the press campaign by the Stefánia’s powerful allies as a “drum roll of attacks.”70 As early as the late 1920s, Johan realized that the balance of power within Hungary would never work in his favor. In the next section, I discuss the paradoxical situation in which foreign aid supporting foreign contacts with the National Institute of Public Health and the Green Cross seems to have made the new model appear more Hungarian to the interested public and to major decision makers. THE GREEN CROSS TURNS NATIVE

Ever since the Rockefeller Foundation began its activities in Central Europe, it supported study trips for experts to visit and learn from institutions that had been developed with foundation support in other European countries. These trips are not to be confused with the fellowship program, which funded trips of longer duration, often to train someone for a specific position. During the establishment of the National Institute of Public Health and the preparation of nursing schools in Debrecen and Budapest, a number of Hungarian experts, bureaucrats, and politicians made trips with RF support to see how various problems were solved elsewhere. From the opening of the National Institute of Public Health in the autumn of 1927, traveling experts were also guided in the opposite direction, toward Hungary and Budapest. After the organization of the first model district, the new local health organization also became an interesting showpiece, in particular following the opening of the Gödöllő Health Center in 1929. It can be documented that the RF funded visitors to Hungary from Italy, Romania, Portugal, Spain, Germany, Norway, Finland, Poland, Bulgaria, Turkey, Ceylon, Siam, and China.71 It is likely that list should also include many more countries.72 Furthermore, both the Ministry of Welfare and the Ministry of Culture and Religion took pride in presenting the institute to foreign guests. A Hungarian medical professor stated in 1931 that “all scientific visitors are taken [to the National Institute of Public Health] as the outstanding showplace.”73 It is evident that Johan consciously developed these connections and used them for all they were worth relative to the general public and the decision makers. On the occasion of the opening of the highly controversial school for bedside and public health nurses in Budapest in 1930, Johan explicitly formulated the

51

52

erik ingebrigtsen

political importance of a broad international presence. Half a year before the opening, Johan appealed to the Rockefeller Foundation and the League of Nations’ Health Committee for support: J[ohan] has suggested . . . desirability of League calling a conference on the training of p.h. nursing, to be convened perhaps in the fall, at the time of the formal opening of the Budapest nursing school and the Gödöllö Health Dept. Headquarters. He believes it would strengthen his hand in Hungary. At present he is having much opposition to his program of training of general p.h. nurses. . . . Scholtz and Minister are with J. but he needs outside support. GKS [Strode] believes J’s suggestion to be excellent and timely.74

Like George K. Strode, who was in charge of the IHD’s European program from 1927, the RF’s vice president in Europe, Selskar M. Gunn, supported the idea: “this would strengthen [Johan’s] hand in Hungary as he is having much trouble.”75 It was imperative for Johan to secure the attendance at the opening of the school from F. E. Crowell, the IHD’s nursing expert. She proved harder to court: Dr. J[ohan] brings up question of FEC’s [Crowell’s] attendance at formal opening of school—knows it is against R.F. policy but points out exceptional conditions in Budapest—his enemies and the constant campaign they are carrying on against him. Will use fact of FEC’s failure to attend as evidence of R.F.’s dissatisfaction with school. . . . Refers to SMG’s [Gunn’s] presence at opening of Institute because of League of Nations meeting that was held concurrently—similar meeting re Health Centres under L. of N. auspices will be held at the same time as the school is opened. Regent has agreed to preside—Asks FEC to think it over.76

A few days later, Crowell decided to accept Johan’s invitation but only on the condition that Johan would arrange a nursing section at the conference, inviting leading nurses from a number of countries.77 Johan enthusiastically supported Crowell’s idea but insisted that the nursing section also had to be convened by the League of Nations’ Health Committee, as the publicity effect depended on this being a “League of Nations affair.”78 The plans materialized, and at the opening of the school in late October 1930, an international congregation of medical experts and nurses gathered in Budapest. Regent Miklós Horthy presided at the grand opening. He greeted the native and foreign guests in Hungarian, German, French, and English. Speeches by the welfare minister, state secretaries, and other dignitaries followed.79 True to Johan’s expectations, both the nursing section and the rural health section of the conference unanimously supported the general model, in which the generally



privileged origins

trained public health nurse was the professional on whom the whole reform depended.80 Although this event may temporarily have strengthened Johan’s hand, the ever-deepening financial and political crisis in 1931 brought unprecedented challenges to the National Institute of Public Health and the Green Cross. The international depression in the summer of 1931 severely hurt Hungary’s public finances. Shortly before the resignation of Prime Minister István Bethlen, a parliamentary committee of 33 members was convened, with extensive authority to cut public spending.81 Immediately after the appointment of Bethlen’s successor, Gyula Károlyi, an executive “committee of six” with extensive powers was drawn from the original 33 members.82 Prospects for the general public health model were gloomy, as two of the six members were “bitter enemies of Johan.”83 During its very first day of existence, the “committee of six” voted to close the model districts, discontinue the education of general public health nurses, turn the dormitory for medical doctors studying to become medical officers into a retirement home for elderly physicians, and to cut funding to the bone for the National Institute of Public Health.84 When the two IHD representatives Crowell and Chas N. Leach quite incidentally reached Budapest the following day, Johan had “accepted defeat” and State Secretary Kornél Scholtz was said to have given in. The new political leaders took little interest in the institutions that had been developed in cooperation with the Rockefeller Foundation. Crowell and Leach had “a decidedly hectic week,” meeting with the prime minister, the minister of welfare, political secretaries, the personal advisor to the prime minister, and other dignitaries.85 Throughout, their message was that all these institutions had been established on the basis of contractual commitments made by the Hungarian state when it applied for grants from the Rockefeller Foundation. Because the RF issued grants only in response to specific requests that carried commitments, it was argued that the discontinuation, disintegration, or major alteration of any institution previously supported by the foundation would be a breach of contract.86 The Hungarian authorities were simply reminded of the purposes for which the Hungarian government had requested and received support. If the assessment that Johan and the other supporters of the general model had “accepted defeat” was correct, it is evident that action taken by the IHD officers secured the survival of the general model at this particularly precarious moment. Their intervention attests to the usefulness of the RF’s general rule that neither the foundation nor individual RF officers ever accepted praise, credit, or responsibility for the new public health model in Hungary—or elsewhere, for that matter. Formally, Hungarian requests, based on Hungarian solutions, had been presented to the RF’s board. Then the RF had lent its support in

53

54

erik ingebrigtsen

return for political commitments made in the name of the Hungarian state.87 Although the attacks from the Stefánia and its supporters continued well into the 1930s, this image of the new model as a Hungarian product, aimed at strengthening the Hungarian nation and representing a source of national pride, gradually gained a stronger foothold, even at the time of the acute crisis in the autumn of 1931. In my view, this is best understood as a result of the long-lasting strategic work of attracting and publicly displaying the approval of international experts for the general model. The daily press frequently reported on the numerous visits to the National Institute of Public Health, the model districts, and the nursing schools. In one particularly exotic example titled “China: Learn from Hungary!” the pride of both journalist and informant was already on display in the subtitle: “The League of Nations Advises China to Shape Its Rural Health Care System on the Hungarian Model”: Maybe more than any other institution, the National Institute of Public Health attracts foreign scientists to Hungary. The number of visitors is unbelievably high. Medical experts come from Ceylon, from Chicago, from Paris—yes, even from Bangkok, the capital of Siam. They are sent here, partly by the League of Nations, partly by the Rockefeller Foundation, to study this world-famous institute. Lately, the institute has had such tremendous success with its rural health program that the Health Committee of the League of Nations presented it as the example for China to follow, after receiving a request for assistance in the development of public health organization from its government.88

In the next interview, a self-confident and “smiling Béla Johan” confirmed that China, indeed, had been advised to learn from Hungary.89 This example shows a Hungarian model in the making as an entity with a clearly defined character, form, and purpose. The Chinese experts were evidently not advised to study the Hungarian case because it would be a convenient place to examine a transplanted American model of public health organization; for that, they might just as well have gone to the United States. The message was that the new Green Cross model had left its embryonic and experimental state and was finished, in the sense that it could be a source of inspiration for others. As stated above, a widely held belief in interwar Hungary was that the demonstration of “cultural superiority” was the only path leading to the revision of the despised Treaty of Trianon. International scientific prestige was one of the main targets of this policy, as indicated by the massive investments in research and higher education under Minister Klebelsberg. Chinese experts traveling to Hungary, as well as similar contacts to numerous other countries, made the National Institute of Public Health into a tool for the demonstration of such cultural superiority.90



privileged origins

In the “Chinese” example, the new model not only appeared distinctly Hungarian, but, even more important, Hungary in this particular case represented the West. The country did not belong to the outskirts of civilization, a periphery to be left behind in the search for modernizing ideas. Hungary stood out as the inspiration for less advanced nations, supporting their urge for development. The inherently Western League of Nations had chosen Hungary, among all countries, to be the measuring stick for a level others should strive to reach. In addition, the disproportion in size and strength between teacher and the pupil in this particular case hints at fulfillment of the dream that the small Hungarian nation would have a civilizing impact on the world. Because fierce attacks from both the Stefánia and its powerful allies continued for years after this event, too, the momentary significance of newspaper articles of this kind should not be overestimated. The combined effect of repeated instances of international recognition, however, made Johan fight his opponents with greater resolve. In 1933, references to Western inspiration reappear in Johan’s arguments, after an absence of five years. The head physician of the Stefánia, Dr. Sándor Fekete, had made what appears to be a huge rhetorical blunder by establishing a link between the specialized system of the Stefánia and the Turkish public health system. In Johan’s devastating reply, his elaboration on Eastern or Western sources of inspiration can be read as expressions of mental mapping, as spatial references indicative of separate paths leading toward modernization or stagnation, even regression:91 Dr. Fekete provides quotations from Dr. S. Fikri, who is a representative of the Turkish parliament, in which it is “confirmed” that the specialized system of the Stefánia is the preferred model. This system is also regarded as superior in Turkey, a country that, according to Dr. Fekete, “finds itself in more or less the same state [as Hungary]” and furthermore, compared to the Hungarian people, “does not show too large differences in cultural level.” I wonder if Dr. Fekete has ever been to Turkey? . . . I have, and with my own eyes have I seen how the proud and striving Turkish people are making all possible efforts—in the middle of a desert—in Asia—to establish a cultivated society at least in one particular city, in Ankara. I was delighted when the Turkish government honored me with an invitation to study the building plans for a new school for public health officers. However, knowing the conditions in Turkey, it should not come as a surprise to anyone that I direct my search for exemplary models to the West. In this case, it would certainly be advisable for [Dr. Fekete] not to go abroad—to Asia—in search of arguments.92

Fekete’s references to the Turkish system were indeed a very weak argument. Johan’s concern for “the striving Turkish people” puts him in the posi-

55

56

erik ingebrigtsen

tion of the paternalistically benevolent “Westerner,” comfortably situated to launch attacks on Fekete’s low ambitions on Hungary’s behalf. Although Johan did not further spell out his critique against Fekete’s argument, he must have been delighted when his opponent, of all possible bad choices, made his references to Turkey. Historically, everything Turkish has raised negative connotations in the Hungarian mind. Among all the humiliations the Hungarians have suffered through history, the Ottoman invasion has been an everpresent motif in Hungarian culture. No visitor to Hungary’s National Gallery will fail to notice how the nation’s heroic defeat by the invading Turks is a treasured part of the collection.93 Ever since its publication in 1899, the reading of The Stars of Eger, which portrays the heroic defense of the city of Eger from the invading hordes, has been obligatory for all Hungarian children.94 The nation’s self-sacrificing resistance against the Ottomans forms the basis of the national consciousness as the last defender of Christianity—a selfperception that Hungary, incidentally, shares with several neighboring nations in the region. Johan had no need to spell out the self-destructiveness of Fekete’s rhetorical slip. One could almost sense his good mood in writing this particular paragraph, demolishing Fekete’s claim to international recognition.95 But, however big a mistake Dr. Fekete’s remarks may have been, his arguments were actually closely related to the initial critique raised against the alien new model in 1928 by Fekete’s companion, Dr. Keller. At that time, Johan had had no ready reply to counter the argument that the American system was inapplicable to the undeveloped Hungarian countryside. Five years later, in 1933, this assumption seems to have been falsified, giving Johan the possibility of striking back against his opponents with the support of a model that had been an inspiration for numerous other countries—Turkey being but one. The Green Cross experienced its first great political victory in May 1933, when the minister of the interior of the recently appointed right-wing Gömbös government launched a ten-year program to extend the Green Cross to all communities with less than 6,000 inhabitants. The Stefánia and other specialized agencies were to concentrate their activities on the larger settlements. As this plan placed 90 percent of all Hungarian settlements under the responsibility of the Green Cross, the organization was due for a vast expansion. The Green Cross was, in 1933, still confined to the original five model districts initiated with the support of the IHD. At first, growth was slow, but from 1936 until 1941, between 30 and 50 health stations were completed every year, with a peak of 90 new institutions in 1939. In January 1941, the Stefánia and several smaller specialized associations were discontinued through a government decree.96 Their buildings, equipment, and personnel were incorporated into the Green Cross. A crucial step on the way to the Green Cross’s monopolistic



privileged origins

dominance as provider of local public health services was the 1935 appointment of Johan to the important post of state secretary in the Ministry of the Interior in 1935. The contributions of the Rockefeller Foundation were not restricted to those of a funding agency. Foundation officers contributed through various strategies to the creation of an image of the supported model as a genuinely Hungarian solution. Visits from foreign experts to Hungary, mainly funded by the IHD, created positive attention toward these institutions among the Hungarian public, political elite, and scientific community. In many cases, the foundation officers must be assumed primarily to have been interested in promoting changes in the country of origin for these experts, in the same way as they financed study trips for Hungarians. The League of Nations conference to mark the opening of the nursing school in Budapest in 1930, however, exemplifies an awareness of the positive effect such scientific visits had on the Hungarian scene. Furthermore, the foundation’s policy of providing grants only in response to requests that carried commitments helped to ensure the continued existence of the new model through the critical autumn months of 1931 on the basis of contractual agreements made between the Hungarian government and the foundation. The creation of a Hungarian public health model that—at least occasionally—even put Hungary in the company of the West did not come about by itself. It was the result of long-lasting efforts by a number of brokers and intermediaries. The general model of the Green Cross came out of this conflict as the preferred model for the further development of local preventive health care, neither by referring to Hungarian traditions, nor by showing its similarities to foreign ideals. During this critical period, the proponents of the Green Cross were able to naturalize and present it as a modern, Hungarian solution, not least because of the positive attention it attracted from the outside world. The discursive contest between pro-Stefánia and pro-Green Cross positions focused, to a large extent, on the combination of images of national origin and the claim to satisfy the needs of the nation as the most modern and rational solution. Although numerous other factors contributed to making the Green Cross the selected national model from the mid-1930s on, it seems likely that the end result would have been radically different had not the Green Cross been able to prove its national character and national worth in the conflict discussed in this chapter. The expansion of the Green Cross system coincides with the general right-wing turn and militarization in Hungarian politics, and, in my interpretation, has to be understood as an integral part of this political development. Prior to Johan’s appointment as state secretary of the

57

58

erik ingebrigtsen

Ministry of the Interior, he was called to an interview with Prime Minister Gyula Gömbös. Minister of the Interior Miklós Kozma instructed Johan to stress the importance of unification of health care under state guidance during the meeting with the prime minister, but from Johan’s notes it is evident that Gömbös beat him to it: “Prime Minister Gömbös proclaimed that, in his view, there is a need for centralist concentration of power within the field of public health, where a lot of work has to be done. Kozma wants to make me [Johan] the boss of all health issues. Gömbös agrees, and he also said that all those who work within public health belong to an army under my command. He said that I should face the challenge with great courage. He instructed me to prepare a four-year plan, and get to it.”97 Gömbös’s demand for unification and coordination of health policy under public direction was, of course, music to Johan’s ears, as it represented the elevation to official policy of principles he had supported for the previous decade. The implementation of this plan was to be based on the continued expansion of, and coordination between the Green Cross, the National Institute of Public Health, and the health-related departments within the Ministry of the Interior. It may seem counterintuitive that the right-wing radical Gömbös would desire a vast expansion of a U.S.-inspired public health solution in the Hungarian countryside. In this chapter, I have demonstrated why and how Gömbös could present a plan for the improvement of the nation’s health based on a new public health model particularly adapted to the needs of the Hungarian countryside. The domestication of the general public health model—that is, its transfer and translation into a new solution to Hungarian challenges— was one important precondition for its nationwide extension.

CHAPTER  4

DEFENDING CHILDREN’S RIGHTS, “IN DEFENSE OF PEACE” CHILDREN AND SOVIET CULTUR AL DIPLOMACY

Catriona Kelly

Across Europe during the decades after 1900, issues relating to children’s place in society began occupying a place of unprecedented importance in political discussion and in state planning. Concrete manifestations of the new trend included an increasing concern for child welfare or, to use the term often favored at the time, “children’s rights”; a sharpening recognition of “children’s needs” as a specific area of legislative and budgetary policy; and a growing emphasis on the requirement that the state should intervene in family relationships to ensure that children were properly treated.1 A landmark, in terms of international relations, was the first supranational proclamation relating to the subject, the 1924 League of Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Child. This set down that (1) the child should be given the means requisite for normal development, both material and spiritual; (2) the hungry should be fed and the sick and backward cared for—“the delinquent child must be reclaimed and the waif must be sheltered and succoured”; (3) the child should be first to receive relief in times of distress; and (4) children should be made capable of earning a livelihood and protected against “every form of exploitation.” In return for this, the child “must be brought up in the consciousness that its talents must be devoted to the service of its fellow men.”2 The sentiments expressed here were to prove longer lasting than the League of Nations 59

60 catriona kelly

itself: its successor organization, the United Nations, returned repeatedly to the subject of children’s rights (particularly in one possible understanding of the term, children’s welfare) in its policy discussions, most prominently in the late 1940s, the late 1950s (in the run-up to the issuing of its own Declaration on the Rights of the Child in 1959), and during the 1970s and 1980s, culminating in the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child. It would be naïve to assume that the prominence of children’s issues resulted from pure philanthropic concern. On the contrary: to an even greater extent than debate on other areas of human rights, discussion of the protection and autonomy of children provoked political point-scoring and assertion of claims to moral and ideological superiority. The process by which the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child came together was recalled by the editors of a collection of essays on children’s rights with a degree of weary cynicism: As is frequently the case in the international human rights domain, the original initiative was motivated by a degree of political self-interest that was to be exceeded only by that which characterised the response of some of the governments which were opposed to the initiative. . . . The original draft on the basis of which the Commission of Human Rights decided to elaborate the convention was little more than a revamped version of the 1959 Declaration on the Rights of the Child with some singularly undemanding reporting provisions added on. . . . Partly for these reasons, the original proposal, put forward by Poland in 1978, was initially assumed by most Western governments to be little more than a propaganda ploy. Only when it became clear that the draft, as amended to give it a little more substance, would almost certainly gather enough political momentum to succeed, did other governments begin to formulate positive proposals rather than confining themselves to rearguard blocking manoeuvres.3

The binary positions that emerged, self-aggrandizing “propaganda ploys” on the one hand and “rearguard blocking manoeuvres” on the other, had little to do with concern for the human subjects to whom the Declaration of Rights related. In the peculiar circumstances of the Cold War, children’s rights, like other areas of international diplomacy, became an arena in which key points of political difference—the extent to which state control over the family was ideologically desirable, the importance or otherwise of explicit political indoctrination—could be brandished, and where set positions of hostility or rapprochement could be adopted. Significantly, it was not until the Cold War was coming to an end that a broader agreement about international standards of children’s welfare began to emerge. The importance of international debates on the position of children goes



defending children’s rights, “in defense of peace”

well beyond the history of childhood itself. Examining the Soviet Union’s drive to present itself as the international champion of children and young people allows one to place politics in what Thomas Mergel has termed its “symbolic siting.”4 Children appealed to Soviet propagandists not so much because of traditional ideas about “innocence” as for a mixture of pragmatic and ideological reasons. The supposed malleability of young children made them attractive subjects of propaganda initiatives (and this applied as much to children abroad as to Soviet children themselves). At the same time, invoking children was ideologically convenient both because they were, like workers, peasants, or women, an “oppressed class,” and because, as the “future of the nation,” they were well suited to represent the futuristic aspirations of the Soviet Union, the “first socialist state.” In addition, referring to children helped Soviet politicians and diplomats to bridge what one might term a “legitimacy gap” relative to their international audience. The atrocities of the Civil War years, the widely reported disasters of collectivization, and the show trials of the 1930s had all badly shaken, as far as many noncommunist observers from outside the country were concerned, the pretensions of the “worker state” to a role of international leadership on humanitarian grounds. Even in the late 1940s, when the standing of the country had been significantly boosted by victory in World War II, there were deep anxieties, in the upper echelons of the Soviet political machine, about the effectiveness of international propaganda.5 Claiming leadership in the area of children’s rights appealed because it could be done in a way that was at once oracular (there was no need to condescend to particulars) and accessible. Children’s welfare was universally recognized as important, at the domestic level, in the so-called developed nations; by carrying discussion of this into international forums, Soviet politicians could at once suggest their commitment to universally shared values and their exceptional dedication to the pursuit of these (i.e., the moral superiority of the nation and system to which they belonged). Examining cultural diplomacy relating to children also allows a grasp of the sheer range of techniques associated with international campaigning, ranging from written and visual propaganda through state-sponsored festivals, officially sponsored “friendship” rituals such as the composition of letters, and not least, the use of United Nations debates for the articulation of claims to cultural superiority and for displays of symbolic power. There is a secondary literature on most of these subjects separately, but they have not hitherto been analyzed as part of a “total system” of international selfpromotion by successive Soviet governments.6 In the field of Soviet representations of children, there are some longterm continuities—for example, an addiction to sentimental images of sun-

61

62

catriona kelly

shine, smiles, and play that in terms of the high art of the day would have been perceived as “kitschy.”7 But there are also important shifts of emphasis and detail over the decades. To begin with, far more emphasis was placed on children’s agency in the 1920s and early 1930s than at later stages of Soviet history (this was consistent with official understandings of children’s role generally).8 Further, one can clearly see a progression between the types of isolationism that György Péteri has identified as typical of state-socialist systems: aggressive and defensive.9 I am primarily concerned with the former phase here, since this chapter is an examination precisely of the Soviet Union’s missionary advocacy of its own provision for children as an international model. The story is partly one of failure, deriving to some extent from the distorted view of the “West” that was held by official policy makers and propagandists. Yet it should be kept in mind that what Péteri wittily terms “the nylon curtain” was permeable on both its faces. Soviet efforts to champion the needs of neglected children had a very different resonance in the West and in the wider world. Even in the former geopolitical area, propaganda had some effects (one might cite the instance of the anxiety, during the Cold War, among U.S. and British political administrators about educational standards, which were felt to be lower at home than in the Soviet Union, particularly in mathematics and science).10 The discussion of cultural diplomacy here therefore emerges as a contribution to the emphasis on the “agency of the East” that is central to the collective project addressed in this collection, while the discussion of the impact of propaganda takes in another of our collective aims, the analysis of “everyday life” under communist rule. HAPPY CHILDREN AND STREE T WAIFS

Policy with reference to children was one of the main domains in and through which the Soviet regime rehearsed its ambitions for political, intellectual, and cultural leadership before its national and international audience. Soviet audiences were constantly assured that Soviet children lived better than any other in the world. Coverage of children’s position in the West was relentlessly critical: newspaper stories drew attention to the plight of homeless beggars and neglected waifs, suggesting that children outside the economic elite could expect no support from the state at all. A customary strategy was the “there and here” comparison, as in the following example from 1949: Bourgeois society with its hypocritical and decayed moral system brands as a disgrace to society the children of single mothers and condemns them to all kinds of humiliation. In the socialist society, the child of the single mother grows up and is raised in conditions where new relationships



defending children’s rights, “in defense of peace”

obtain between society and the individual, in conditions where all— regardless of nationality, social status, and origins—enjoy full equality. No reduction in the dignity of a person as a citizen and member of socialist society is allowed in our society with relation to the child born outside wedlock.11

The comparison in fact distorted the situation obtaining in contemporary “bourgeois society,” where illegitimacy was, after World War II, no longer such a stain. It also misrepresented the attitudes toward illegitimacy in the Soviet Union itself, where children born outside wedlock and single mothers might suffer prejudice in day-to-day life, and sometimes institutionalized discrimination as well.12 But the mythic sense that the Soviet Union offered an entirely different way of life did not depend on such factual details for its viability. Fundamental, rather, was the projection of a sense of competing values, where the Soviet set was systematically opposed to the Western set. Readers would learn, on the one hand, that Soviet families were more stable and happier than Western ones, but that, on the other, any rare unfortunates were better treated; the force of the juxtaposition depended not on concrete details such as statistics (which might, if accurately presented, have eroded the moral high ground from under the feet of commentators), but on emotive assertions phrased in a spirit of not-to-be-contradicted certitude.13 Western children were subject to economic exploitation, political indoctrination, and the callous unconcern of entrepreneurs and members of government toward their welfare; Soviet children were, to quote the punchline of a 1970s Radio Erevan joke, the reverse.14 This type of representation went back to the early days of Soviet power. For example, textbooks used for the teaching of English in the late 1920s and early 1930s dwelt on social inequity in the British Isles. Readers were told that John, the laborer hero of A. Wicksteed and N. Settingson’s English (1928), “didn’t buy milk because he did not earn enough money, so his children weren’t very strong and healthy.” The reading material provided in English consisted of texts such as Thomas Hood’s famous evocation of an oppressed seamstress, “The Song of the Shirt” (“Stitch, Stitch, Stitch”), extracts from Arnold Bennett’s Clayhanger novels, and so on. L. Kilochnitskaia’s English, published in 1937, included an extract from Friedrich Engels’s Child Labor in England, supplemented by the following suggestions for essay titles: “(1) Overworked weariness of the children and young people working in the English factories and mines. (2) Sleepiness. (3) Stunted stature, retarded puberty and other deformities as a consequence of overwork.”15 Such books represented Soviet life as the ideal for all progressive citizens of the West (a Soviet text-

63

64 catriona kelly

book for learning German from 1931 showed Genosse [Comrade] Müller from Berlin and Genosse Schultz from Dresden visiting the Soviet May Day celebrations), with commitment to social welfare at the center of the ideal. “I’ve heard that in Russia,” said “Bill,” the enlightened blacksmith who acted as a raisonneur in Wicksteed and Settingson’s English, “the Bolsheviks have taken houses like that [i.e., the local manor house] and made them into convalescent homes for the workers and peasants, so instead of just one landowner and his family enjoying the splendid rooms and the more splendid gardens, hundreds of people enjoy them every year.”16 Newspaper reports were laid down on a foundation of assumptions brought by such books, and by nursery texts such as Samuil Marshak’s MisterTvister (originally published in 1933 but repeatedly reprinted thereafter). This satirical little sketch portrayed a boneheaded American millionaire deciding, at the prompting of his spoiled daughter, to visit (as the latest exotic country) the Soviet Union, because she was hoping to gorge on caviar and gallop about in a troika. After having checked out of the Angleterre hotel in disgust because the rooms he had booked turned out to be next to rooms being rented by some Africans, Mister and his wife and daughter, unable to find other rooms, spent the night in gloomy exile on the doorman’s camp bed, the counter of the food bar, and a chair in the lobby. Their just punishment survived, and a lesson in internationalism absorbed, the Tvisters were happy enough to accept rooms in the Angleterre for the rest of their stay, despite now having a “Malay and a Mongol” as neighbors. The idea that all children in the Soviet Union, unlike those elsewhere, could expect proper treatment was also pushed hard in material intended for a Western audience. For example, Mat´ i ditia (Mother and Child), published by VOKS in 1933, included photographs of elite Leningrad institutions, with lyrical captions celebrating the virtues of these in terms of hygiene and rational practice.17 The attempt to persuade was not only a long-distance activity. Western visitors to the Soviet Union were provided with “agitational” material about childhood in the form of visits to model children’s institutions—clinics, hospitals, orphanages, and so on.18 Interestingly, such model institutions were often termed not only obraztsovye, the direct equivalent of the English word “model” or “exemplary,” but also opytno-pokazatel´nye, “experimental and for show.” In colloquial Russian, during the late Soviet period, the reception of foreigners in this way would have been named by the rude term pokazukha (“showing off,” “making a show that is not borne out in reality”).19 Indeed, the institutions on the tourist circuit showed the best that was attainable in the most favorable circumstances, not what was typical or average.20 But in the



defending children’s rights, “in defense of peace”

early Soviet era, no shame or sense of dislocation seems to have been felt by the participants in such institutions.21 Even in the late Soviet era, there were many institutions that took pride in visits from outsiders—whether these came from the West or from “brother” countries in Eastern Europe or the wider world.22 In the paradoxical isolationism that characterized Soviet life, the conviction that the Soviet Union really was the leading country in the world required regular reinforcement by affirmation from the outside world. THE CHILDREN’S INTERNATIONALE

Propaganda work did not just go on inside the Soviet Union; it also went on outside. The sponsorship of communist groups abroad and of international rallies and festivals for children began early in the history of the new state. Indeed, Children’s Communist Groups (Kommunistische Kindergruppen), otherwise known as “Young Pioneers” (Junge Pionere), “Young Spartacus Groups” (Jung-Spartakusbünde), and “Young Comrades” (Junge Kamaraden) were set up in Germany at the same time that they were developing in Soviet Russia; and the newly invented calendar festival around which internationalist activities were centered, International Children’s Week, was first held in Germany in 1921 (28 June–3 July), reaching Russia only the second time it was held, on 25 June to 2 July 1922. It was not until after the Pioneers, as an integrated, centralized Soviet children’s organization, were set up in late 1922 that International Children’s Week became fully institutionalized in the homeland of communism.23 The Soviet Union’s attempts to foster “world revolution” and to propagandize the Soviet way of life to the international proletariat constitute one of the better-researched areas of the state’s history. In particular, there is a huge bibliography on the Comintern.24 Little attention has hitherto been given to the central part played by youth organizations, however, and events and activities aimed at young people, in propaganda and agitational work of this kind. Yet the Communist Youth International and the children’s groups affiliated with it were one of the most prominent and successful aspects of the Comintern’s work, especially in 1928–33, not only a period of bitter political infighting at the summit of the Comintern but also one in which a genuine grassroots “revolutionary culture” was developing in the countries where communist parties existed.25 Study of communist youth organizations is of value not only in its own right but also because of the light that it throws on the day-to-day existence of the Comintern more generally. Extant historiography has tended to emphasize the importance of direct Moscow control over the organization: archival sources make clear that Bolshevik leaders, especially Stalin, took an intimate

65

66 catriona kelly

interest in the formation of policy, and the coordination of this with the Soviet Union’s perceived international interests in a broader sense.26 Klara Zetkin’s 1929 condemnation of the organization as “a dead mechanism capable only of swallowing orders in Russian and regurgitating them in different languages,”27 however, does not seem fair when applied to the youth work done by the Comintern. For instance, even a Soviet encyclopedia article of the late 1930s, while asserting that the drive for a youth organization in the Second International went back to a resolution that Lenin and other Russian Bolshevik representatives put forward at the Seventh Congress of the International in 1907, acknowledged that social-democratic youth groups had already been in existence since the 1880s. The first special youth festival that it recorded was held outside Russia: International Youth Day, organized as an antiwar protest in Switzerland on 3 October 1915.28 To be sure, publications for children about international work underlined the symbolic primacy of the Soviet Union. Soviet Pioneers were instructed to act as “patrons” (shefy) of foreign children’s groups, and loyalty to the Soviet Union was a primary quality expected in members of such foreign groups.29 Soviet children were taught that their country was a world leader in terms of the facilities provided for children (in the words of a 1925 song, “Children of the Union! You’re happier than others / In the red free Soviet land”)30 and encouraged to think of children elsewhere as oppressed victims, just as Soviet adults were (donations to German children’s charities were a prominent part of Soviet workers’ welfare activities in the 1920s). Yet the ideological drive for children’s internationalism came from outside the Soviet Union as well as inside it. A landmark text in articulating the importance of political activism by children was a brochure by Edwin Gernle about the children’s communist movement, translated into Russian in 1925.31 Later publications often spoke with admiration of the German children’s communist movement, seen as especially resolute and well disciplined.32 At least some early Soviet publications were prepared to be blunt about Soviet Russia’s dependence on international precedent. For example, a publication on International Children’s Week published in Vladivostok in 1925 traced the founding of both the communist children’s movement, and the festival itself, to “Germany in 1920.”33 INTERNATIONAL CHILDREN’S WEEK

What kind of a festival, then, was International Children’s Week? Where and when was it celebrated? No doubt because, in countries where communist activities were illegal, a fixed date would have played into the hands of the authorities, the early weeks took place at a different time each year, though always at some point in the summer. The first day, held on 28 June to 3 July



defending children’s rights, “in defense of peace”

1920, was marked by demonstrations and meetings in Germany, France, Britain, Norway, Holland, Switzerland, and Czechoslovakia. In some places the ceremony was also marked by sports days, accompanied by distributions of leaflets, books, and the propaganda volume Young Comrade. Similar festivities took place for the second International Children’s Week two years later, held from 25 June 1922 to 2 July 1922, which also involved the holding of collections to raise money for the children caught up in the famine on the Volga.34 All this, it is worth noting, preceded the formal discussion of Comintern work with children that took place at the Third Congress of the Communist Youth International in December 1922.35 When integrated Soviet celebrations for International Children’s Week were initiated a year later, from 24 to 31 July 1923, they took much the same form as those organized in the West in earlier years: parades, demonstrations, and charitable collections (this time in aid of poor children in Germany). At this point, activities seem to have been on quite a small scale. In 1924, however, all Soviet organizations were supposed to organize lectures to publicize the event, and the activities of the children’s movement more generally.36 The year 1929 marked a major boost for the profile of International Children’s Week, and of children’s internationalism in general, in the USSR, a development connected with the holding in that year of the First All-Soviet Pioneer Rally (slet). This was attended by delegations from Pioneer groups from Western Europe and the United States, as well as from all over the Soviet Union. Its discussions took in (among other things) numerous internationalist issues, such as the difficulties endured by Pioneer groups in capitalist countries and the need to protect the Soviet Union against aggressors. The themes were not purely defensive, however: numerous speakers suggested the need for more cooperation, as expressed in exchanges of letters between Pioneer groups or the learning of Esperanto. The two sets of conference resolutions pointed in both directions as well: the rally underlined that “the USSR is our Fatherland” and that the Fatherland needed to be defended but also emphasized the need for more international meetings, more exchanges of letters and of individuals, and more support for exploited children and for worker organizations in the West.37 International Children’s Week did not attain this height of prominence ever again, but there was some journalistic coverage of the event over the next few years. For example, in 1932, the magazine for Pioneer leaders, Vozhatyi, encouraged its readers to mug up on the history and purpose of the week so that they could explain it to their charges. As well as supplying reading lists, the magazine itself carried a small amount of material dedicated to the event, mostly concerning the miseries endured by children in the capitalist world.38

67

68

catriona kelly

Alongside International Children’s Week, International Youth Day was also regularly covered in the Pioneer press, and Pioneer groups were also supposed to make a contribution to celebrating it. In September 1924, for example, the Tenth International Youth Day was celebrated by the Usupovo Cell of the Communist Party in the Moscow region with a meeting for children at which there were six speeches, one by a representative of the local schoolchildren, and then two plays: The Communard, and a comedy under the title Economic Collapse (Razrukha).39 There were also other ways of making internationalism in a broad sense familiar to Pioneers. From 1924 on, Pioneers promised to “stand up for the cause of the working class in its struggle for the liberation of the workers and peasants of the entire world,” a phrasing that remained current until the oath and laws for the Pioneers were rewritten in 1936.40 The text of this promise substantially elaborated on the original Pioneer oath, introduced in 1922: “I give my word of honor that I will be true to the working class, that I will help my comrades and brothers every day, that I know the laws of the Young Pioneer and will obey them.”41 There was also a good deal of coverage in the children’s press of international matters, going well beyond the annual coverage of International Children’s Week. Items that appeared in 1932, for example, included not only news (such as a piece on the Scottsboro murders) but activityrelated materials such as teach-yourself-German pages, and an “Internationalist Quiz” which posed readers such questions as “who is Harry Eisman, and where does he now live?” “where is the Voroshilov Pioneer Camp?” and “what color is the bourgeoisie afraid of?”42 Already by this stage, though, there were some signs of a cooling in official attitudes toward internationalism, as manifested, for instance, in the fact that the answers to the “International Quiz” never saw the light of day.43 The year 1932 represented a watershed in the Pioneer movement, since this was the date when the organization was relocated in schools and given a remit to include the improvement of educational standards and discipline, as well as “political education” in the narrow sense.44 As with Soviet culture generally, children’s culture was becoming not just more “disciplined,” but also more inward-looking (the school reforms of August 1932 explicitly specified more Soviet history and geography as desiderata).45 Coverage of International Children’s Week in 1934 and in 1935 was challenged by extensive space devoted to other, purely Soviet festivals: celebrations of the achievements of Soviet pilots, parties to mark the beginning and end of the school year and the start of the Pioneer camp season, and so on.46 From that point on, “internationalism” increasingly got absorbed into druzhba narodov (the friendship of [Soviet] nations), a phrase dropped by Stalin into a speech of 1935 and canonical by



defending children’s rights, “in defense of peace”

the end of the 1930s.47 Rather than being encouraged to make contact with children abroad, Soviet children were exhorted to maintain friendly relations with those of other nationalities at home: for instance, in a story published in a magazine for younger children in May 1932, the Octobrists Klania and Zhenia intervened to stop boys fooling in the yard insulting a Chinese boy as “slittyeyed” (kosoi). Only burzhui, they reproved, would use such language. The story went on to draw a broader internationalist picture—the children voted to collect scrap for the Chinese and got a letter of thanks for their pains—but the primary point was that charity began at home.48 Children’s political activities in every area were, of course, tied to Realpolitik in a larger sense, and in this case to the attrition of international activism more broadly. To be sure, young citizens of the USSR were not initiated into the squabbling and backbiting about policy lines that marred Comintern work during the late 1920s and 1930s (this accorded with a general pattern according to which policy reversals and contentious matters were kept from view so far as children were concerned).49 But the marginalization of the Comintern was certainly a factor in the fall from favor of International Children’s Week. Because little or no publicity was given to the event after 1934, it is hard to say when it stopped happening, but its demise evidently preceded that of the Comintern in May 1943 by some years. By the mid-1930s, even the originally more assertive organization for young people of Komsomol age, Communist Youth International, had become pretty well toothless, as can be seen from official Soviet accounts of the International Peace Congress for Young People held in Geneva in 1936. Rather than a political meeting, this was described as an intergenerational celebration at which young people from the broadest backgrounds—including religious groups and conservatives as well as Communists and socialists—came together to mark their commitment to a common aim, peace in their time.50 The high point of Soviet internationalism, and at the same time its last flourish, was the Spanish Civil War, widely reported in the Soviet press and heroically celebrated in Dziga Vertov’s 1937 propaganda film about the wonders of Soviet childhood, Cradle Song; from this point on, momentum shifted from “world revolution” to “defense of the Soviet borders” against hostile external enemies. THE POST WAR YE ARS: INTERNATIONAL CHILDREN’S DAY

During World War II, the image of the Soviet state as the defender of little children across the world disappeared from view for a few years, the emphasis in propaganda switching to the threat to children’s lives posed by the fascist invader and to the defense of Soviet children from this threat. The established view of the USSR as a children’s paradise, however, was to be a crucial part of

69

70

catriona kelly

the ideological assertion that began with the creation of a new version of the Comintern, Cominform, in September 1947. The system of binary contrasts was resurrected: in the West (or its present and former colonies), children starved and dragged out their days in miserable exploitation; in the USSR, they were well provided for. In the USSR, there was quality children’s literature; in the West, there were crude comic strips (komiksy).51 A fundamentally new element had also been introduced to propaganda. Rather than a bellicose crusade, a campaign designed to ensure the triumph of communism and victory in “class war,” children’s internationalism—once again, in conformity to circumstances higher up the political pyramid—became sucked into the official campaign for peace. This was, for instance, the central theme of International Children’s Day, an occasion set up in late 1949 at the instigation of the International Democratic Federation of Women. At the federation’s conference (where, so a Soviet children’s newspaper reported, delegates rose and applauded whenever the name of Stalin was mentioned), the contradiction between war-making and the interests of children was constantly stressed. A Soviet delegate, Nadezhda Parfenova, deputy president of the Anti-Fascist Committee of Soviet Women, using a Soviet trope, emphasized that to threaten children was to threaten the future; the Spanish Civil War heroine Dolores Ibarruri (“La Passionaria”) insisted that “we will not let our children’s sleep be interrupted by sirens”; and in a truly Soviet touch, a letter from a small boy was read out: “If all of us, all children, unite to shout ‘We do not want war!’ there will be no war.”52 Unlike the internationalism of the 1920s and early 1930s, postwar internationalism for children was not concerned with fostering participation in the promotion of communism. Contact among children’s groups was still encouraged but was kept of a ritual kind: the exchange of letters between “patron troops” in the USSR and those in the destination country, for example. But children were still encouraged to make a firsthand contribution to the occasion. Now the key genre was the child’s letter demanding peace, henceforth to become one of the most prolific types of officially controlled children’s textual production. Already in June 1950, Pioneer published a spread of such letters calling to order the most important Cold War antagonists, the United States and Britain.53 Coverage of what actually happened on International Children’s Day was very abstract: the celebrations themselves were not detailed in newspaper reports.54 But this was definitely an occasion for adults as much as for children (or more than for children), at which children’s texts had a purely instrumental function. It went alongside events such as the mass signing of the Stockholm Declaration, organized in all Soviet workplaces and administrative centers in



defending children’s rights, “in defense of peace”

late 1950.55 The main purpose of International Children’s Day was not to promote children as active agents in the fight for peace but to use their innocence and vulnerability on the international stage as a means of enhancing the Soviet Union’s propaganda war against Western nuclear supremacy. Peace propaganda aimed at the home market, including children, was almost always accompanied by horrendous images of children suffering in capitalist countries. A spread of children’s peace letters published in mid-1950 underlined that children in the West who campaigned for peace put themselves at risk: recently, it was alleged, two girls of 10 and 11 had been arrested in London because they had collected money to support strikers and peace campaigners.56 This scramble for the moral high ground was one respect in which the Soviet government negotiated the contradictory position of a nuclear state conducting a disarmament campaign; additionally, like their Cold War antagonists, the Soviets attempted to escape paradox by presenting the home side’s position as defensive. This idea underlay slogans such as “You don’t wait for peace—you obtain it by conquest!” (Mira ne zhdut—mir zavoevyvaiut!), or collocations such as mirnaia vakhta (the guardhouse of peace).57 In addition, propaganda stories emphasized the uniquely pacific character of the Soviet army. For example, “Soldiers of Peace,” a moral tale published in Pioneer in 1950, told how a Soviet soldier had responded to the sight of a small German girl standing amid the blazing ruins of the Reichstag by carrying her to safety: the girl had reminded him of his own daughter, slaughtered by Germans during the invasion of the Soviet Union.58 “Defense” items of this kind were usually part of the coverage for International Children’s Day: for instance, a splash in Pioneer Pravda published for the first celebration of this day included, alongside an open letter from a group of famous Soviet writers offering their congratulations, several items in which armed conflict was represented in terms of parents defending their own children: while fathers fought for their safety, mothers protected them at home.59 Evgeny Dobrenko has traced a process whereby, as terror escalated in terms of real practices, reference to terror vanished from Soviet official sources, replaced by euphemisms such as distsiplina.60 One can observe a similar process with the history of internationalism for children: as the Soviet Union’s imperial ambitions became more egregious, the country’s relationship with the outside world was increasingly presented in terms of protection, defense of universal interests, and “friendship” (a term that in Russian is much more tightly connected with “enmity” than is the equivalent term in English: a central meaning of druzhba is “absence of enmity”; a druzhnaia sem´ia [lit. “friendly family”] is one that “doesn’t fight”).61 From the late 1930s on, children (perceived as a recruiting ground for activism in the 1920s) once again

71

72

catriona kelly

came to be seen as naturally innocent and passive, requiring “pro­tection” rather than “rights.”62 This symbolism was disrupted by the war, during which representations of children—granted an ancillary role in the struggle against fascism as couriers, leaflet distributors, and occasionally participants in armed struggle—were more diverse. But the idea of the child as potential victim asserted itself vehemently after 1945 and could effortlessly be claimed by the propaganda for peace that crystallized around International Children’s Day.63 At the same time, to see the official peace movement as simply propaganda or an initiative taken only “on paper” would be mistaken. The composition of material like this in the immediate postwar years undoubtedly sprang from real popular feeling. It did not take propaganda manipulation to make the postwar generation, children as well as adults, feel revulsion at the idea of war. Peace motifs can be found in unofficial texts, too: for example, a homemade New Year’s card manufactured by a Leningrad orphanage inmate for a friend in late 1949, where the arrival of the New Year is shown as a dove fluttering up with an envelope—a kind of mixture of a carrier pigeon and the dove of peace (fig. 4.1).64 Like contemporary works composed by adults at the time—a famous example being Prokofiev’s cantata On Guard for Peace (Na strazhe mira, 1951)— children’s texts evoking the peace movement were an inextricable fusion of conformity and spontaneous sentiment.65 “LE T THERE ALWAYS BE SUNSHINE”: THE PE ACE MOVEMENT IN THE POST-STALIN ER A

The central symbolic role of children in the promotion of the Soviet official peace movement persisted after 1953 as well. To be sure, this was not the only way in which images of children were used to political ends. The new, globetrotting generation of Soviet leaders made sure to export the conventions of the leader cult beyond the borders as they roamed: pictures of Khrushchev with local children in Indonesia and India initiated a new genre of “babykissing” propaganda, creating a vision of internationalism for children that was at once sentimentally appealing to adults and effective in codifying a strongly subordinate role for the juveniles in the picture.66 But statements about peace figured at all the Pioneer rallies held from 1962 onward, and the antiwar theme was constantly harped on in the mainstream and Pioneer press. For example, in 1966, Nedelia magazine carried pictures of children fleeing U.S. military action in Vietnam; two years later, a victim of the conflict in Portuguese Guinea was photographed holding up his napalmed hands.67



defending children’s rights, “in defense of peace”

Figure 4.1. Child’s design for a card to celebrate the new year, 1950. Source: Collection of Zoia V. Levocheskaia, St. Petersburg.

Thus the old polarization between “exploited” and “cherished” children was constantly revisited and revived by references to recent events. From childhood, Soviet citizens were expected to know that in the West and its colonies, only children who were the right color and belonged to the right class had any chance of living a decent life. The enormous expansion of social welfare support that took place in Western Europe during the postwar era attracted no attention. In this era, as in the 1920s and 1930s, school textbooks emphasized the deprivation of children outside the Soviet Union—for example, in the 1950s and 1960s, Spanish was taught with reference to stories about a poor, deprived little Cuban boy.68 Promotion of such negative images went alongside a great deal of positive reporting of the Soviet Union itself. As in the late 1940s and early 1950s, much of this centered on the country’s leading role in the “fight for peace,” or, as it was now more often named, the “defense of peace.”69 For example, when the Pioneer rallies were revived in 1962, the program included a “Day for the Defense of Peace,” with speeches, songs, and drills; children from foreign countries were invited to the ceremonies as a gesture of “friendship of nations.”70 The character of these occasions had changed considerably since the time of the 1929 rally—ceremonial replaced debate, and the political content was

73

74

catriona kelly

limited to celebrating the heroic past or internationalism of the most general and sentimental kind. Now international contact between Pioneer groups as such had become less important than the general expression of solidarity with “children across the world” as an antiwar gesture.71 Children were encouraged to contribute to the creation of peace propaganda—in a suitably choreographed way, of course. As in the Stalin era, they were supposed to locate themselves within a well-defined patriarchal tradition. An interesting case of how this worked is a poem written by the poet Lev Oshanin (1912–96) in 1962, which, in a musical setting by Arkadii Ostrovskii (1914–67), became one of the most widely broadcast and familiar songs of the next decades: The disk of the sun, The sky all around— It’s a little boy’s drawing. He drew it on a piece of paper And wrote in the corner: Let there always be sunshine, Let there always be blue skies, Let there always be mama, Let there always be me. Dear little friend, Kind little friend, People want peace so much. Even at 35 One’s heart once more Never tires of repeating: Let there always be sunshine [etc.]. Hush, soldier, Listen, soldier— People are scared by explosions. Thousands of eyes Stare at the sky, Lips are stubbornly repeating: Let there always be sunshine [etc.]. Against disaster, Against war Let us stand up for our little boys. Sun—forever!



defending children’s rights, “in defense of peace”

Happiness—forever! Thus man has commanded. Let there always be sunshine [etc.].72

Oshanin and Ostrovskii were two of the leading lights of Soviet official culture of the postwar decades (Ostrovskii was buried in the most prestigious cemetery in the Soviet Union, Novodevichii in Moscow; Oshanin won a Stalin Prize in 1950 and was decorated at several International Youth Festivals thereafter). Their song marked a break with the pre-1953 past because it credited the creation and maintenance of happiness not to the party, “dear Comrade Stalin” (or some other leader), or to the Motherland, but to humanity generally. It conformed entirely to the established canons of Soviet peace propaganda, however: the association of war and disaster, the figure of the soldier who was sensitive to the needs of children (but did not lay down his arms), and above all the emphasis on the fact that children’s desire for peace was legitimate because it was shared by adults (“People want peace so much / Even at 35”). The chorus of the poem made use of a verse that had originally been published, credited to a small boy, by the famous writer Kornei Chukovskii.73 This was not, in fact, a peace poem but was “adopted” without apology for the new purpose—framed in a way that made it suitable to the paternalistic adult culture of the time. Children themselves were encouraged to write peace poems of this kind, full of references to sunlight and tranquillity. A typical example was published in the Leningrad Pioneer newspaper Leninist Sparks in 1961: When I grow up— and that’ll be soon— There’ll be no armies and vicious cannons, There’ll be no people, bowing their heads Standing by soldiers’ graves, And children will grow up happy In every part and bit of the world. And our planet will always Be full of sunlight, So beautiful.74

Interesting here is the Soviet millenarianism of the image—“there’ll be no armies and vicious cannons”—though the potentially provocative nature of such a vision, in terms of the “fight for peace” ethos, was softened by the refer-

75

76

catriona kelly

ence to an obsolete form of defense technology (“cannons”). More important, however, was the abstract internationalism of the poem—“children will grow up happy / In every part and bit of the world.” Thus children pointed the way to peace, and by espousing their cause, the Soviet Union would lead the world into the “bright future.” Alongside poems of this kind, “fight for peace” letters continued to be composed throughout the post-Stalin era. Certainly, by the late 1960s, there was a shift of register, as the focus moved from armaments in an overall sense to a precise subcategory of armaments—nuclear weapons. Between 1984 and 1986, for instance, a peace drive at schools and children’s libraries in Leningrad oblast took place. Local Pioneer groups produced, alongside quizzes about war heroes, essays about war memorials, and drawings of flowers being laid on soldiers’ graves, contributions to the popular genre of “letter to an American pen pal about the peace movement.” A typical example follows: Dear friend! Those writing to you are schoolchildren from the Soviet Union. In our time, when vast reserves of atomic weapons have been laid down in the West, it is very important to reduce these and to preserve peace. We, schoolchildren of the USSR, are striving for this with all our hearts. All the children of our planet should take part in this. Therefore we call on you and your friends to help us rid ourselves of the horrors of atomic war. Many adults in America do not understand what an atomic bomb can do; we children should be more rational and set them on the right path. If they do not listen to the voice of their conscience, they may listen to the voice of their children. We hope that you will understand us. With warm greetings, Children of the USSR School no. 3 Class 6 B OL´GA KHRUSHKOVA IRINA KUL´KOVA75

The public tone of the letter is typical (“we call on you and your friends”), as is the presentation of children as leading figures in social change: “If they do not listen to the voice of their conscience, they may listen to the voice of their children.” Soviet children, while themselves articulating the policy of their government (i.e., acting as instruments of the patriarchal society) were supposed to call on their fellows abroad to adopt a more radical role with reference to their society—to act as the voice of conscience (or as a substitute for this) and the voice of reason, to “set adults on the right path.”



defending children’s rights, “in defense of peace”

Such texts exemplified the capacity of the Soviet peace movement to present the home country in the role of “righteous victim”: it was always other countries (particularly the United States) that were cast in the role of aggressor. Yet at the same time (a leitmotif of these years), it was emphasized that “ordinary people,” and above all children, were not part of the warmongering drive: there was hope that they would listen to the voice of peace. Thus the Cold War entered a new phase, where the international or global audience became the subject of contestation, leading to mirror image propaganda on each side. Just as Western newspaper coverage of the Soviet Union emphasized that the “Soviet masses” were the victims of propaganda and political manipulation and would delightedly listen to the Voice of Liberty if they were given a chance to hear it, so Soviet propaganda insisted that the “voice of reason” would fall on willing ears if only children could be used as a conduit for this to resound. Talk about the importance of children’s issues was, as before, also integrated into Soviet propaganda for overseas audiences, which conformed to time-honored patterns. The Privileged Class, published in 1979, evoked a popular cliché of the time: “Children are the only privileged class in the Soviet Union. To them, the future of our country, Soviet society gives the best it has. ‘To ensure that every child will have a happy childhood—this is one of the most important and noble tasks of the building of a communist society,’ reads the Programme of the CPSU.”76 CHILDREN AT THE UNITED NATIONS

The treatment of children was not just a matter for political window dressing. The issue was also integrated into the Soviet Union’s international diplomatic presence, driving Soviet interventions into UN debates. National suprematism (the conviction that the Soviet Union was a uniquely “progressive” state) was matched here by cultural imperialism—the desire to impose a Soviet model on the rest of the world, especially developing nations. Part of the point of Soviet excursions into children’s welfare was to boast about how well things were done in the USSR. Delegate Maiorova, speaking at the 249th meeting of the UNICEF executive board on 17 March 1960, proclaimed, “In the USSR, the interests of mothers and children were regarded as among the most important state responsibilities and were taken into account in the improved health services program recently inaugurated by the government.”77 Proclamations of this kind continued into the late Soviet era too, as in a speech by Delegate Komarova from 15 October 1979: The Soviet Union is the first country in the world where the upbringing of children and concern for every aspect of their physical and moral

77

78

catriona kelly

development has been made a high-priority matter of state. Since right after the establishment of Soviet power, not a day has passed in our country when this concern has slackened even for a moment or been allowed to lose its priority. In the Soviet Union, a country of genuine equality and people’s power, children are known as the only privileged class. . . . [W]hat is viewed by many countries in the framework of the International Year of the Child as a long-term goal has long become a reality in the Soviet Union. Comprehensive concern for children and the fundamental principles of the Declaration of the Rights of the Child have become an immutable law in our country and have been enshrined in the Constitution of the USSR.78

Sometimes the Soviet Union’s espousal of a “progressive” international role led to situations that were quite piquant in terms of domestic policy and attitudes. A case in point is an apparently heated debate about the rights of illegitimate children that took place in April 1959. The Soviet delegate declared himself to be firmly on the side of such rights. The declaration should proclaim equality of rights for all children, whether born in or out of wedlock. . . . The child should have a name, a nationality, political rights, a right to education, and a right to work, irrespective of the circumstances of his birth. The child of incest referred to by the Italian representative was also entitled to the same rights as other children and should not be deprived of the right to be brought up in his own family. He was neither inferior to others nor guilty in any way and there was no justification for giving preference to legitimate children, or for condemning illegitimate children to ostracism, even if they were born of incest.79

One can well imagine how an editorial defending the rights of “children born of incest” would have gone down had it (by some unlikely chance) been published in Pravda or Izvestiia. The rhetoric of moral suprematism did not change until perestroika, when there was more acknowledgment of the fact that the USSR might need help from the UN, not just be entitled to supply crucial advice and policy direction. Yet the importance of cooperation was recognized at earlier stages as well, at least in theory. For instance, Maiorova, speaking to the UNICEF meeting in early 1960, stressed the importance of international exchange of information on mother and child welfare programs, including milk processing and conservation plants, the preparation of high-protein foods, and the development of medicines and vaccines.80 Soviet delegates used UN discussions not only to articulate political principles but to try and use these to drive international policy making. This was particularly clear in the contributions made to the discussions of the in-



defending children’s rights, “in defense of peace”

ternational conventions relating to children’s welfare. During the early drafting, in March 1959, of what ended up as the 1959 Convention on the Rights of the Child, USSR delegates called for the inscription into principle 3, safeguarding children’s development before birth, of “adequate paid maternity leave to working women both before and after their confinement; a ban on the employment of expectant and nursing mothers for heavy, unhealthy, or night work; the transfer of expectant and nursing mothers to lighter work when necessary without any reduction in pay; the provision of suitable intervals in the working day to enable a nursing mother to feed her child.” With reference to the same principle, they called for states to provide “an adequate network of hospitals, clinics, maternity homes, and other medical institutions,” and sporting facilities. Principle 4, they insisted, should contain a reference to states’ responsibility to provide for orphan children—to wit, “the proper maintenance and upbringing of such children in children’s homes, boarding schools, and other children’s institutions. Emphasis should be placed on the desirability of maintenance allowances payable by the state to large families.” Principle 5 should highlight the importance of “compulsory and universal primary education,” and of universal secondary education. It should also stress the need to “make culture accessible to children, by providing an extensive network of children’s libraries, reading rooms, music schools, and other cultural and educational establishments.” Principle 7 should state the need for a ban on employment of minors below a certain age, with limits set by national legislation and violations punishable by law. It should also prohibit corporal punishment in law. Principle 8 should add, “Children must be brought up in a spirit of international peace, friendship and brotherhood and . . . states must prohibit the dissemination of war propaganda and racial and national hatred in schools.”81 This reads like a resume of the program for child welfare that had been developed over the decades in the USSR itself.82 It therefore included mother and child care (both pre- and post-natal), institutional provision for homeless children, access to education and culture, labor protection legislation for minors, a ban on corporal punishment, and education for peace. It did not include noninstitutional solutions such as subsidies to economically needy families, development of a fostering and adoption program, regulation of such work as might be done by children, safeguards against child abuse within the family, or a program aimed at the prevention of crime by young people. To some extent, presenting this package of suggested measures as an international advance was misguided. Soviet diplomats, like propaganda texts produced for the Soviet public, were incapable of recognizing how far Western Europe had shifted toward mass welfare provision since World War II, making

79

80 catriona kelly

themselves easy prey for attacks from this quarter. Thus the Belgian delegate felt able to point out in April 1959 that many developed countries already had the provisions that the USSR was trying to insert, objecting: “The commission should not put forward standards lower than those already recognized.”83 Not surprisingly, also, the abstract principles behind the interventions of the USSR delegates often put them at variance with those from Western countries. In particular, attitudes toward what could be managed by legislation differed, as was made clear by, for example, the reservations expressed by the UK delegates about whether it made sense to try and legislate for “the right to grow up in a family atmosphere of affection and understanding.”84 At the same time, the Russian tradition of legal texts as documents providing a moral incentive was closer to the principles behind the composition of conventions than were the practical, precedent-driven regulatory traditions of English law. Areas that caused more important conflicts included how far the UN should attempt to prescribe levels of provision by the state. For example, Soviet delegates did all they could to get free medical care for children written into the 1959 convention as a “right.”85 This proposal was fiercely opposed by some of the Western delegates, particularly those from the United States, and a compromise had to be worked out: it was agreed that the phrasing would refer to an “invitation” to provide medical care, which would be described as “adequate,” with the assumption that this would mean “free.”86 Discrepancies of this kind prevailed at later debates, too. For example, at a meeting of 10 March 1966, Delegate Kasinovskii argued for intervention by the state in situations where children were under threat. “When it was clear, for example, that the imposition of certain beliefs on the child could have a harmful effect on him, the state should prevent the rising generation from suffering as a result of the errors of its parents. Such cases were exceptional to be sure, but the principle that the authorities should intervene when the exercise of parental rights was detrimental to the interest of the child, of society, or of the state was nevertheless an extremely important one.”87 Both the idea that religious education (evoked by the phrase “the imposition of certain beliefs on the child”) might be harmful and the idea that parents should not have jurisdiction here were highly controversial. In contrast, the Israeli delegates pressed for international agreement that children should be raised according to the religious wishes of their parents even if these were dead.88 The background of disagreements, combined with the political balance of power in the various UN voting bodies, meant that Soviet policy could not always be pressed through successfully. Notably, the proposal to insert “free” before “medical care” in principle 4 of the 1959 convention was defeated by 11 votes to 3.89 But there were also concrete successes on the part of the Soviet del-



defending children’s rights, “in defense of peace”

egation. For example, with reference to the 1959 convention, the amendment with regard to illegitimate children was accepted (principle 1 of the final version read, “Every child, without any exception whatsoever, shall be entitled to these rights, without distinction or discrimination on account of race, color, sex, language, religion, political, or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth, or other status, whether of himself or of his family”).90 Partial success was achieved in relation to principle 9 (later principle 10). A U.S. amendment akin to the Soviet one was adopted: “the child shall be brought up in an atmosphere which will promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all national, racial, and religious groups and aversion for all forms of national, racial, or religious discrimination.” In fact, the final version of the text adopted a more “Soviet” phrasing than this, referring to “tolerance, friendship among peoples, peace, and universal brotherhood.”91 On balance, it could also be said that Soviet policy achieved success in the long term. For instance, the move toward more detailed statements on children’s rights that made itself felt in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s had been championed by the USSR in 1959 against the reservations of some other states, such as Belgium.92 Indeed, the USSR was the chief advocate of the whole question of paying special attention to children as subjects requiring “rights.” In 1962, for example, the Soviet delegation successfully argued that a special article on children’s rights should be added to the UN Declaration of Universal Rights (1948), despite opposition from representatives of other states, including the United Kingdom, on the grounds that such an article was tautologous (children came under “all individuals” in any case).93 Soviet policy had an impact in part because West European societies, in particular, were in the process of becoming more “Soviet” (in their commitment to state intervention) than Soviet delegates themselves realized.94 In addition, the critiques of children’s sufferings under tyranny, although perceived as hypocritical by Westerners when coming from Soviet delegates, spoke to universal values. When Komarova addressed the General Assembly on 16 October 1979, she articulated views to which most of her listeners would have subscribed without question: “The human conscience cannot rest when children are suffering, when in so many countries they are languishing in conditions of poverty, hunger, and disease. The sufferings of children who live in countries where fascist dictatorial regimes are in control, or where conditions of racism and apartheid prevail, are incalculable.”95 As a statement of general humanism, this is every bit as resonant as the first sentence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Le Contrat social; thus, Soviet ideas of social justice, where they chimed with those accepted elsewhere, could cross borders and play a role in shaping international statements about children’s welfare.

81

82

catriona kelly THE IMPACT OF INTERNATIONALISM

In terms of its effect on discussions at the UN, Soviet championing of children’s rights must be described as moderately successful. What, though, about its impact at a humbler level, on individual citizens in the USSR and abroad? So far as Soviet internal politics were concerned, official representations had mixed effects. Certainly, many Soviet citizens accepted that children lived better at home than they did in the West, and most particularly in the third world. The readers of illustrated magazines were genuinely shocked by the pictures of napalm victims or half-starved child laborers, which made the glasnost´ revelations about children’s suffering in Soviet institutions extremely traumatic. In the words of a doctor speaking in 2004, “I remember how when I was a child . . . how I wept when I read Children of the Underground. . . . I never thought I’d see anything like that in my entire life. But now I have seen it— malnutrition like you wouldn’t believe!”96 Certainly, too, the peace campaign had genuine popular resonance, particularly in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The main reason for this, however, was because the Soviet masses did not take much persuading that living through another war would not be a good idea. The campaign’s limited energy, in a political sense, ebbed away over successive decades, until the “fight for peace” became no more than a mechanized ritual. Both before and after World War II, generating true internationalist feeling in a country that was politically and practically isolated proved a difficult task. In 1929, for example, a Leningrad Pioneer newspaper carried items lambasting local Pioneer groups for having “slept through” International Children’s Week.97 It would be fair to assume that the sheer number of campaigns in which Pioneer groups were supposed to participate actively during the Great Break of 1928–31 (others included the bor´ba za novyi byt [campaign to modernize daily life], the propagandization of atheism, and above all the collectivization campaign) muted energies for the remoter and more utopian concerns of the Soviet propaganda administration. Equally, exhortations to collect money for unfortunate German children can only have seemed a nuisance in a climate where collecting money for good causes was constantly foisted on the young. Among Pioneers from later generations, military education and such nonpolitical activities as collecting scrap were usually to prove far more memorable than information of any kind about the wider world; it was often hard even to get children interested in foreign languages, since there was no guarantee they would ever be needed later.98 But generating internationalist feeling was patently never the first intention of Soviet political agitators. Rather, internationalism as disseminated to children, even in the 1920s, was merely



defending children’s rights, “in defense of peace”

an ancillary form of Soviet patriotism, underlining the state’s benevolence toward the unfortunate, from whatever nationality they came, its status as the perfect exemplum of universal values such as brotherhood and tolerance, and above all its unique concern with the welfare of children themselves. It was on an international level where the campaigns had resonance, particularly in the postwar years. Genres such as the child’s letter, introduced to domestic politics in the 1920s, became familiar outside the Soviet state, and the vision of the Soviet Union as offering a moral alternative to Western capitalism was enhanced by the insistence on the rights of children to enjoy a life of peace and comfort. Some children found the mixture seductive. The writer Pankaj Mishra has recalled how much Soviet propaganda, including representations of children, meant to him growing up in a northern Indian railway town. In this bleak setting, “any trace of colour . . . could provoke a sense of wonder.” A magazine called Soviet Life, “which was really an illustrated press release boasting of Soviet achievements in science, agriculture, industrial production, sports, and literature,” became the high point of his existence. “Alone in my room, I gazed for a long time at colour pictures of young Soviet women raising production levels on the Ukrainian steppe, in the Fergana valley and Siberian oilfields. I lingered longest over the pages with pictures of Young Pioneers and then cut them out carefully and wrapped them around my school notebooks, obscuring the calendar-art images of the young Lord Krishna.” Mishra was prevented by his parents’ poverty from writing to his Young Pioneer girl pen pal—no one could afford the stamps—but he devoured Soviet Life and wrote fiery school essays presenting the Soviet “intervention” into Afghanistan as a war of liberation.99 Some non-Soviet adults as well as children were susceptible to the ideals voiced in propaganda. This was already clear in the first two decades of Soviet power from the favorable comments made by many visitors to the Soviet Union about the facilities for children that they witnessed, if nothing else. Bernard Pares, for example, waxed enthusiastic about the “Mother and Child” rooms at Russian stations in 1936; Louis Fischer was impressed by everything aimed at juveniles he saw during his visit to the Soviet Union in 1934.100 Publications of this kind continued into the late Soviet era: whatever the degree of skepticism voiced about the Soviet Union generally, visitors—including both child-care professionals and those without any expertise—would generally praise what they had seen of work with children.101 Among anti-Soviet Russians, particularly during the late Soviet era, the attitude was sometimes taken that Western visitors of this kind were simply duped by their Soviet guides—that they were, to use a term current in the Stalin era, “useful idiots” (poleznye idioty). Certainly, few traveled outside the capi-

83

84

catriona kelly

tals, and even here they were witnessing what was available at the top end— in the best-funded maternity hospitals, crèches, and nursery schools. Many long-term foreign residents did not look deep either. Some, such as foreign members of the Communist Party holding official positions, had a niche in the complicated hierarchy of privileges available to the Soviet elite.102 Others, such as diplomats, belonged to professions that led a rarefied existence wherever their latest posting happened to be.103 But foreigners’ readiness to respond positively to what they witnessed in the Soviet Union was not only testament to their naïveté; it was also an indication that they shared the ideals and objectives of Soviet policy toward children. Equally, the history of the Soviet contribution to the UN’s policy on children illustrates how Soviet policy could win allies or, at the very least, strike a chord with delegates from other states. To be sure, the level of comprehension in the Soviet delegations of how things were handled in modern Western welfare states was uniformly low. Diplomats of the late Soviet era were, after all, molded by the textbooks, press reports, and children’s literature to which they were exposed as children, young people, and adults. But, despite Western diplomats’ irritation at being patronized by their Soviet counterparts (as in the example of the Belgian spokesman cited above), the ideals of the child-centered policy that these delegations set out proved influential in the long term. In addition, the debates on the UN conventions of children’s rights, and the implementation of policy relating to these conventions afterwards, indicate the USSR’s commitment to making at least an outward show of cooperation with UN decisions and with the mechanisms of international law.104 The role played by representations of children and the appealing idea of child welfare in Soviet cultural diplomacy had an impact during three main periods of the country’s history, both in the West and inside the Soviet Union. The phase of “communist internationalism” lasted until the mid-1930s and was brought to a definitive conclusion by the Spanish Civil War, at which point children inside and outside the Soviet Union were not only exposed to material about the superiority of Soviet society in terms of what it offered the young, but they were also encouraged to participate actively in international contacts by organizing events for International Children’s Week, maintaining links with Pioneer and youth groups abroad, and working hard at learning languages, especially German, and improving their knowledge of the outside world. This was succeeded, in the late 1930s, by a phase of increasing isolationism marked by overt “spy mania” and suspicion of the outside world—which naturally increased in virulence during World War II. After the war was over, a different phase of internationalism set in, at which point initiatives includ-



defending children’s rights, “in defense of peace”

ing children focused strongly on the peace movement. Children were now encouraged to take their tone from adults, while at the same time encouraging their coevals in capitalist countries to adopt a “leading role” relative to their own elders. The superiority of the Soviet Union in terms of the lives led by children continued to be ubiquitously proclaimed in propaganda aimed at foreigners and citizens of the Soviet Union. It was customary throughout the decades of Soviet power to adopt a “here and there” standpoint: here children have access to education, welfare support, excellent leisure facilities, and first-class provision in the arts; there they are begging on the streets. This polarization also underpinned the contributions made to discussions relating to children’s affairs by Soviet diplomats at the United Nations (who themselves, of course, had been educated in the Soviet system and read the textbooks, journalism, and children’s literature in which the polarization was set out). By the late 1950s, at which time welfare structures were far better developed in the West than Soviet diplomats appeared to realize, attitudes of this kind created friction. At the same time, there was more in common between at least some of the West European representatives so far as the issues of welfare provision went and their Soviet counterparts than there was across the “free world” itself (as can be seen particularly with reference to the question of free medical care as a “right”). United Nations debates show an unfamiliar side of the Cold War— one in which the final conflict may have been “won” by the United States and its allies but in which individual ideological “battles” sometimes brought victory to the Soviet side. At the same time, such victories were dangerously fragile, since the gulf between propaganda discussion and actual welfare policy in the Soviet Union was significant. Propaganda representations of “there” versus “here” ignored the failures of Soviet state socialism with regard to providing for children in some central areas. Not until the post-Soviet era did it begin to be admitted that comparisons of infant mortality in the Soviet Union and elsewhere had been made, from 1937 on, on the basis of discrepant indicators. Soviet statistics (unlike those produced in other countries) excluded stillbirths and spontaneous abortions from the total of infants dead before the age of one, thus to a significant extent ameliorating the data used for international comparison.105 If this was hidden from view, there were other areas where the hiatus between promise and delivery was more obvious, such as provision of consumer goods for children. Items such as strollers, infant clothes, powdered baby milk, and previously prepared meals for infants were subject to severe shortages. This started to become important once improved education and rising living standards created a public with a sense of entitlement, as had happened by the

85

86

catriona kelly

1970s. The inadequate supply situation with reference to items for the young was an important cause of dissatisfaction among the Soviet public, as can be gauged even in official press reports.106 Thus, in absorbing views that Soviet children did live better, millions of Soviet citizens (many parents themselves) absorbed the sense that they ought to live better—which could generate a feeling of injustice at any evidence that pointed the other way. By the end of the 1980s, sociological surveys were indicating a striking similarity between the proportion of the population that felt spending time with children was the main joy in life (52.7 percent) and those who felt in one way or another dissatisfied with the state (53.2 percent).107 Outside the Soviet Union, the dynamic worked similarly, with disillusion setting in rapidly once the Western press picked up news about failures in children’s institutions. The fact that Russians “loved their children” was one of the few positive traits recognized in a survey of German attitudes to the nationality carried out in the late 1980s.108 By the middle of the next decade, Russian children were seen, rather, as the needy objects of Western charity—the targets for adoption campaigns, financial support, and a good deal of long-distance paternalistic anxiety.109 An assumption that the Soviet state had got one thing “right”—caring for children—was replaced by an assumption that it had failed even with regard to this area, and that Soviet rule had therefore been altogether disastrous. Thus short-term political gain was associated with longterm political loss; by adopting a strategy that allowed successful maneuvering in the international arena, Soviet leaders eventually stored up insuperable problems for themselves at home, problems that eventually undermined the very “cultural capital” that propaganda had been intended to amass.

CHAPTER  5

EAST AS TRUE WEST REDEEMING BOURGEOIS CULTURE, FROM SOCIALIST RE ALISM TO OSTALGIE

Greg Castillo

Depicting the postwar world as sundered and under siege, Winston Churchill’s “Sinews of Peace” speech of March 1946 catapulted the phrase “Iron Curtain” into public discourse and U.S. foreign policy. Churchill warned of a West jeopardized by communist infiltrators—a far cry from the Eastern menace posed by the Golden Horde of yore. The literary heritage of former Oriental perils lived on, however, in the “Sinews of Peace” address, as György Péteri has observed. Invoking images far more visceral than those of mere doctrinal difference, Churchill characterized communist “fifth columns” as a barbarian invasion’s “challenge and peril to Christian civilization.” Churchill fashioned this vivid mental map of a divided Europe to compel Americans to act. His message of impending catastrophe lent impetus to the creation of the U.S. Marshall Plan, which in the words of the economic historian Carlo Spango “can be regarded as the founding act of the postwar Western world” (emphasis in original).1 The trope of Bolshevist barbarism, which came to permeate U.S. Cold War nationalism, found its complement in anti-American discourses shared among the people’s republics, a coalition forged at the initial Cominform conference of September 1947. According to Andrei Zhdanov, the Politburo member charged with orchestrating Cominform’s debut, international alli87

88

greg castillo

ances fell into two factions: America’s imperialist, antidemocratic camp; and the Soviet democratic, antifascist camp, which embodied the “aspirations of progressive mankind.” Zhdanov’s “two camps” thesis reversed the polarities of Churchill’s schema of modern barbarism, implying that continuities with fascism implicated the United States—and, by extension, Marshall Plan Europe—in the brutal legacies of Hitler and Mussolini. Soviet fulmination against American “cultural barbarism” was conveyed to divided Germany by Aleksandr Dymshits, the Red Army officer in charge of cultural affairs in the eastern sector. His denunciation of the United States for contaminating German arts and letters found a sympathetic local audience.2 West European intellectuals and opinion leaders typically regarded America as characterized by “a primitive, vulgar, trashy Massenkultur, which was in effect an Unkultur, whose importation into postwar Europe had to be resisted,” as the historian Volker Berghahn notes.3 The Marshall Plan administrator Paul G. Hoffman believed that dispelling “the old stereotype of the Yank as a cross between a cinematic gangster and an uncultivated bumpkin” was crucial in the struggle for American influence.4 Antithetical, yet complementary, notions of a postwar threat to civilization—Churchill’s warning of a communist assault on Christendom and the party’s denigration of the Marshall Plan as a conveyor belt for cultural degradation—illustrate what Péteri has called the “systemic relativism” of Cold War discourses, which mobilized common concepts yet defined them in ways that buttressed divergent epistemes.5 Parallel but incommensurable models of barbarian invasion and cultural resistance were indispensable to both camps, grounding their respective identities in an adversarial relationship with a hemispheric “other.” Within the disciplines of architecture and industrial design—the subjects of this essay—socialist realism and international-style modernism defined the East/West epistemological divide. The cultural geographies theorized by these opposing design movements, however, were far more complex than the cartography of their practices. U.S. cultural propaganda in Marshall Plan Europe emphasized New World experiments in modernism as the antithesis of “totalitarian” art and architecture—a contention that lumped Soviet and Nazi cultural production in a single catch-all category while conveniently ignoring the fact that neo-traditional design was alive and well in America’s architecturally pluralist society. Even more entangled was the representational logic of Soviet socialist realism, glossed as a creative method “socialist in content and national in form.” As the aesthetic associated with the high culture of “high Stalinism,” socialist realism emerged during the USSR’s “Great Retreat” of the mid-1930s and came to the postwar people’s republics through a party-choreographed cultural revolution in the late 1940s and early



east as true west

1950s. Abandoning the universalist pretensions of a modernist avant-garde, socialist realists proposed a novel form of cultural internationalism clad in recycled and reprocessed symbols of national identity. Standardized compositional formulae organized a carnival of regional motifs into a legible stylistic totality: the aesthetic counterpart of Stalinist policies proposing the socialist transcendence of nationalism through nonstop celebration of its neutered iconography. If, as the political basis of socialist realism, “national identity was accepted, and indeed propagated, by the Soviet state to avoid the emergence of defensive nationalism,” as Terry Martin has observed, one might expect the movement’s “invented traditions” and heritage elements to have come from within Soviet territorial bounds.6 Although logical, that deduction is inconsistent with socialist realist theory and practice, which embraced design precedents that were global as well as local. Stalinist urbanism praised and emulated Haussmann’s Paris. Socialist realist architectural texts emphasized the movement’s debt to ancient Greece and Rome, a heritage previously claimed by nineteenth-century Beaux-Arts neoclassicists. Cultural authorities in East Germany promoted Chippendale furniture as a paradigm for proletarian homemaking in the “Battle for a German Interior Design” fomented by the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Unity Party of Germany [SED]). In short, socialist realism established as its mission not the creation of an alternative to Western bourgeois culture but the distillation and arrogation of its progressive essence. Seen from an Eastern bloc perspective, communism was to be not simply the capitalist West’s executioner but also its cultural savior. Across the new postwar realm stretching east from Germany, an intelligentsia freshly converted to the gospel of socialist realism proceeded to remodel the history of Western culture as a Marxist Bildungsroman anticipating the party’s rise to glory. Western Europe was imagined as a repository of abandoned aesthetic traditions, with the people’s republics as heirs apparent: beneficiaries of a monumental salvage operation yielding a new socialist culture high in recycled content. Members of the Ulbricht party of German communists brought the theory and practice of socialist realist cultural reclamation back home after wartime exile in the USSR. While in Moscow, Johannes R. Becher, the future East German culture minister, contemplated the fusion of Marxist-Leninist ideology with his homeland’s “classical heritage.” With the war over and a socialist German state established, Goethe became a pioneer of Marxist thought; Bach, a partisan fighter in the struggle against formalism; and Beethoven, a visionary proponent of the “solidarity of nations” ultimately realized by the October Revolution.7 A nonpartisan historiography of the cultural Cold War would map its dynamics not in terms of a struggle between

89

90 greg castillo

East and West, but as a conflict involving two presumptive Wests, each the strategic invention of a postwar superpower and its client states. THE ATL ANTICIST WEST

East Germany’s socialist realist self-image as the inheritor of abandoned bourgeois traditions must be understood in the context of the Cold War’s destabilization of international political and cultural affiliations. With Europe in ruin at war’s end, the United States forged a new Western identity narrative, institutionalized in the economic and military alliances of the Marshall Plan’s European Reconstruction Program and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Both organizations were manifestations of an “Atlanticist” West, seen as “not only an enduring extended family to which Americans, West Europeans, and a few others are indissolubly attached but forever the father to whom all owe allegiance,” as described by the diplomatic historian Michael Vlahos. “Until 1945, Americans never considered themselves fraternally tied to Europe, nor did they talk about ‘The West’ as a political and cultural entity,” Vlahos writes. “If anything, the smart talk was of American membership in the ‘Anglo-Saxon race.’”8 Political imperatives sidelined ethnically based transnationalism in favor of the “geostrategic sleight of hand” offered by Atlanticism: an identity construct that recast Western civilization as the collective heritage of nations connected, rather than separated, by the North Atlantic ocean.9 Marshall Plan propaganda, in both the United States and Europe, disseminated the notion of a fraternal bond between continents extending into the future and back through time. Your Eighty Dollars, a documentary film produced by the U.S. State Department and broadcast nationally by America’s ABC television network in 1952, used images of continental monuments to convince U.S. taxpayers that the $12.5 billion disbursed in Marshall Plan Europe over the previous four years constituted an investment in the incubator of American civilization, rather than a handout to two of the former Axis nations that had vowed to destroy it. Atlanticists like Churchill and John McCloy, the director of the U.S. monetary organization that would become the World Bank, went so far as to envision a “complete economic union” with America as the ultimate answer to Europe’s postwar doldrums.10 While full transatlantic unification of a fiscal variety remained a fata morgana, the orthodoxy of historically conjoined U.S. and West European interests remained intact until the second Bush administration, in a diplomatic tantrum, proposed the continent’s postcommunist division into a sclerotic “Old Europe” in the West, and its “New” pro-American successor in the East. Socialist realism was not the only postwar style to stake a claim on the



east as true west

West’s cultural heritage. Atlanticism spawned its own design culture—said to be proprietary but in fact assembled from two decades of modernist experimentation across two continents. In 1952, the Mutual Security Administration (MSA), a Marshall Plan successor organization, unveiled the modern Atlanticist aesthetic at Wir bauen ein besseres Leben (We’re Building a Better Life), an exhibition that debuted at West Berlin’s German Industrial Trade Fair before traveling to venues in Stuttgart, Hanover, Paris, and Milan. The main display was a single-family suburban home realized down to its kitchen gadgets and garden tools but built without a roof. All 6,000 products on display were modernist in style and manufactured in a Marshall Plan member nation. The Better Life home showcased a “man-wife-child family team actually going through [the] physical actions of living in [the] dwelling, making proper use of [the] objects in it,” according to a State Department telegram.11 A narrator, dressed in white and perched in an elevated crow’s-nest, described the model family’s interaction with their luxurious environment. Visitors became voyeurs, staring through windows or crowding overhead catwalks for a bird’s eye view as they observed the power of household objects to define new postwar subjects. To counter the notion that the Better Life home was merely a crass exercise in cultural imperialism, the transnational portent of the show’s modernist aesthetic was spelled out for guests. “To some visitors, this home of a future ‘average consumer’ would appear perhaps to be ‘American,’ but that is incorrect,” a West German journal glossed from MSA press releases. “John Smith or Hans Schmidt would be perfectly capable of affording such a house when certain conditions were met: we must make the Atlantic community of nations a reality, eliminate tariff barriers, and raise productivity, thereby allowing us to lower prices and raise wages.”12 A billboard beside the front door announced, “The objects in this house are industrial products from many countries in the Atlantic community. Thanks to technology, rising productivity, economic cooperation, and free enterprise, these objects are available to our Western civilization.”13 As a primer in “the modern approach to interior decoration,” the display was said to demonstrate how “rationally designed products from different countries in the Atlantic community can be combined harmoniously.” An MSA press release explained that “just as these items from the various countries combine to form a homogenous whole, so the nations themselves can combine to form a homogenous community.”14 The exhibit’s underlying message was glossed in the West German daily Der Tag: “There are different versions of one style and one way of life typical for a ‘western bourgeois’ household. Nothing is foreign to us, whether it comes from Berlin or Los Angeles,

91

92

greg castillo

from Stockholm, Sicily, or New York.”15 As featured in the Better Life home, modernism was the stylistic hallmark both of postwar capitalism and its new mode of citizenship, the latter inculcated through transatlantic patterns of production, trade, and consumption.16 During its three-week run, the Better Life open house drew over half a million viewers, with 40 percent of its audience consisting of daytrippers from Berlin’s socialist sector. The ideological subtext of America’s celebration of consumer abundance and modernist household design was not missed by East German authorities. They impugned Marshall Plan and MSA advocacy of barrier-free trade as an assault on national sovereignty and vilified modernist aesthetics as an exercise in cosmopolitanism intended to “disassociate the people from their native land, from their language and their culture, so that they adopt the ‘American lifestyle’ and join in the slavery of the American imperialists.”17 While alarmist, the assessment was not baseless. The MSA exhibition demonstrated that the U.S. State Department was indeed grooming international-style modernism as the stylistic lingua franca of transnational consumer capitalism and its idealized “good life.” We’re Building a Better Life inspired a decade’s worth of U.S. propaganda, culminating with the suburban home stage set of the famed Kitchen Debate in Moscow between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev, a showdown contrived to establish modern consumer culture as native to the Atlanticist West and forever alien to the Sovietized East.18 THE WEST, SEEN BACK WARDS

Like Alice’s looking-glass world, the topsy-turvy West Germany envisioned in East German literature in the early 1950s was a wonderland characterized by tropes of inversion. West Berlin was depicted as a site of failed modernity—a disorienting displacement of the master narrative underpinning Western interpretations of the socialist East. An exemplary reversal of postwar identity myths occurs in the unpublished 1952 manuscript Stalinallee, the first fullfledged socialist realist novel by Theo Harych, a celebrated East German “proletarian author.” One subplot involves a young East Berlin activist, Marianne Brose, whose clandestine visit to West Berlin deconstructs the city’s reputation as a showcase of capitalist affluence. Unlike the day trips made by her nonfictional peers, which typically culminated with shopping or a movie, Marianne’s border crossing is made with a daring political mission in mind: plastering East German posters across storefront windows—in effect, obstructing capitalist advertising with its communist equivalent. Her twilight impressions of the city’s consumer wonderland reveal it to be a Scheinwelt—a shimmering realm of illusion:



east as true west

Delicious American jams, coffee, citrus, [along with] furs and shoes filled shops and storefronts. But the bags carried by window shoppers were empty. Perhaps hunger drew them to these display windows, or they were drawn to the streets out of boredom. Their own apartments were cold; light was expensive. Their cupboards were bare. But out here light, life, warm clothes, and groceries were found in abundance. “For whom?” Marianne wondered.

Her misgivings are substantiated when Fritz, an unemployed West German bricklayer (and future refugee to East Berlin) pulls Marianne off the street, hiding her in his apartment before West Berlin’s Gestapo-like police can make an arrest. Marianne’s first exposure to the interior world of capitalism is revelatory: “Two moth-eaten bedsteads and an old overstuffed sofa stood beside a table and three chairs. The room also had a chest and shelves curtained off with a worn blanket.”19 The degraded domestic nonculture of a West Berlin tenement, as imagined by Harych, inverts the claim of increasing affluence central to Marshall Plan modernity. Before dismissing the novel’s depiction as absurdly propagandistic, however, consider that in 1950, 16 percent of the West German industrial labor force was unemployed, about the same proportion of the population was crowded into housing at three or more inhabitants per room, and the average working-class family of four spent nearly half its disposable income on food.20 Implicit in Harych’s description of the tenement is another deficiency, perhaps less obvious to today’s reader. Not only are consumer goods notably absent, but so is beauty: a form of poverty fraught with political ramifications, according to socialist realist discourses championed by the new East German state. According to party cultural authorities—including the general secretary of the SED Central Committee, Walter Ulbricht—beauty played a pivotal role in cultivating socialist citizens and distinguishing socialist Germany from its capitalist other. Ulbricht claimed that members of the intelligentsia who failed to grasp the fundamentals of beauty demonstrated their alienation from the working class.21 Inculcating an appreciation for beauty and its ideological implications comprised an important mission of East Germany’s Erziehungsdiktatur, its “educative dictatorship,” as described by some observers.22 Beauty was said to be rooted in the nation’s “progressive” cultural heritage. Its antithesis, according to SED authorities, was aesthetic modernism—known as “formalism” in Stalin-era parlance. In the opinion of Hans Hopp, a leading figure in East Berlin’s architectural establishment, modernism’s nonrepresentational aesthetic, stripped of the iconography of national identity, bolstered “the socalled American lifestyle, which claims global validity, is nothing other than

93

94 greg castillo

a direct continuation of [bourgeois] decadence, and serves to uproot human beings, making them suitable as objects of exploitation in all forms, straightforward and veiled.”23 “We know that political consciousness is, for many, not sufficiently developed to enable citizens to distinguish beautiful and good from ugly and bad,” Hopp maintained. “Only when such material education penetrates [the citizen’s] innermost being, including the world of his dreams and fantasies . . . will changes bear fruit.”24 In short, socialist realist beauty defined the beholder. Add to this a belief in environmental determinism—the notion that physical surroundings exert potent and very specific influences on behavior (an idea of broad currency on both sides of the Cold War divide in the 1950s)—and the result was a national reconstruction policy in which the creation of environments saturated with beauty assumed strategic importance in the struggle to forge new socialist subjectivities.25 Western modernism, diagnosed as a symptom of capitalist cultural dissolution, played a vital role in advancing the socialist realist cause in East Germany. The SED founded a new state institute to wage its socialist realist cultural revolution and stem the influence of modernism. The Deutsche Bauakademie (DBA), composed of collective design studios and research units, was tied to the party through cross-linked memberships.26 Its template was the Soviet Academy of Architects, an institutional model prescribed in the Sixteen Principles of City Planning, a document presented in April 1950 by Soviet hosts to East German architectural delegates in Moscow.27 Although the DBA was Soviet in inspiration, the organization clad itself in symbols of German national identity, appropriating both the title and the former headquarters of the venerable Bauakademie, a nineteenth-century design institute formerly housed in the eponymous monument by Friedrich Schinkel, Prussia’s de facto architect-of-state. The postwar Bauakademie celebrated its dedication at Berlin’s State Opera House in November 1951 with a ceremony that rehearsed the tropes of cultural appropriation and synthesis central to socialist realism. Deutsche Bauakademie members were inducted before a painted backdrop depicting another Schinkel masterpiece, Berlin’s neoclassical Schauspielhaus. Performances of scores by Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven, composers hailed as models for emulation by socialist realist musicians, ennobled the proceedings. Ulbricht’s keynote speech outlined the DBA’s mandate: The Deutsche Bauakademie has the noble task of retrieving the honor of architecture as an art and developing German architecture as a German art of building. In the wake of the functionalism and the formalism of the so-called Bauhaus style, which—particularly in West Germany, as introduced by the Americans—have led architecture to a dead end, it is necessary to base the new German architecture on Germany’s classical



east as true west

legacy and the progressive architectures of all nations; above all, Soviet architecture.28

Ulbricht’s address disclosed the terms and contradictions of East German socialist realism. Rejecting Germany’s native Bauhaus legacy and embracing Soviet design precedents would nurture, rather than erode, national identity. Because the Bauhaus style was a capitalist—hence American—phenomenon, German socialist design would take its cues from Prussian neoclassicism. From the DBA’s recycled name and headquarters to the sights and sounds of its inaugural celebration, all signs pointed to an architectural future synthesized from the Soviet present and a choice selection of European pasts. A 1951 publication outlined the geographic and temporal sweep of the DBA’s program of architectural appropriation. Titled simply Architektur, the slim volume by B. P. Mikhailov was a German edition of his entry under that heading in the Bol´shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia (Great Soviet Encyclopedia).29 The text’s translation marked the beginning of what would become an ongoing service by the DBA Institute for Professional Development (Institut für Nachwuchsentwicklung). Established to ease the transition to unfamiliar norms of socialist realist theory and practice, the organization circulated a periodical titled Studienmaterial, containing German translations of authoritative Russian texts. Mikhailov’s terse survey of global design assumed canonic status through its DBA imprimatur. With regard to the emergence of socialist realism—the culmination of architectural progress—the author ascribed great significance to the Renaissance, which on authority of Engels was “the greatest turning point, in the progressive sense, that humanity had experienced up to that time.”30 Renaissance humanists had retrieved antique culture as an “ideological weapon” in the battle against feudal class powers. The age held other portents for postwar design, as East Germans learned from Mikhailov’s text: “The architecture of the Renaissance has a life-affirming quality. It creatively reworked the forms and compositional methods of classical antiquity and introduced progressive construction methods. The comprehensive development of a synthesis of different arts is an achievement of this age.”31 Renaissance masters, in short, had pioneered the fundamentals of socialist realist synthesis and its characteristic pathos of optimism. Neoclassical architects in the newly developed nation-states of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, according to Mikhailov, had set another important realist precedent: aesthetic expression of national identity. Local adaptations of Renaissance form reflected “distinctive national character traits.” Of particular importance was the urban design tradition that had developed under a centralized French state of the mid-eighteenth century, with

95

96 greg castillo

its enthusiasm for “rationalist ideas and . . . rigorously geometric patterns and ground-plans.” Straight runs of broad streets intersecting at “a new type of metropolitan plaza” were a portent of future socialist realist urban ensembles.32 Tragically, this progressive trajectory was cut short in the nineteenth century by the “decline of architecture” accompanying the historical efflorescence of capitalism. “Chaotic urban construction and private ownership of property and buildings advanced sharpening capitalist competition, exerting a pernicious influence on the development of city planning, and rendered impossible the creation of a built environment under a unified perspective.”33 Mikhailov dismissed Western modernism with a single illustration: an aerial view of lower Manhattan in the 1920s. It portrayed skyscraper urbanism as visually chaotic and feudal in texture, conveying the socialist realist trope of jazz-age America as a site of failed modernity. Or, as expressed in Mikhailov’s text, “The quest to create a ‘new’ architecture premised on naked construction . . . reflects the complete vacuity of the bourgeois architecture of an imperialist age. The decline of the art of building reveals itself with tremendous precision.”34 Rather than constituting a new and revolutionary aesthetic, modernism repudiated all aesthetic values, according to this socialist realist interpretation. Its looking-glass inversion of American identity myths cast the United States as a source of philistine brutality, and Marshall Plan Europe, by implication, as a victim of barbarian conquest. More than just an outline of architectural history, Mikhailov’s text summarized the agenda for East Germany’s cultural revolution. Designers were to retrieve and safeguard the aesthetic legacy of the West—its crowning achievements consigned to history’s dust bin by monopoly capitalists. Socialist realism, according to its theorists, reversed the cartographic coordinates of “Western” progress and “Eastern” backwardness, with the USSR and its allies, as the caretakers of civilized culture, constituting the twentieth century’s true “West.” THE WEST AS RUSSIA’S DOMINION

From an Atlanticist perspective, socialist realist claims on the West’s built heritage must have seemed like an impertinence of the first order. After all, anyone with access to a postwar English-language architectural history should have known that Greco-Roman classicism traced its trajectory of subsequent influence into Western and Central Europe, where—after tedious cycles of revision, reiteration, and eclectic revival—the modernist breakthrough had occurred. Unless, that is, one deferred to the authority of Henry-Russell Hitchcock, the American architectural historian whose highly influential



east as true west

text, The International Style: Architecture since 1922, revealed the United States, and not continental Europe, to have been the true cradle of modernism: “It was in America that the promise of a new style appeared first, and up to the [First World] War, advanced most rapidly.”35 By 1950, Hitchcock’s rerouting of Western architectural progress through nineteenth-century Chicago could be found even in the homeland of the Bauhaus, as demonstrated by an article titled “America, the Birthplace of Modern Construction,” published in the Stuttgart journal Die Bauzeitung: More and more, [Louis] Sullivan is recognized as the true father of the “new architecture” and the “International Style.” . . . He was the philosopher of Functionalism, who built the foundation for the works of Le Corbusier and [Walter] Gropius. One knows the evolution: in 1894–1900 Sullivan founds the Chicago school, in 1910 Secessionism arrives under [Otto] Wagner and [Josef] Hoffmann in Germany, in 1912 America’s Frank Lloyd Wright is published in Germany, in 1914 we see the first modern-age buildings by Le Corbusier and Gropius.36

As demonstrated by this imaginative genealogy of modernism, both Cold War superpowers were engaged in campaigns to annex the West’s aesthetic heritage, which were subsequently waged by proxy in client states. Of the two projects, the USSR’s was the elder, claiming dynastic continuities. The imperial Russian disciplines of ethnography and philology may seem unlikely sources for clues to socialist realist theory. All, however, share a fundamental interest in discerning the essential traits of peoples, nations, and their cultures. The use of ethnography to justify Russia’s expansion can be traced back to the rule of Catherine the Great, who cited the ancient historian Herotodus and his description of Russians as descendants of the ancient Scythians to legitimize her annexation of their former homeland, the Crimea. As Vera Tolz observes, Catherine’s “reclamation” of what was once Scythia also linked Russia to the legacy of ancient Greece, thus forging a connection to the Greco-Roman patrimony cherished by European nations.37 A century later, Russian ethnographers and Orientalists, following the lead of colleagues farther West, began to chip away at modern Europe’s Greco-Roman foundation myth. A new discipline, “scientific racism,” and its theory of the continent’s prehistoric Aryan ancestry triggered a race among Russian scholars to discover the “cradle of Aryan civilization” within their empire’s territory. Siberia, Central Asia, and the Caucasus were scoured for ethnographic evidence of Aryan occupation.38 The stakes involved were not merely academic. If the racial origins of European civilization could be located on imperial soil, Russia would be the historical West, rather than a marginal Eurasian state seeking

97

98

greg castillo

membership in it—redefining powers like France and England as peripheral (albeit highly advanced) upstarts. A link between imperial theories of a primeval Russian West and Soviet dominion over Western culture can be found in the work of Nikolai Iakovlevich Marr, a philologist whose career spanned the pre- and postrevolutionary eras. Marr’s mission was both scholarly and patriotic. By putting his understudied Georgian language on the map of world tongues, he would simultaneously reveal his homeland’s linguistic origins and status as a global culture hearth. His dissertation, defended at St. Petersburg University in 1899, proposed connections between ancient Georgian and Semitic languages overlooked by establishment Indo-Europeanists, whose scholarly agenda involved “the oppression of the peoples of the East by the European peoples with their lethal colonial policies.”39 This fusion of pedagogical and anticolonial activism was well suited to revolutionary times, and by the 1920s Marr had become a Soviet academic heavyweight. His work focused on the ancient “Japhetides” of the Caucasus, a tribal group related to the Semites. Georgian, Marr claimed, was the modern language most closely related to the primordial Japhetic tongue. He soon discovered Japhetic roots permeating not just Georgian but all Caucasian languages. As his philological gaze spiraled outward, he discerned Japhetic underpinnings among the Sumerians, Thracians, and Etruscans as well. The Japhetide “substratum,” Marr declared, was “indeed the very foundation of the Mediterranean culture, the historic source of world civilization.”40 As Yuri Slezkine observes, “By about 1924, . . . Marr’s Georgians had progressed from an orphaned ethnic group to a well-connected ethnic group, to a great ethnic group, to the only ethnic group, to the very essence of human evolution.”41 As Marr climbed ever higher within the ranks of the Soviet intelligentsia, his next scholarly achievement was to subordinate Japhetic Theory to Marxism. The social and cultural cohesion of ancient tribes like the Japhetides turned out not to have been ethnic but materialist in nature. Because language was conditioned by class structure, linguistic transformation had to be a byproduct of socioeconomic processes, and not of cultural influence or ethnic migration. Marr’s New Theory of Language contradicted many of his Japhetic postulates, but theoretical dissonance was less important than consonance with the revolutionary élan of the First Five-Year Plan and Stalin’s pledge to catapult the USSR to the forefront of world history.42 Liberated from the confines of bourgeois scholarship, Marr’s linguistic theories became central to Soviet philology and ethnology, much as Lysenkoism dominated Soviet genetics and agronomy. Academics struggled to reconcile conflicts between the mandates of Stalinist nationality theory, which established the ethnic and cultural specificity of diverse socialist peoples, and



east as true west

an equally mandatory Marrism—itself internally riven by Japhetic Theory, which explained languages as ethnographic phenomena, and a New Theory of Language that explained them as universal products of class differentiation. The confusion persisted until 1950, when Stalin clarified the matter in a Pravda article establishing the national character of languages and cultures as incontestable and permanent. Meanwhile, the proto-Soviet origins of the modern West, hypothesized by imperial Russian ethnographers and elaborated by Marr, remained intact even within the anti-Marrist critique. A partycommissioned broadside by the philologist Arnold Chikobava dismissing “the far-fetched scheme of the Japhetic Theory” reaffirmed Japhetic cultural patrimony, describing its origins in “an ancient and numerous group of languages, whose speakers are known in the history of mankind as the creators of the ancient Near Asian civilization, which gave rise to the ancient Greco-Roman civilization, and consequently, to the whole of Western European culture.”43 Marr’s Japhetic origin myth provides a precedent for the subsequent notion of the West as a Soviet cultural protectorate, as well as a rhetorical prototype for the art of resolving epistemological contradictions—which, in the case of socialist realism, involved explaining how stylistic artifacts of bourgeois cosmopolitanism might be reconstituted as an aesthetic “socialist in content and national in form.” WESTERN CIVILIZ ATION AS SCR AP HE AP AND TRE ASURY

On 17 November 1953, exactly five months after an East German general strike had caused panic among SED leaders and prompted a Red Army intervention, the DBA hosted a colloquium and exhibit titled Besser leben—schöner wohnen! (Live Better—More Beautifully!) to address the pressing national issue of household aesthetics. A furniture exhibition, held in a temporary pavilion erected in East Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, targeted an audience of designers, manufacturers, retailers, and socialist citizens. DBA officers adopted a threetiered didactic strategy. One section of the Alexanderplatz exhibit, titled Cultural Heritage, familiarized socialist consumer-citizens with Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, and Biedermeier furnishings through historic exemplars on loan from museums in Potsdam, Wörlitz, Paretz, and Glauchau. To provide a glimpse of how the past would inform contemporary socialist home design, another portion of the exhibit unveiled new suites of neotraditional household furniture in 30 interior mock-ups. A third exhibition zone, referred to in DBA planning documents as the “chamber of horrors” (Schreckenskammer), placed historical reclamation efforts into their political context through a contrasting collection of “reactionary” modernist objects.44 To re-educate socialist citizens misled by U.S. propaganda or misinformed about the ideological content of

99

100 greg castillo

their nation’s Bauhaus legacy, exhibits pointed out the “emphatic primitiveness” of modernist armchairs and “complete decadence” of minimalist light fixtures.45 A caption explained: “Formalism and kitsch serve only the misanthropic interests of imperialism and its politics of warmongering.”46 Although the “Live Better—More Beautifully!” catalogue credited “the generous support of the government of the USSR” for making the exhibition possible, its installation logic bore little relationship to Soviet techniques of inculcating visual literacy. The “totalitarian museum” of Stalinist provenance, as analyzed by Boris Groys, established socialist realist hegemony by relegating to storage all art deemed visually discrepant, indeterminate, or illegible.47 That curatorial technique was at odds with the DBA “chamber of horrors,” which attempted to innoculate visitors against modernism with a preventive dose of cultural deviance. The direct precursor of the “Live Better—More Beautifully!” exhibit was Germany’s own “Away with National Kitsch” exhibition of 1933, which displayed two living rooms side by side: one, a jumble of tawdry furniture and cheap political memorabilia; the other, a dignified home environment fit for Teutonic Kultur.48 This airing of antipodes was followed four years later by the Third Reich’s most infamous exercise in shock-value pedagogy: Munich’s “Degenerate Art” (Entartete Kunst) exhibition of 1937, which branded the term Schreckenskammer into art history as a Nazi phenomenon.49 Like the Third Reich “chamber of horrors” generated by “Degenerate Art,” that movement’s East German successor portrayed modernism as a cultural contaminant: its toxic contents converted from Jewish and Bolshevist to American and capitalist. The DBA’s unsavory conflation of pre- and postwar antimodernism campaigns may be explained by a 1953 issue of its serial Studienmaterial. Among its translations of Russian articles, one by the Stalin Prize–winning sculptor Vera Mukhina dedicated several pages to the American art scene: a “gangster world, in which anything is allowed.” The headline above this excursus was translated into German as Entartete amerikanische Kunst—“Degenerate American Art.”50 Soviet validation of the trope of aesthetic degeneracy may have paved the way for the DBA’s reconsideration of historically familiar tactics to combat that pathology. Either deliberately or unwittingly, DBA authorities, in responding to the urgent need to inform socialist citizens about the dangers of modernism, had revived the discourses and techniques of Nazi exhibition design. Another DBA initiative aimed to provide an authoritative provenance for socialist realist household design. Throughout the summer of 1952, photographers traversed East Germany documenting late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century furniture, lighting fixtures, textiles, even tiled stoves. Research sites included museums, stately homes under state ownership, and



east as true west 101

private collections.51 The goal of this project was the publication of a definitive catalogue of source material to be used as a springboard for new furnishings incorporating national design traditions. Another research program, undertaken at Ulbricht’s behest, promised a pioneering breakthrough in socialist realist theory. Within the archives of a venerable furniture workshop in the town of Zeulenroda, researchers discovered an exhaustive drawing collection of furnishings and decorative details going back more than a century—which, amazingly, had survived World War II intact. Deutsche Bauakademie interest in the archive focused not on identifying potential exemplars of national tradition but on just the opposite: “We are unanimous in our conviction that one must analyze this material, in that it is of special importance to find the first, or primordial, configurations [Ausgangs- bzw. Ursprungsformen] of bad design.” Through archival research, DBA investigators would reveal the historical circumstances of beauty’s decline under capitalism. Buried within the Zeulenroda archive, they believed, was evidence of a formalist Ursprungsmodell—the progenitor of all subsequent generations of ugly furniture.52 Employing empirical methods, DBA researchers thought they were poised to construct a definitive history of formalism, mapping its evolutionary origins back to a specific archetype. As demonstrated by this ambitious project, Ulbricht and members of his party’s design intelligentsia were not content merely to emulate Soviet design practice. Instead, East Germany was to emerge as a leader in a novel Marxist discipline of aesthetic archaeology: an epistemological breakthrough that would place the nation at the forefront of socialist realist theory and practice. With multiple strategies in place for creating a new East German design culture, the director of the DBA’s Institute for Interior Architecture announced to the party journal Neues Deutschland in November 1954 the happy news that “with just a few exceptions, formalism in the design of furniture has been eliminated.”53 But by the end of the month, a breakthrough of a higher order rendered many of the DBA’s initiatives obsolete. On 30 November, the Soviet All-Union Conference of Builders and Architects met in Moscow. A startling address by Nikita Khrushchev excoriated the housing industry for lagging behind in the use of standardized, prefabricated concrete construction and berated leading architects, some of whom had served as consultants to the East German National Construction Program, for continuing to adorn apartment blocks with extravagant decorative details. Soviet design’s front line quickly shifted from the creation of elegant urban ensembles to the engineering of prefabricated housing, its components mass-produced on an assembly line, just like any other standardized product.54 The initial results were architecturally modern without being modernist, the stripped-down look of

102 greg castillo

the new concrete residential slabs shaped by rationalized construction techniques rather than any coherent style. East German architects learned of the Soviet paradigm shift in design through a confidential DBA publication on the 1954 Moscow conference, its cover bearing the warning: “For Official Use Only.”55 Like a fluttering fig leaf, this cautionary notice could only draw attention to the unsettling truth lurking beneath the surface: in revoking socialist realist aesthetic ideology, elaborately grounded in Marxist-Leninist doctrine and enforced through institutional oversight, Khrushchev had also obliterated the party’s doctrinal infallibility. In light of Khrushchev’s mandate, the DBA began experimenting with new mass housing prototypes and their interior appointments. Just as neoclassical apartment blocks of Stalinist vintage demanded suitable furnishings, so did the new mass-produced flats. Their low ceilings and compact rooms were unsuited to bulky prewar furnishings or their socialist realist counterparts. A new household journal, Kultur im Heim, created through an initiative of the SED Third Party Conference in March 1956, championed contemporary furniture designs that were “optimistic” and “light in mood.”56 East German experiments in domestic minimalism soon picked up where Bauhaus modernism had left off. Given the vituperative energy that Ulbricht and the DBA had invested in denouncing Bauhaus design, however, it remained the style that dared not speak its name. Repressed from public discourse for several more years, the notion of Bauhaus modernism as a “signpost to socialist architecture” finally erupted into rancorous debate among opposing DBA factions in 1959.57 An East German Bauhaus revival could proceed only with an unambiguous signal from Moscow. It came with the 1962 publication of “The Creative Legacy of the Bauhaus” in the Soviet journal Decorative Arts, and published in German translation a year later.58 Whereas Khrushchev-era aesthetic revisionism had opened the floodgates to a new appreciation for Bauhaus design, the more sensitive topic of the design school’s political and social history remained off limits until the mid-1970s, when the Bauhaus finally received party certification as a “socially progressive” phenomenon.59 The December 1976 unveiling of the restored Bauhaus building, built in Dessau in 1926, announced modernism’s full ideological rehabilitation as a constituent part of East Germany’s “socialist national culture.”60 Journalistic and scholarly discourses incorporated the Bauhaus into a new “invented tradition” of socialist design, inverting Stalin-era aesthetic evaluations of modernism, yet leaving intact the socialist realist strategy of reclaiming Western cultural achievements. Avant-garde experiments of the 1920s were now said to have been catalyzed by “the wave of socialist revolutions after 1917,” a Russocentric reading that conflated communist and modernist repudiations of



east as true west 103

bourgeois orthodoxies. Central European monuments of interwar modernism were reinterpreted as the premonitory artifacts of social reform movements that “achieved their complex realization in architectural practice only during the last few decades” under party guidance.61 This updating of the socialist realist formula for national tradition cast its horizons beyond previous geographic and temporal confines to reassess Western modernism—albeit as a diminished echo of its supposed Eastern bloc source material. The transformation of Bauhaus design into a harbinger of post-Stalinist functionalism constituted a terminal breakthrough in the cultural remapping of the postwar East as a newer, truer West. AN “OSTALGIC” EPILOGUE

Perhaps the most surprising cultural development associated with the collapse of communism has been the romantic rediscovery of its consumer culture. The neologism for this phenomenon, Ostalgie, fuses (and infuses) the German word for “East” (Ost) with “nostalgia” (Nostalgie). Products notoriously lacking in glamour during their shelf life as socialist commodities suddenly, like Proust’s tea-soaked madeleine, have gained the power to evoke memories of a lost world. First-time visitors to the Eastern bloc once marveled at the sight of empty Western toiletry bottles arrayed in home bathrooms like so many hunting trophies.62 Then, capitalist commodities were the gold standard against which their socialist counterparts were judged and found lacking. Now, “Mokka Fix Gold,” an East German brand of coffee long absent from shop shelves, merits a cameo role as a reminder of pre-unification family values in Goodbye, Lenin, an international box-office hit. The Center for the Documentation of East German Daily Life, founded in 1991 in the Stalin-era steel town of Eisenhüttenstadt, preserves more than 50,000 samples of the material culture of “real and existing socialism.” Coarse cardboard retail packaging, plastic housewares, and garments fashioned from “Präsent-20” polyester invite recollections of a defunct nation and its vanishing artifacts.63 Once reviled, now selectively revered, this “remaindered hardware of a noncapitalist consumer society” has been refashioned into a window onto the everyday landscape of what has been called “Germany’s last real alternative culture.”64 Divergent approaches to Eastern bloc nostalgia mark the East-West divide in German collective memory. From a Wessi point of view, socialist artifacts sometimes suggest the simpler times before an economic miracle unleashed its maelstrom of postwar prosperity. East Germany, according to the West German curators of an exhibit of socialist consumer goods, existed in a “time warp” that “unwittingly preserved fossil wares which, 20 or 30 years ago, were near and dear to us.”65 Socialist commodity culture is more often

104 greg castillo

construed by former East Germans as a paean to an extinguished national identity or a communal interdependence fostered by chronic shortages: perspectives romanticized in Goodbye, Lenin. These postsocialist revolutions in collective memory share in common a process of alchemy performed upon artifacts of the party’s final campaign to arrogate Western civilization, transmuting tools of socialist modernity into the sentimental mementos of a golden age of innocence. Ostalgie maps the Eastern bloc through the Orientalist trope of backwardness, inverting the underlying intentions of socialist mass consumption, which party leaders were grooming not as some sort of alternative to its Western counterpart but as the historical successor to capitalist mass consumption. In the late 1950s, riding high on Soviet technological triumphs like Sputnik, Khrushchev staked communism’s future on its ability to overtake capitalism on its own terms. The Soviet Seven-Year Plan for 1958–65 pledged to match—then exceed—the United States in housing and commodity supply. On Khrushchev’s first visit to America in 1959, his White House toast boasted: “Tomorrow we shall be as rich as you. The next day? Even richer!” On the heels of his American tour, the Soviet premier informed East Germany’s Walter Ulbricht that by 1961, “the GDR will start to surpass the FRG (West Germany) in standard of living,” a prognostication duly conveyed to East German citizens by their party leader.66 Not to be outdone, Mao Zedong declared that communist China would overtake Great Britain in per capita production by 1961.67 Historians remain divided in their assessment of whether the epidemic of optimism that infected communist leadership in 1958 was a case of cynical manipulation or fatal self-delusion.68 In either case, the outcome was a revolution in rising expectations. What Susan E. Reid has dubbed “Khrushchev Modern” attempted to expropriate core paradigms of Western modernity—from housing and industrial design to mass consumption—purging them of capitalist contaminants (like irrational excess and invented desire) before incorporating them into communist life.69 The commodity culture thus produced was to be consistent with Marxist theory and economically viable in the long term, preserving mass consumption’s progressive essence from extermination in the “final crisis of monopoly capitalism.” In short, the generic plastic housewares and polyester garments now conserved under glass as emblems of failed modernity are, in fact, former icons of modernity’s communist destiny. Ostalgie, then, is the mutagenic process by which the artifacts of a final campaign to depose the West become icons of a rustic East—a realm transformed by false memory from modernity’s proclaimed apotheosis to the last, lost refuge from it.

CHAPTER  6

PARIS OR MOSCOW? WARSAW ARCHITECTS AND THE IMAGE OF THE MODERN CIT Y IN THE 1950S

David Crowley

In 1934, the architects Szymon Syrkus and Jan Chmielewski presented their plans for the future of Warsaw at a meeting of the Comité international pour la résolution des problèmes de l’architecture contemporaine (the International Committee to Resolve Problems of Modern Architecture), a key Modern Movement forum (and the elected executive body of CIAM, the Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne [International Congresses of Modern Architecture]). Their plan for “Warszawa funkcjonalna” (Functional Warsaw) extended, like an unfolded map, on a countrywide and even international scale (fig. 6.1).1 The city’s functions were to be distributed along an extensive strip with nodes indicating the sites for growth of future smaller centers. Based on the principle of modern communications, the plan emphasized the city’s location between East and West on the “great transcontinental line of communication” that linked Paris through Moscow to the Urals. Rather than conceive the city in terms of fixed elements, “Warszawa funkcjonalna” envisaged the dissolution of city and national boundaries in an extensive network of road, rail, and river routes and junctions. Warsaw was not simply projected as a European city: it was to become Europe itself. This was a heady statement of faith in international modernism (and, accordingly, was published in a series of pamphlets in German, English, and French, though not Russian). The 105

106 david crowley Figure 6.1. Illustrations for the “Functional Warsaw” scheme presented by Szymon Syrkus and his colleagues at the Comité International pour la résolution des problèmes de l’architecture comtemporaine, 1934. Source: Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art (London, 1937).



paris or moscow? 107

authors of the scheme admitted that “our plan lies within the realm of utopia.” National and private interests stood in the way of the kind of fluid material and intellectual exchange among peoples that their vision demanded.2 After World War II, new ideological divisions made Syrkus and Chmielewski’s scheme seem even more utopian. Paris or the Urals had become more like polar opposites than points on a route. Their diagrams also now looked more like unpublished secret plans for a Red Army march on Western Europe or NATO designs on the Soviet Union. Paris or Moscow? Both exerted a gravitational pull on Polish architects in the postwar period. Architects went to both capitals during the 1950s in order to understand the different forms that the modern city might take. These tours had strong historical echoes. The conditions of partition had a centrifugal effect on Polish intellectual life, and since the mid-nineteenth century Polish architects had made journeys to Russia and France (and elsewhere in Europe) to boost their careers. An academic training in St. Petersburg or a spell working in the studio of a French architect was a way of acquiring expertise as well as professional and cultural capital. After the country regained its independence in 1918, Polish intellectual life was marked by a strong degree of Francophilia and Russophobia (though it should be noted that Polish modernists—in architecture and the fine arts—were well connected to the Soviet avant-garde through the course of the 1920s).3 After 1945, Paris began to lose its claim to be the center point in the sphere of Western modernity.4 Nevertheless, the city continued to hold a magnetic appeal for Polish architects.5 Ambitious and intellectually curious young professionals continued to be regular visitors to the French capital throughout the postwar period, albeit in small numbers (though probably exceeding their Eastern bloc colleagues). One such visitor was Oskar Hansen, who received a French government scholarship and invitation to work in the Paris studio of Pierre Jeanneret, a prominent modernist architect, in 1948. The contacts forged over the next two years allowed him to become the youngest representative of a band of prominent Polish architects—including Syrkus and Chmielewski—who forged strong professional relationships with their Western colleagues within the frame of CIAM from the late 1920s on.6 What—in retrospect—appears to have left the most powerful impression was not the training he received in Jeanneret’s studio or his meetings with the leading lights of the Modern Movement but life in the streets: “when I lived in Paris at the beginning of the 1950s, I lived on Rue Mouffetard, behind the Pantheon, and it was really an open form street, a real jewel . . . the way the street functioned was fascinating: the sellers would put their goods on the ground—right on the street! You had to go around them— that was real spatial time.”7

108 david crowley

Like other Polish visitors to the French capital in the 1950s, Hansen appears to have discovered what might best be described as a heterotopia, a world of chance, sensation, and pulsing crowds.8 On his return to Poland in 1950, Hansen made his most important contribution to Polish intellectual life in the form of his “Open Form” theory, a work to which I return below. Published in Warsaw in 1957 at the height of the de-Stalinizing Thaw, this manifesto-like statement was, in part, a Parisian “product” in that it was indebted to postwar existentialist preoccupations with rooting thought in action.9 After 1945, Moscow was also a site of considerable influence which drew the attentions of ambitious Poles, among them architects and planners. It hardly needs to be said here that the “pull” of Stalin’s capital—with its grand boulevards and socialist realist monuments—was accompanied by a considerable degree of coercion. Under the determining influence of Soviet models, party “aesthetes” imagined Warsaw as Moscow in the early 1950s.10 At its heart was to be the Palace of Culture and Science designed by a team of Soviet architects and builders according to the same blueprint as Moscow’s vysotki (high rises). Vladimir Paperny, in his classic account of socialist realist architecture, describes Warsaw and Riga’s “Stalinesque towers” as being no more than part of the centrifugal disposition of the “wedding-cake” skyscrapers in Moscow.11 With Stalin’s “gift” at the center, the new Warsaw was to be legible and, as such, ordered. This was an expression of architectural determinism which elided architectural order and social order. In this regard, the city offered itself as the backdrop for one kind of human activity above others, the rally. In fact, the new Warsaw incorporated a space expressly designed for this purpose, Plac Defilad (fig. 6.2). Rue Mouffetard with its joyful amorphous crowd and Plac Defilad, populated by orderly ranks of marchers, represented two very different conceptions of the modern city. One might be described as the image of the utopic city, based on the ideal of faultless, transparent space; the other as its heterotopic shadow, full of uncertainty and anxiety. Both conceptions had deep roots in Western intellectual traditions: the former can be traced back to the ideal cities and buildings projected by visionaries like Tommaso Campanella and Étienne-Louis Boullée in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whereas the latter belongs to a more recent vein of urban poetics with antecedents in the writings of Charles Baudelaire, Georg Simmel, and Walter Benjamin. These different conceptions were, however, activated in the specific circumstances of Polish reconstruction, particularly of Warsaw, a city in ruins in 1945 that became a massive public project to demonstrate the vitality of both the nation and Soviet-style socialism.12 The image of the city as heterotopia was repressed during the early 1950s, but, as I show, it was not extinguished.



paris or moscow? 109

Figure 6.2. Parade on Plac Defilad, Warsaw, 1955. Source: Palac Kultury i Nauki im Józefa Stalina, Warsaw, 1955.

Paris—or, more precisely, the images of Western modernity it furnished— continued to exert an influence over the development of Warsaw, particularly during the Thaw years. Its appeal as the “home” of cosmopolitan urbanity and the associated ideas of artistic and intellectual freedom were hardly diminished among architects (and artists and writers, for that matter) by the Soviet attempts to suppress the influence of the West.13 Moreover, in Hansen, it stimulated the creation of a remarkable theory of space and movement which was, as I show below, a product of being between Paris and Moscow. In the turn eastward that occurred as a consequence of the formation

110 david crowley

of the People’s Republic of Poland in the late 1940s, Polish architects were required to suppress or conceal their traditional orientation to the West. “The West” is, of course, a conceptual amalgam capable of bearing a range of meanings. A differential concept, it depends on the specter of an “other” for its meaning. In the Cold War context that forms the backdrop to the architectural ideas and practices explored in this chapter, any evocation of the West necessarily constituted a comment about the Soviet East. In this setting, the West was not just a spatial or geographical category but a judgment about the past, present, and future. As James Carrier in Occidentalism: Images of the West observes, “The occident is often constructed as both spatial, for it is Western, and temporal, for it is modern.”14 Poland’s refashioning as a socialist society in the late 1940s sought to put this coupling under pressure. In its ideological reorientation eastward, Poland was to embrace the future. The main task was not restoration but the “creation of new, improved, and more rational living conditions for the working man.”15 Conversely, the West was aggressively figured as the past in official rhetoric. Party ideologues made much of the “backward” social relations (zacofanie) of capitalist societies and the “primitive” (prymitywne) tastes satisfied by commercial culture.16 Poland’s capitalist past was also held in contempt. Prewar exploitation and injustice were frequently invoked to demonstrate the new generous principles of social justice operating in the people’s republic. Party leader Bierut’s “Six-Year Plan for the Reconstruction of Warsaw,” delivered as a lecture in 1949 and as a book two years later, furnished a steady stream of contrasting images of past injustices and future reparations. The appalling state of overcrowded working-class housing was contrasted with the luxurious and elegant conditions in which the rich lived in Poland in the 1930s. Impressive suburban villas and the unimaginable luxury of “weekend” cottages were compared with gritty photographs of the dishevelled hovels in which Warsaw’s poor once lived (fig. 6.3). Poland’s location in the capitalist West before the war (the fact of redrawn borders notwithstanding) had been responsible for these injustices. Although the threadbare urban fabric of Poland’s slums was an easy target (particularly given the high levels of overcrowding in prewar Warsaw), how were the vigorous currents of prewar urban utopian futurism—like Syrkus and Chmielewski’s “Functional Warsaw”—to be configured as the past?17 How might the academicism of Soviet architecture be cast as the future? To answer these questions, it is necessary to join a group of Polish architects on a 1950 tour to the Soviet Union. HE ADING E AST

In June and July 1950, a group of a dozen Polish architects, urban planners, and structural engineers toured the Soviet Union at the invitation of the Main

paris or moscow? 111



Figure 6.3. Contrast between the housing conditions of the poor and a weekend house for the wealthy before 1939. Source: Bolesław Bierut, Sześcioletni plan odbudowy Warszawy (Warsaw, 1951).

Council of the Union of Soviet Architects.18 Among this group were some prominent prewar modernists such as Bohdan Pniewski and Romuald Gutt. Pniewski had, for instance, designed the Polish Pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair of 1937 for the prewar Sanacja regime. Others were new faces. Eugeniusz Wierzbicki had scored a career triumph in the late 1940s by designing the .

112 david crowley

Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza (PZPR) headquarters in the center of Warsaw (with Wacław Kłyszewski and Jerzy Mokrzyński).19 Their exhausting tour included two weeks in Moscow, where they learned how the new monumental tall buildings, beautiful squares, and avenues were “harmonized into an architectural unity”; and four days in “beautiful, historic, and heroic” Leningrad where they were “inspired” for their return home to the task of rebuilding Warsaw.20 Tours of Stalingrad and the cities of Georgia followed. What these Polish architects and planners actually felt for Soviet architecture is difficult to ascertain despite the extensive reports that they each wrote on their return.21 Each article was cloaked in the empty rhetoric of subservience: each Soviet city on their tour was “heroic”; every Soviet building “joyful”; and every Soviet architect was “inspiring.” This, of course, is hardly surprising given the processes of Sovietization under way in Polish architecture. This history is relatively well known and can be sketched here in general terms.22 A stagemanaged conference of party-affiliated architects—Krajowa Partyjna Narada Architektów (National Party Council of Architects)—was called in Warsaw in June 1949 to ratify the decision to adopt socialist realism as the governing creed of architectural practice. Architecture and urban design were now to follow a script written in the Soviet Union. Buildings designed in the immediate postwar period, which might otherwise have been championed as models to be emulated throughout Europe—such as Zbigniew Ihnatowicz and Jerzy Romański’s Centralny Dom Towarowy (Central Department Store, 1948–52), a shimmering glass box suspended above the ground on slender columns— were unreported.23 To ensure the wholesale adoption of the new aesthetic, private practice was outlawed. Large state planning offices were organized to serve the only client, the state, which also controlled the supply of building materials and plots. If architects were uncertain about how to interpret the new creed, dozens of articles from Arkhitektura SSSR were translated and reprinted in the Polish press. Architectural competitions also served a disciplinary function, providing the ideologues with the means to reward orthodoxy and publicly criticize difference. To meet the ideological requirement of “national form,” a limited repertoire of historic precedents was licensed: in Warsaw, for instance, a 1907–10 neoclassical tenement on Plac Małachowski designed by Jan Heurich and Artur Goebel was now to supply the genetic code from which new buildings in the city would be generated (fig. 6.4).24 Its descendant, the Marszałkowska dzielnica mieszkaniowa (Marszalkowska Housing District [MDM]) was designed and built in the center of Warsaw in the early 1950s as a model of the socialist city.25 In a very literal manner, the fiveand six-story elevations of new apartment buildings were dressed with classical cornices, lintels, and miniature porticos, the preferred taste of the haute



paris or moscow? 113

bourgeoisie in 1900. In its monumental form and historicist detailing, MDM presented the paradoxical face of Soviet futurology (fig. 6.5). After 1949, foreign architecture came—in the chief architectural magazine Architektura—to mean almost exclusively Soviet architecture (with occasional excursions to the people’s republics of Romania and Bulgaria). Within the extensive and glowing discussions of Soviet Union, the West emerged as its inversion. One commentator, Edmund Goldzamt, claimed particular expertise over both worlds, though in fact he knew only one of them. He had left Poland in the autumn of 1939 and spent the war, like the Polish communist leadership, in Moscow, where he trained as an architect. Still young (born in 1923), he spoke with authority in postwar Poland. His influence was, however, relatively short-lived: his 550-page magnum opus, Architektura zespołów śródmiejskich i problemy dziedzictwa (The Architecture of City Centers and the Figure 6.4. Neoclassical tenement on Plac Małachowski, Warsaw, designed by Jan Heurich, 1910. Source: Author’s photograph.

114 david crowley

Figure 6.5. Marszałkowska Dzielnica Mieszkaniowa (Marszałkowska Housing District), Warsaw, 1954. Source: MDM Marszałkowska 1730–1954 (Warsaw, 1955).

Problems of Heritage), appeared in 1956, after the academic Soviet architectural effects and monumental urban schemes it celebrates had been disparaged not least by Nikita Khrushchev himself. Nevertheless, Goldzamt’s book provides the most authoritative account of what he calls “bourgeois urbanism.” In its pages, the capitalist city—London in the nineteenth century, turn-of-thecentury New York, and Weimar Berlin—is represented, in orthodox Marxist terms, as a necessary stage of human development: “Capitalism created the city in the modern sense of the word. It provides and refines contemporary technical and civic resources such as communications networks and sanitation systems.”26 Riddled with injustice and anxiety, the modern city is the place where the working classes acquire political consciousness, partly because of the democratizing effects of urban culture. In the face of class injustice, the reforming spirit of the interwar Modern Movement was not radical enough. In this context, Polish modernism was singled out by Goldzamt for criticism. “Warszawa funkcjonalna” was a sop. Its authors, he wrote, “associated social problems with the question of housing and debilitating living conditions for the working classes and other working strata. This meant not only improving designs for the city but also the whole social organism, including workers in the suburbs and the villages of the region. Such conceptions, however, only



paris or moscow? 115

pretended to solve the divisions of [the] contemporary capitalist city . . . [becoming] propaganda for reactionary social-economic trends.”27 Socialist realism required unambiguous statements of loyalty from the most prominent figures in the architectural profession, particularly those who had been mostly connected with the old faith of modernism. Helena Syrkus, a one-time constructivist and prominent member of CIAM (and Szymon Syrkus’s wife and professional partner), signaled her unequivocal support for the new order at the seventh meeting of the congress in Bergamo, Italy, in 1949.28 Before an audience made up of architectural luminaries like Josep Luis Sert, Ernesto Rodgers, Le Corbusier, and Max Bill, some of whom had once been her close allies and colleagues, she went on the attack like one of Zhdanov’s sharpshooters.29 Her speech was also, as Syrkus admitted, a “selfcritique.” In this, she gave her audience a public demonstration of the Soviet mania for samokritika, a public confession of the “errors” in one’s earlier thinking or actions.30 She argued that the kind of technological invention and abstract volumes of Corbusier’s L’Esprit nouveau pavilion (at the Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in 1925) were redundant under advanced conditions of Soviet socialism: The formalism of CIAM was positive in the early days—it was a revolt. It made use of analytical methods, which were also socialist methods . . . but its importance has grown less and less. . . . Construction is but a skeleton. It has great interest for the anatomist, but for the rest it becomes beautiful only when it is covered with fine muscles and a lovely skin. We had nothing else to offer when CIAM began, and so we made a fetish of the skeleton. The countries of the East have come to the conclusion that we should have a greater respect for the past.31

Soviet modernity, in other words, outstripped that of the capitalist West and had therefore no need for the transitional experiments of the Modern Movement. Seeking to distinguish socialist realism from fascist neoclassicism, Syrkus also offered disingenuous praise to the Soviet Union for its interest in local and national cultures: The USSR does not impose the culture of Mother Russia on the rest of the country, but it encourages the culture of each region, always rejecting what is not fitting to the time. This is the difference between the USSR and the Hitlerian Herrenvolk mentality. . . . The new Warsaw will conserve its link with the past—that is to say, it will preserve all that is good in the line of roads, open palaces, the connections with the Vistula, and with all remaining evidences of its ancient culture. In defending and preserving our national culture we defend and preserve international culture.32

116 david crowley

Goldzamt, too, subscribed to this line of orthodoxy, claiming that Soviet architecture was advanced precisely because it did not view the historic urban fabric as redundant. Le Corbusier’s schemes for Paris—illustrated by Goldzamt by the Plan Voisin of 1925—were sharply condemned for their iconoclasm. Not surprisingly, Goldzamt took the orthodox Soviet view that “dramatic traditions” were encoded in antique and Renaissance architecture.33 The “real” processes of history were revealed in the changing ownership and use of the former possessions of the rich: “dead exhibits throw into sharp relief what is really dead in old buildings—and what the fate of these palaces of kings and aristocrats is now.”34 Both Goldzamt and Syrkus’s views are best understood in the context of the early years of the Cold War. Like many tendentious images of the period circulating in the people’s republics, they attempted to represent the West as the past. Such acts of ideological inscription were, however, often strained by the indisputable evidence presented by Soviet architecture itself. Take the case of the new order of vysotnye zdaniia (lit., tall buildings), of which eight were designed for Moscow at the wishes of a Council of Ministers proclamation in 1947. Seven were completed, including Moscow State University and the headquarters of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (fig. 6.6). Stalin’s new landmarks received extensive coverage in the Polish press, as one might expect, given the fact that the skyline of Warsaw was about to be elevated by the construction of the Palace of Culture and Science to a design by the Russian architect Lev Rudnev (see background to fig. 6.2).35 In their scale, stepped profile, and historicist ornament, these buildings clearly owed much to the American skyscraper of the early twentieth century, typified by buildings like the Woolworth building in Manhattan by Cass Gilbert (1910–13).36 A 25-story tower capped with a sculptural spire emerging from a massive main block, the Woolworth building was a steel frame dressed in gothic terra-cotta moldings, traceried marbled and bronze trimmings, and glass. A self-proclaimed “cathedral of commerce,” it was an unmistakable symbol of Western capitalism. Its uncanny return at the heart of the Soviet empire was a kind of perverse historical echo that Soviet and Polish architectural critics struggled to explain.37 Goldzamt claimed that it was not the arrangement of space or the building technology that made these buildings Soviet: it was their legibility and order: The American skyscraper reflects the chaos and internal contradictions of the capitalist economy. Piled up near one another in a state of disorder, they grow without clear function. This can be supplied only by thinking carefully about the composition of the city and its streets. The tall buildings set in Moscow’s extensive squares have created a genuine system



paris or moscow? 117

Figure 6.6. Moscow State University, designed by Lev Vladimirovich Rudnev, 1949–53. Source: Author’s photograph.

which responds to the needs and the structure of the city. It has created the affecting unity (emotionalna całość) of its silhouette and image.38

The market also determined the austere form of the modernist block (illustrated—somewhat oddly—by Goldzamt with the Secretariat block of the United Nations Headquarters in New York of 1947–53, which was perhaps chosen because it was the first major postwar office building to use a fullheight curtain wall suspended off the structure). This was a building type that invited comparison with the opulent materials and rich decoration of the Soviet vysotnye zdaniia. The towering slab dressed with a glass curtain wall and aluminum was an architectural “degeneration” rather than—as its champions in the West claimed—the expression of modernity. “The economic power that drives the New York skyscraper upwards,” wrote Goldzamt, “also determines its degenerated slab form [zwyrodniała forma bryłowa]. Stretched like a sky-

118 david crowley

high matchbox on extended foundations, it is awkward in construction and in use.”39 According to such Stalin-era criticism, the chaotic and ugly Western city was the pivot of modern alienation: it was shaped by the selfish interests of capital and the technological fetishism of the architectural profession. Alienation was also adopted as a term by those who expressed opposition to Stalinist urban aesthetics, at first sotto voce, and later, during the Thaw, much more loudly. The journalist Leopold Tyrmand, for instance, recorded his opinion of the new city center scheme in Warsaw known as MDM in his famous diary of 1954. He was repelled by the dreary vision of the city projected in what he called the garb of “emdeemizm” (MDM-ism): Monotonous, identical, gigantic, flat boxes with columns, turrets, and allegorical figures will extend Warsaw’s greatest streets for kilometers. No one who has seen these designs will be able to imagine himself in this monotonous and appallingly boring place. . . . These buildings will provide apartments, offices, and hotels. Yet it is impossible to imagine them bearing neon signs, advertisements, or any individual accent. . . . Desperate postwar antagonisms have produced this ridiculous and ugly place. When every chemist, boutique, and confectioners share the same, uniform appearance, we will have fallen into chaos and nonsense.40

It was not long, however, before such criticisms could be publicly vented. Even before the Thaw, MDM—with its monumental sculptural ornaments and classical colonnades—was frequently singled out for its lifelessness. In 1955, the architect Jerzy Wierzbicki reflected on the alienating effects of order: “Note the absence of advertising, lighting, and neon: the elements that in the evening hours lend great liveliness and diversity to a city. The city center must be a concentration of hotels, restaurants, cafes, travel offices, attractive shop premises. The life of a great city presses for them.”41 Such critiques of Stalinist urbanism contained a strong desire for the animation and stimulation of the heterotopic city. HE ADING WEST

In August and September 1956, Wierzbicki was a member of another group of Polish architects traveling abroad. Although the tour was organized by the architects union (Stowarzyszenia Architektów Polskich, SARP) with the view of extending the profession’s horizons, the architects were not guests of any foreign association nor did they enjoy the comforts of an official delegation.42 Traveling in a Warsaw bus with red and white livery with “Paris–Varsovie” on the indicator board and camping in canvas tents, they followed an itinerary of their own making through Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Switzerland



paris or moscow? 119

to the Atlantic coast of France. They returned along France’s Mediterranean coast, across northern Italy and through southern Austria. In Wierzbicki’s words, “we returned to Western Europe after 17 years.” This was not just an autobiographical statement made by one individual member describing the group: it reflected the long-standing Francophilia of Polish culture. Architectural tourists, they selected their route to include both historic buildings and new, often controversial landmarks such as the Chapel Notre-Dame du Haut in Ronchamp by Le Corbusier, which had been completed a few months earlier.43 The notes that Wierzbicki kept of the journey reveal his fascination with the ordinary faces of West European modernity. He reported, for instance, his wide-eyed amazement at the absence of horses on the road in Austria, the ease with which international borders could be crossed, or the fact that taxis were “luxury limousines” in Zurich. Of their visit to see Le Corbusier’s new housing block in Nantes (La maison radieuse, also completed in 1955), Wierzbicki wrote, The city is full of life with great crowds in the streets. Trams are already extinct in Western Europe. Corbusier’s great block reminds me of an anchor in the land by the Atlantic. In the sun, and against a background of old trees, with its bright colors and natural grey concrete, it is immensely interesting. However, its interior streets, poorly ventilated and gloomy, do not encourage use. The apartments in this building have their enthusiasts and opponents. In each apartment the occupant has been forced to sell off his large furniture, a fact that provokes hostility among the French bourgeoisie.44

Wierzbicki’s account—anecdotal and alert to the mundane aspects of life in this new model of social housing—was critical: it was not, however, criticism infused with ideology. One senses that this trip was liberating for these Polish architects not simply in terms of a newfound freedom to travel but also the freedom to exercise independent judgment. At the same time, it presented clear evidence that the people’s republics were falling further behind West European societies in terms of living standards. The 1956 tour of Western Europe (and the fact that it could be reported in evenhanded terms in the Polish press) was possible because of a set of new conditions that had emerged during the Thaw. Stalin was dead, and de-Stalinization was under way: Poland’s Communists were renegotiating their relations with the Kremlin while writers, artists, educationalists, and other intellectual professions in Poland were renegotiating their relations to the state. In fact, these architectural tourists returned on the eve of Poland’s Październik—the momentous events of October 1956 in which the Polish Communists extracted

120 david crowley

greater autonomy from Moscow, not least by promising to channel the popular appetite for reform which had been swelling since the beginning of the year. With workers rioting and the intelligentsia demanding greater civil and political liberalism, Poland seemed to be on the verge of revolution. On 24 October, great crowds filled the marching grounds of Plac Defilad to hear Gomułka announce the sovereignty of the party and the Polish government over internal affairs of the nation but proclaim his continued loyalty to the Soviet Union. The party had managed to vent pressure coming from Moscow and from the streets. The political tensions and opportunities released by deStalinization do not need to be rehearsed in detail here.45 Instead, I would like to ask in what ways did the image of the West change in architectural practice and discourse during the Thaw? Crucially, the grounds for architectural change had been set somewhat earlier in 1954, when Khrushchev—then first secretary of the Communist Party of Soviet Union—launched an attack on socialist realism at the Moscow Conference for the Building Industry (a statement that was published in Trybuna Ludu in extracts within days of its publication in Pravda and Izvestiia and in the Polish architectural press in January 1955). Architects were charged with building efficiently by designing standardized and industrialized building elements and eschewing their interests in superfluous decoration: “Architects like all builders, must make a sharp turn toward problems of construction economy. . . . An architect, if he is to keep abreast of life, must know and be able to use not only architectural forms, ornaments, and decorative elements; he must know the new progressive materials, reinforced concrete sections and parts, and, most of all, must have an excellent understanding of construction economy.”46 Khrushchev effectively presented the architectural profession with a new technocratic model of practice based on research into new building technologies and materials. This was characterized as “experimentation,” albeit within limits. What was implicit in 1954 became explicit in Khrushchev’s many promises—made in the years that followed—to overtake the capitalist West (and America in particular) in terms of “living standards.”47 Despite Khrushchev’s staggering optimism, it is clear that such pronouncements had an important effect on the way that West could be imagined. Soviet ideologues had in the 1920s claimed that the advanced and distinct nature of Soviet society would produce an advanced and distinct material fabric—that is, “socialist things.”48 Yet from the 1930s onward, as György Péteri has argued, the state-socialist modernization project was marked by contradiction: it tried to create a form of modern civilization that was distinct from (and competing with) capitalism and yet at the same time “it accepted the economic and technological stan-



paris or moscow? 121

dards of success prevailing in the advanced core area of the global system”— that is, Western modernity.49 This was, as Péteri argues, a recurrent pattern in Soviet modernity, albeit one sometimes cloaked by the rhetoric of triumphalism. This was evident, in the architectural field, not least in the debt owed to American skyscrapers by Moscow’s vysotki, which were built during a period of heightened nationalism following the “Great Patriotic War.” In what might be described as an “integrationist” swing after Stalin’s death, Khrushchev, too, acceded that Western modernity was—in a material sense—more advanced. With consumption given a heightened significance by the Cold War, he challenged Soviet planners, economists, and other agents of the command economy—including architects—to ensure the progressive uses and the equitable distribution of the material benefits of modernity. Viewed in this light, the informal tour of Western Europe by Polish architects in 1956 was—in one key respect—like that taken to the Soviet Union in 1950: both were designed to witness the future in the making. The future—in architectural terms—appears to have been a narrowly technological one. Within months of reprinting Khrushchev’s 1954 speech, the Polish press had published a series of unquestionably positive articles on architectural design and building technology in the West. Specialist readers and the general public were introduced to well-informed articles (usually summaries of Western reports) on the luxurious face of the Hilton Hotel high above the Bosporus in Istanbul;50 the synthesis of modernity and tradition in Japanese housing;51 the glossy corporate modernism of Olivetti’s headquarters in Milan;52 Lionel Schein’s “revolutionary” plastic house exhibited at Le salon des arts ménagers in Paris in 1956;53 as well as the “New Brutalism” in Britain as represented by Alison and Peter Smithson’s school buildings.54 Read together, the point was clear: an entire world was being fashioned in a common and seemingly universal language of modern architecture. France, it had to be acknowledged, was no longer responsible for the most compelling images of architectural modernity, Corbusier’s unités notwithstanding. This mantle been taken by the United States. The United States made its first sustained appearance in Architektura, the leading architectural journal, in April 1956, perhaps not surprisingly in an article on the glass curtain wall.55 This has, arguably, been the United States’ major contribution to the architectural vocabulary of postwar modernism. The practice of using large sheets of plate glass suspended between architectural elements was not new: the innovation was that panes could be suspended off the structure in a grid of often near-invisible mullions, thereby creating the spectacular effect of shimmering and flat glass curtain. Amplified over 40, 50, or 60 floors, the curtain wall produced a powerful image of organization: this was, in Rein-

122 david crowley

hold Martin’s analysis, its chief “media effect.”56 For contemporary observers it was not just its symbolism that drew attention. The combination of standardization and flexibility promised by this building technology was its main attraction. The modular grid in which the curtain wall was held offered the potential of off-site manufacture and on-site assembly. Flexibility, too, would follow: “open plan” office spaces could be produced, freed from the limitations of windows between piers. Full modularization was, however, never achieved in the U.S. construction industry, especially when compared to that of Eastern Europe. But it is in this context that Polish enthusiasm should be considered. The Architektura article—rich in details and illustrated with Mies van der Rohe’s Lake Shore Drive blocks (1948–52) and a clutch of new banks and commercial offices designed by Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill in New York—defended American experiment in the face of local criticism: “Louis Mumford has called the Lake Shore Drive buildings ‘the nonsense of contemporary architecture.’ From the point of view of building technology, discussion of these buildings is undoubtedly interesting in terms of the development of standardized construction elements.” In two short sentences, the author linked Khrushchevian thrift to the preferred architectural style of the ambitious American corporation. Perhaps more important is that the author made no judgment about the commercial interests driving architectural design and shaping the face of U.S. cities. Two months later, the magazine published the translation of an extensive article on the relations between architects and their commercial clients in the United States. Originally published in the Architectural Review, a British journal, this piece reflected the widespread fascination in a model of operation in which the professional association “is more of an advisory body than a regulating authority” and “where the building industry has to deal with well-organized labor unions and pays very high wages.”57 In the context of Poland in turmoil, with the intelligentsia engaging in considerable reflection about the future of socialism in Poland and its own role, this article—by inference—offered reflection on the value of the large and centrally organized architectural design bureaus operating in Poland. Of working for Richard J. Neutra, a Los Angeles–based “pioneer of American modern design,” one interviewee who was consulted in the article said, “There is no doubt that his small staff with the resulting intimacy of personal relationships, made possible opportunities for links between those who built and who were built for.”58 The Thaw did not lead to a new model of practice for the majority of architects. Like Khrushchev’s 1954 speech itself, the forms of modern design licensed after Stalin sought to enhance the authority of the socialist state and further diminished the creativity of architects, particularly in the key sphere



paris or moscow? 123

of housing.59 This was a matter of great political sensitivity, not least because it was in this field, more than in any other, that achievement would be measured by the very people the party claimed to support. Industrialized construction—based on prefabrication with the aim of radically reducing the number of architectural elements to the minimum—removed architectural design from sphere of art to engineering. Increasingly practice meant serving one of the large kombinaty (building trusts) centered on panel construction factories. In the late 1950s, Polish cities began a transformation that resulted in a new urban fabric, formed from the numerous panel-built, high-rise blocks for which the entire Eastern bloc became notorious. The tall block became an important symbol of socialist futurology, endorsed by both regime and architects as the triumph of pragmatism over ideology.60 At the same time, the state flashed its technocratic credentials, promising to use the resources of the command economy to produce high-quality mass housing. Bolesław Szmidt, a highprofile architect, charted a new relationship between architects and the state as well as the criteria used to judge new buildings, in describing designs for new 12- and 14-story blocks of flats: “This work is mostly based on a 1960 decree of the Council of Ministers advocating the design and erection of prototype blocks of standardized apartments, intended for prefabrication and mass production. If a prototype building is found by a commission of experts to be progressive technically and economical in exploitation, then it is recognized as a ‘type’ and passed for mass production.”61 That is, the architectural profession was licensed to experiment within a narrowly defined field of technical competence. Architects responded positively to the oft-repeated “Khru­shchevian” challenge to design buildings that could be built “cheaply and quickly.”62 As technocrats, they produced not designs for buildings—specific works of architecture—but building types. International competitions were launched to find new models for the high-rise housing in which Poles were to live in the future. Designs were to be based on the off-site manufacture of elements like load-bearing walls with ready-made apertures for windows. The aim was to reduce the number of “parts” from which an apartment could be made and the number of movements of the crane on the building site. In such ways, architecture became closer to engineering. Although encouragement was given to invention in the people’s republic, creativity was now channeled by economy. Moreover, the “guiding” principles of sanitary norms, albeit based on an expanded per capita “allowance” of space, and the requirement of family occupation, checked any radical social visions on the part of architects. This was, it should be noted, a turn of events that few appear to have protested.63 Alongside industrialized housing, the second face of Thaw modernity was rather more commercial and Western in outlook. Wierzbicki’s 1955 de-

124 david crowley

mand for hotels, restaurants, cafés, travel offices, and attractive shop premises as well as neon to counteract the sterility of socialist realist urban aesthetics seemed, at least on the basis of the prestigious projects widely reported in the Polish press, to have been answered two years later. In 1957, the state ushered in a partial market economy, manifest in the rapid appearance of new cafés and restaurants, as well as other small private services like tailors and taxis. One contemporary estimate suggested that more than 10,000 new private shops and kiosks opened in Warsaw in 1957 alone.64 The changing appearance of the city was a product of the party’s promises to improve standards of living in the face of a storm of criticism following Stalin’s death. The modish sensibility had its foremost architectural expression in the wave of cafés and bars which were newly opened or refurnished in the second half of the 1950s. Whereas abstract art on the walls and neon on the façades of these leisure sites were clear signs of a new attitude toward the satisfaction of previously suppressed appetites, much of this modernization was “surface-deep” in a literal sense. With Polish streets increasingly dressed with neon and plate-glass windows projecting consumer goods into the street, the image of the West appeared to occupy the socialist city. Should we regard the shop window as another site in which the West was both imagined and encountered? Or perhaps we should regard it as a hybrid form of modernity “laid” in Havel’s oft-quoted phrase “by the historical encounter between dictatorship and the consumer society.”65 It was becoming clear to some observers that the Eastern bloc was losing its claim to constitute a distinct material world. This was François Fejtö’s diagnosis in 1969: “Ever since the Eastern Countries have concerned themselves only with profit, profitability, productivity, and the application of the most advanced capitalist methods, and the ‘consumer fever’ has set in, the Communist system has begun to lose its individuality.”66 During the Thaw, not only was the alignment of the East with the future and the West with the past reversed: the subservient position of Polish and other Eastern bloc architects as apprentices to Soviet masters was modified too. With closer links to the West and a living prewar legacy to draw upon, it seems that Polish products and interior schemes were viewed by Soviet designers and consumers as being more sophisticated than the limited exercises in fashionable design on Soviet drawing boards. Writing of the taste for the contemporary style, the editor of Dekorativnoe isskustvo Iurii Gerchuk recalled the appearance of a Russian magazine reporting Polish culture in the late 1950s: “Every decorative-painterly cover of the journal Pol´sha [Poland] behind a kiosk window seemed like a manifesto of new artistic possibilities. And for the ‘keepers’ [of orthodoxy] the word ‘Pol´sha’ became an odious symbol of ‘modernism’ infiltrating the country.”67 The interior schemes for the Warszawa



paris or moscow? 125

Hotel in Moscow, which opened in July 1960, offered other examples of Poland’s fashionable modernity. The building needed, according to its Soviet architects, to have a Warszawski character. What this meant in practice was furnishing the public areas with designs produced in Poland.68 Colorful textiles printed with abstract forms in the style of Henri Matisse’s découpages were employed in the reception area alongside low kidney-shaped tables and freestanding lamps on spindly metal legs. Entirely unremarkable in any other context, such designs, it seems, carried an exotic charge at the heart of the Soviet empire. Poland, Russia’s Occident in a geographical sense, had become “the West” in a metaphorical sense too. As if hinged on an invisible pivot, the rise of images of the West during the Thaw was accompanied by the decline in reports of Soviet architecture. Furthermore, one can occasionally detect what James Scott has called “hidden transcripts” in the pages of the Polish architectural press. These are, in Scott’s terms, concealed or disguised expressions of frustration or self-assertion by subordinate groups in the face of power.69 For instance, a 1958 Architektura report entitled “Experimental Buildings in Moscow” recording the Novye Cheremushki (1956–57) housing scheme in Moscow’s Ninth District placed these lumpen five-story blocks constructed from prefabricated elements under pitched roofs securely within the newly sanctioned space of “experimentation.”70 Yet the magazine’s art director juxtaposed this report next to a set of dramatic photographs of lightweight roof structures in France and the United States. Simon and Morriseau’s and Robert Townsend’s cantilevered steel frames and innovative spiral structures were designed to produce open and unimpeded spaces. Placed side by side, Western structures appeared like an indictment of Soviet progress.71 This was a comparison that few readers could overlook. The wholesale enthusiasm for Western building technology during the late 1950s did not appear in an ideological vacuum. In fact, in the early 1960s, the freedoms seized during the Thaw had been reined in, and party leaders issued low warnings about the magnetic appeal of the West. In 1963, for instance, Artur Starewicz, head of the Press Department and a Central Committee member, announced, “The myth of the superiority of Western culture is on a par with nationalist distrust and rejection of everything done in the East and contempt for the achievements of the USSR and the other socialist countries.”72 The Thaw was long over, but it was too late to return to the conditions of 1949. As long as Polish architects (and, for that matter, architectural critics) maintained their position as technocrats, occupied with technical and professional questions, they enjoyed personal and professional privileges.

126 david crowley BE T WEEN E AST AND WEST

Although the architectural profession in Poland after the Stalin years can be characterized in terms of its disinterest in controversy, some voices—speaking loudly from the margins—objected to what they saw as the superficial modernization of architecture. In 1960, Jerzy Sołtan, an architect leading the Zakłady artystyczno-badawcze (Artistic and Research Workshops, ZAB, with Zbigniew Ihnatowicz) within the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw,73 took a critical view: “during the last four to six years, the approach to the modern movement has changed very much. Everyone everywhere now expresses the wish to be modern. No more war between the new and the old! . . . The important centers of academic, quasi-classical, decorative approach to architecture in the USSR . . . have changed their position. But it is obvious that ‘modern’ does not mean the same to everybody.”74 He held that the prevailing “superficial bourgeois modernism,” like socialist realism before it, was just another form of decorativism. Moreover, he censured architects for their unprincipled willingness to serve their “sponsors,” whether commercial clients in the West or the state in the East.75 This was a remarkable statement which indicted both the East and the West. Sołtan also expressed his critique in the form of Bar Wenecja, a small building in a workers’ district of northern Warsaw. Commissioned by the central catering agency (Stołeczne zjednoczenie przemysłu gastronomicznego), ZAB’s design for Bar Wenecja emphasized openness. Housing various facilities, including a self-service restaurant (an innovation that prompted much discussion and some controversy) and a number of cafés, the bar was designed to privilege choice.76 Sołtan and his colleagues went to considerable lengths to achieve specific spatial effects: they sought to design a building in which the viewer would be aware of the ways in which they and others passed through its spaces. The design was conceived as a three-dimensional form composed of interior and exterior interpenetrating spaces through which people might move as a “colorful crowd.” Emphasizing texture and material qualities by using cast concrete stairways and balconies, clinker bricks, and glass walls in plan frames—Sołtan and his ZAB colleagues made an explicit rebuttal of the monumental visual effects and “noble” materials preferred during the Stalin era—a rejection of the scopic order of socialist realism in favor of embodied experience (and, as such, displayed a strongly phenomenological sensibility). Here was a building conceived in terms of ordinary textures and experiences. Describing the Bar Wenecja, his close colleague and ZAB associate Ihnatowicz characterized their frank use of materials there as a “conscious protest



paris or moscow? 127

against the skin of applied forms, against cubist sausages, kidney-shaped furniture, and latticing à la Mondrian.”77 Sołtan had considerable experience of practice in Western Europe as an architect who had spent the second half of the 1940s working in Le Corbusier’s Paris studio and as an active participant in CIAM and its successor association, Team X, in the 1950s. A diverse and international group that counted Alison and Peter Smithson and Aldo van Eyck among its members, Team X eschewed a singular vision of modern architecture as a creed, style, or technique. Architects should act in response to the conditions they encountered. This conception of design was rooted, they claimed, in the specific, lived reality of being human. In standing “against rhetoric” as the Smithsons put it, they subscribed to the Sartrean precept that “existence precedes essence.”78 In its dislike of dogma and interest in generating sociality through architectural form, Sołtan’s thinking was orthodox Team X philosophy. But his attitudes needed to be brought back to Poland where, during the Thaw, they had particular resonance. In framing a critique of Stalinism, the Polish intelligentsia—architects included—seized on the maligned and abused figure of the individual. This was part of an attempt to rediscover the moral roots of socialism under the debris of Stalinism, its vulgar materialism and empty propaganda. Much of the criticism vented in 1955–57 was from a broadly Marxist perspective, albeit often one drawing much from the “young” Marx—stressing humanistic, democratic values.79 This intellectual archaeology was shot through with existential themes. (It is not surprising that the plays of Ionescu, Sartre, Kafka, and Beckett were all performed on Warsaw stages in 1957, and experimental music and modern jazz became important features of Polish cultural life at that time.)80 Leszek Kołakowski’s 1959 political parable, “The Priest and the Jester,” is a case in point. The reforming Marxist philosopher contrasted the attitude of the servants of power. The priest lives in blind certainty that his faith is right, whereas “the jester’s constant effort is to consider all the possible reasons for contradictory ideas. . . . In a world where apparently everything has already happened, he represents an active imagination defined by the opposition it must overcome.”81 This was a existentialist parable that raised important questions about the relations of intellectuals to power: after all, many—Kołakowski included—had once been loyal and enthusiastic supporters of the Bierut regime. Kołakowski’s conception of the “active imagination” found an analogue in Polish architectural theory during the Thaw. Oskar Hansen—the architect whose enthusiasm for the Rue Mouffetard I invoked at the beginning of this essay—developed a set of ideas about the place of the individual within the

128 david crowley

built environment which he published under the title of Otwarta Form (the Open Form) in 1957.82 Like Sołtan, Hansen escaped the conventionalizing pull of the large architectural office by working within the relatively liberal context of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. His early career was built on the design of exhibition pavilions at home and abroad. In fact, Hansen claimed the genesis of his theory of Open Form in his designs (with Zofia Hansen and Lech Tomaszewski) for an exhibition pavilion in Turkey in 1955.83 Speaking to both artists and architects, Hansen argued for spatial forms that were incomplete, forms that by their incompleteness required the creativity or participation of viewers or users. This was fundamentally a social and decentered conception of space and creativity. Space, according to Hansen, should be considered terms of movement, whether in terms of a synchronic potential to be reorganized by those who occupy it or in its diachronic capacity to change over time. In engaging audiences/users, open forms had the potential to remind audiences of the fact of their own embodied being. They would also make the individual more attuned to the ordinary: “As Dadaism in painting broke the barrier of traditional aesthetics, so the Open Form in architecture will also bring us closer to the ‘ordinary, mundane, things found, broken, accidental.’”84 Hansen’s theory also offered new ways to conceptualize modern architecture. Promising universal application, Hansen saw his theory as a way of rethinking public memorials, housing estates, and works of art.85 For example, one unrealized scheme that Hansen promoted internationally—including at the last Team X meeting in Otterlo in 1959—was an extension to the Zachęta Gallery in Warsaw, which he designed with Lech Tomaszewski and Stanisław Zamecznik in 1958.86 An addition to an existing neo-Baroque building (Stefan Szyller, 1896), the Hansens’ scheme was a transparent cube raised on square columns in its corners. The walls and roof were to be made from glass panes set into a steel frame, creating a flat, transparent skin. Although this was a version of the latest architectural fashions, the glass curtain wall and the open plan, it was based on a different and novel conception of the technology. Internal walls—creating a box within the glass box—were formed from adjustable panels. These panes could be rotated to disappear from view or to form an opaque wall against which the exhibits could be seen. Two floors and staircases could be moved within to create different internal spatial configurations. The interior spaces of this gallery were to have no permanent or fixed form. Flexibility meant much more than efficient elasticity of the “open plan” office: it required the “active imagination” of the artists and the curators who would use it. Hansen’s theory marked a point at which the influence of the architect—now characterized as a technocrat—was to end: “The role of the artist-



paris or moscow? 129

architect is altered from the previous exclusively personal and conceptual role (imposing the Closed Form in the manifestations of which the form is determined beforehand and that most often for non-existing persons) to the conceptional-coordinating role. An all-knowing architect must realize, in the face of the high level of specialization in present times, that he does not know everything himself. Hence, the architect super-specialist is obsolescent in present times.”87 This view put Hansen at odds with the building program that was being orchestrated by a state committed to controlling and effectively constraining the use of resources.88 It is perhaps not surprising, then, that although Hansen’s ideas were widely debated, they had little impact on architects.89 The theory of Open Form was an explicit challenge to the two-dimensional and highly scopic conception of space that had been evident in architecture and urbanism during the Stalin years—that is, buildings and spaces conceived as spectacle. Many of the landmarks of modernism were equally bereft. Hansen singled out the new capital of Brazil, inaugurated in 1960. An entirely new settlement of half a million people had been realized at breakneck speed in under three years. Brasilia’s allegorical plan, by the urbanist Lúcio Costa, suggests the form of an airplane in a gentle 15-kilometer arch of residential buildings bisected by a long monumental axis. At its heart is the Plaza of the Three Powers, two skyscrapers flanked by a spherical vault occupied by government offices. “It seems to me that Brasilia-Capital,” Hansen wrote in 1961, “will be antique before it is completed, for it, too, is based on the Closed Form.” Like his colleague Sołtan, Hansen delivered a critique of both Stalinist aesthetics and the forms of modernism which were now spreading throughout the “first,” “second,” and “third” worlds in the 1950s. Both were fashioned in the “aesthetics of the closed form.” Hansen was not alone in his critical view of the alienating effects of modern architecture. After all, Brasilia was widely employed as a symbol of the alienation at the heart of modern life. It was, in Simone de Beauvoir’s famous phrase, the capital of “elegant monotony.”90 What was important about Hansen’s view was that it presented the kinds of spectacular effects of late modernism and Stalinism—long counterposed—in terms of equivalence. The spectacular face of the modernist city with its towering glass-walled slabs was just as alienating as the Socialist Realist vision with its radiant and joyful vistas. The broad outlines of the intellectual history of architectural thought in Poland in the 1950s follow a pattern in which an enforced rejection of modernist architecture—identified by Soviet ideologues with Western Europe—gave way to an uncritical embrace of its technical and formal achievements. This

130 david crowley

outline—though broadly correct—underplays the extent to which East and West were folded into each other throughout the period. Polish architects like Hansen and Sołtan were, by dint of their activities in Paris in the 1940s and their contributions at Team X meetings in the 1950s, engaged in debates and practices shaping modern architecture in the West and the East. They were by no means “imagining the West” from without (though they were capable of seeing it differently from their Western colleagues). The experience of the Soviet aesthetic of socialist realism—with its fascination with sight lines and monumentality—made it somewhat easier for Hansen and Sołtan to identify the same characteristics in the forms of modernism being so readily embraced by the post-Stalinist authorities in Poland in the second half of the 1950s (or for that matter in France or Brazil). In their emphasis on the role of the user, Hansen’s Open Form theory and Sołtan’s critique of dogma might be characterized as simply articulations of existential humanist thinking in the period. But emerging from a Sovietized environment, their thinking represented a rare dual perspective on two worlds. This was a perspective that was perhaps only afforded to those—like the mobile Polish architects whose interests and ideas have been the subject of this essay—living between East and West.

CHAPTER  7

IMAGINING RICHARD WAGNER THE JANUS HE AD OF A DIVIDED NATION

Elaine Kelly

Over the course of its turbulent history, the German nation has defined itself time and again in terms of a constructed Other. The Other—depicted variously as a political, ideological, or racial opposition to the existence of the imagined German Self—has served as a common enemy against which the nation can unite, essentially a vehicle for promoting national spirit. Discussing the historically exclusive nature of German nationalism, Christian Joppke observes, “the German concept of nation thus became more like a weapon than a unifying symbol, the property of some but not of others.”1 Implicit in this is the perception of an enemy within, a construct of nation in which Self and Other are two sides of the same coin. Thomas Mann famously asserted in 1945 that one could not speak of two separate Germanys, an evil one represented by Hitler and a good one that encompassed Kultur.2 Yet as the Cold War progressed, identity-formation processes were dependent on narratives of separate Germanies: Germany as oppressed and oppressor, as perpetrator and jury, and, most obviously as East and West. The political scientist John Keane notes that “crises are times during which the living do battle for the hearts, minds and souls of the dead,” an observation that is pertinent here.3 Uniting the various postwar definitions 131

132 elaine kelly

of nation, as intimated by Thomas Mann, was the shared cultural heritage, which inevitably emerged as a focal point in the ideological combat of the Cold War. Amid the abject poverty in Berlin in 1946, an incredulous cultural correspondent from Time magazine revealingly acclaimed the city as “the current theatrical and musical capital of Europe,” noting that “theaters with their roofs blown off and their walls caved in are housing productions . . . that would shame a good deal of the stuff shown on Broadway.”4 Birthdays and anniversaries of Germany’s dead musical luminaries were seized upon as nationbuilding and propaganda opportunities; in both East and West numerous “commemorative years” (Gedenkjahre) and other smaller festivals were organized to honor, and exploit, the pantheon of Germany’s cultural heroes. The 200th anniversary of Bach’s death in 1950 gave rise to a year-long series of festivities; a Beethoven-Gedenkjahr to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the composer’s death followed in 1952, and commemorative celebrations for Schubert, Schumann, Mozart, and Handel followed in quick succession.5 THE CANON IN A DIVIDED NATION

The commitment to the canon by the Soviet and American occupying forces played in their favor by confronting widely held perceptions of both as culturally challenged nations.6 It also tapped deep into the German psyche; culture, and in particular music, was intrinsic to the German sense of self and national identity. Robert Schumann, for example, observed in 1839: “as Italy has its Naples, France its Revolution, England its Navy, etc., so the Germans have their Beethoven symphonies.”7 The response to this conviction was strikingly different in East and West Germany. The Americans were adamant that the Third Reich had been no chance occurrence but a product of an innate German chauvinism that was manifest in their attitude toward their musical heritage. A reoccurrence of war was inevitable unless these basic flaws in the German character were addressed.8 Consequently, in the immediate aftermath of the war, the focus in West Germany was on the denationalization of the canon. Radio programs and concerts interspersing German music with compositions from the Allied nations, accompanied by the promotion of nonGerman performers, aimed to reduce the German certainty about their musical supremacy. David Monod describes American attempts to “attack Nazi sentiments in the music sector by showing the Germans that Americans could sing Wagner better than they.”9 Similarly, Bach and Beethoven were no longer discussed in terms of their German heritage but depicted as products of an international humanism, one to which Germany had no greater claim than any other nation.10 Denationalization had no role to play in the politics of East Germany. On



imagining richard wagner 133

the contrary, the Socialist Unity Party (SED) relied heavily on the exploitation of national pride to validate the state. The SED was keen not to portray the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as a brand new entity but to align it instead with the Germanic cultural heritage and to demonstrate its position as the true heir to the riches of Germany’s past. Central to the construct of the socialist German nation was the hypothesis that two parallel strands of society had evolved in Germany, one reactionary and one progressive. The unfolding of the reactionary strand included the rise of capitalism, the abandonment or misappropriation of Kultur, and ultimately the atrocities of the Nazi regime. The progressive strand, in contrast, was one that had evolved directly from the ideals of the Enlightenment and found its apotheosis in the socialist society espoused by the SED. As David Bathrick observes, the SED was determined to demonstrate that “socialism, and by extension Socialist Realist culture in the GDR, was the logical continuation of all that was enlightened, rational, and therefore democratic from Germany’s controversial past.”11 According to this logic, the Nazis were not a product of the German cultural heritage; they had betrayed it. This strategy had a dual purpose, serving not only to convince citizens of the validity of a socialist state but also to distinguish the GDR from the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in terms of cultural superiority. The cultural environment of the GDR, triumphantly depicted as one that “realizes the conceptions and ideals, the traditions of the humanistic German poets and thinkers,”12 was, according to the SED, inconceivable in the political circumstances that defined West Germany. In a statement to mark the 200th anniversary of George Friedrich Handel’s death in 1959, the Central Committee of the party explained: The politics of the oppression of the peaceful and progressive aspirations of the working classes of West Germany, the nuclear armament of the West German army, and the propagation of openly revanchist territorial claims against other countries in Europe no longer leave a place for the progressive and humane ideas of the great thinkers and artists of our past. The Bonn NATO state is today not only the focal point for the threat of nuclear war in Europe but also the scene of a rapid decline of culture.13

The Federal Republic was typically depicted as a cultural wasteland, a breeding ground for fascist aesthetics. Alexander Abusch described it as a state “where the humanistic traditions of the German nation are disregarded as ‘antiquated’ and ‘outmoded,’ but the traditions of German-Prussian and Nazi militarism are all the more cherished.”14 In the eyes of the SED, the FRG was a haven for superficial formalism, cosmopolitanism, and, in particular,

134 elaine kelly

depraved American cultural imports. Otto Grotewohl characteristically advised GDR citizens of the need to struggle against the spread from the West of a “cultural barbarity” replete with “gangster and slayer movies [Mörderfilmen] with unscrupulous sensations, with mysticism, [the] cult of death, and all types of perverse eroticism.”15 The credibility of this rhetoric was dependent on the construct of a socialist cultural canon that embodied the Enlightenment ideals promoted by the regime. Goethe and Schiller, together with the triumvirate of Bach, Handel, and Beethoven, were quickly harnessed to this effect, their biographies and works rapidly reinterpreted to reveal latent socialist tendencies. Bach, for example, was portrayed as an ultimately secular and populist composer whose religious compositions, according to the committee assembled a year prior to his 200th anniversary, were written “simply on account of his job”;16 whereas Handel, as Pamela Potter demonstrates, was championed as a hero of the working classes, a fighter in the struggle against the slave trade, colonialism, and, apparently, the suppression of the Irish.17 The veneration and politicization of Enlightenment culture, one that was mirrored to an extent in the West, has been the subject of much recent attention.18 Yet perhaps of greater interest is the reception history of figures that presented more complex ideological challenges. Richard Wagner, in particular, was a thorn in the side of the SED for much of the early period of the GDR. Unarguably central to the German myth of Kultur, his dubious appropriation by the Nazis did nothing to quash his popularity with the public.19 Following the successful reopening of Bayreuth in 1951 under the direction of the composer’s grandson Wieland Wagner, the GDR was forced to respond. The resulting portrayal of the composer in the 1950s and early 1960s is a fascinating one, illuminating the impact of the West on the process of identity formation in the GDR and the complexities inherent in reconciling an essentially bourgeois canon with Marxism.20 WAGNER IN BAYREUTH

The problem of Wagner was by no means exclusive to the East. In light of Bayreuth’s status as a cultural showcase of the Nazi regime, and Hitler’s close personal relationship with Winifred Wagner, the American occupying forces (under whose jurisdiction the theater fell in the immediate postwar period) had serious misgivings about its reopening and were unsurprisingly reluctant to restore it to its original function.21 The difficulty with the festival lay not only in its wartime history; Bayreuth was the ultimate manifestation of Germanic cultural chauvinism, an expression of the German claims to artistic hegemony that the Americans were so keen to dispel. Wieland Wagner, however, was quick to lay this incarnation of Bayreuth aside. Publicly distancing



imagining richard wagner 135

himself from events of the recent past and from the nationalistic aesthetics that had become entrenched in German productions, his reading of Wagner stripped the repertoire bare to reveal eternal universal myths.22 Gone were the naturalistic set designs and the traditional fanfare of horses, breastplates, rainbow bridges, castles, and dragons; in their place was an empty stage broken only by symbolic sculptures and experimental lighting techniques. Wieland Wagner eschewed the romantic realism traditionally associated with Wagner and instead explored the implications of the composer’s interest in Greek tragedy. His productions experimented with stylized acting, his choruses and actors often communicating directly with the audience rather than with each other. As a number of commentators have pointed out, Wieland Wagner’s vision of a postwar Wagner was something of an illusion; Bayreuth in the Third Reich was by no means the bastion of artistic conservatism that it was later assumed to be, and Wieland himself had launched his experimental pared-down Wagner in Altenburg during the war.23 Yet the rancor that “Neu”Bayreuth incurred among hard-core supporters of German nationalism, and its clear commitment to internationalism, served to offset any concerns.24 Wieland’s construction of Neu-Bayreuth as something of a zero hour in Wagner reception, and his transformation of the composer into a symbol of the nascent West, embracing the aesthetics and ideals of a new Europe, was excellent propaganda for the Western powers. Wagner’s ideological place in the canon of the GDR raised some difficult questions. His early revolutionary years were certainly conducive to a socialist reading, and in the past he had enjoyed the support of left-wing enthusiasts ranging from George Bernard Shaw to Anatolii Lunacharskii.25 The course of Wagner’s life after 1848, however, was far more problematic. His increasingly bourgeois lifestyle and his embrace of Schopenhauerian philosophy, in particular the advocacy of redemption through death, could not easily be reconciled with aspects of Marxist-Leninist doctrine. Yet the East Germans were understandably reluctant to blacklist a composer with such widespread public appeal. As Stephan Stompor observed in a review of the 1954 Dessau production of Der Ring des Nibelungen, “[the performance] proves that we are not willing to relinquish even the smallest part of our humanistic cultural legacy, not even the extremely contradictory and hotly debated Ring.”26 Central to the SED’s antifascist narrative of reactionary and progressive strands of culture in the early 1950s was Georg Lukács’s polarization of rationalism and irrationalism as the intellectual constituents of socialism and capitalist fascism respectively.27 Locating the origins of socialism clearly in the rationalism of the Enlightenment, Lukács traced an antithetical line from the irrationalism of the romantic school through Schopenhauer, the late romantics, and Nietzsche

136 elaine kelly

to fascism, a hypothesis that was validated for many left-wing intellectuals by the role allocated to figures such as Wagner in Nazi Germany. This had a significant impact on the reception of romantic literature, and during the first two decades of the state’s existence, romanticism was essentially a taboo topic. Novalis, Schlegel, and Tieck were confined to the backwaters of history until the 1970s,28 and so-called late romantics such as Nietzsche remained out in the cold well into the 1980s.29 Yet Lukács’s narrative of the past by no means precluded Wagner from the socialist canon. The importance he placed on nineteenth-century realists such as Balzac in his construction of the socialist canon allowed for a broad reading of the classical humanistic tradition 30 and created a bridge between bourgeois and Marxist art that was particularly useful for the popular-front politics prevalent in the early fragile days of the GDR.31 Despite his tarnished reputation, Wagner’s cultural currency was such that the pragmatic East-German government was not prepared to surrender him to the West—and certainly not to Bayreuth, which was firmly reestablishing itself as the composer’s geographic, historical, and spiritual home. DESSAU: “BAYREUTH OF THE NORTH”

In 1953, the GDR responded to the challenge posed by Bayreuth with an Eastern alternative in the guise of the Richard-Wagner-Festwoche in Dessau. The theater in Dessau, which was bombed during the war and reopened under the directorship of Willi Bodenstein in 1949, had already established itself as a center for Wagner performance: Bodenstein staged Tannhäuser and Der fliegende Holländer in 1950 and Die Meistersinger and Lohengrin in 1951 and 1952, respectively.32 The inaugural government-sponsored festival in 1953, which launched the theater’s first production of the Ring,33 deepened this commitment to the composer, earning the festival the sobriquet “Bayreuth of the North.”34 Indeed, given that the theater in Dessau was a repertory one, and the festival, unlike the one in Bayreuth, had to fit around and draw resources from the standard season program, the focus on Wagner was striking. By 1958, Bodenstein had already staged two full runs of Wagner’s operas from the Der fliegende Holländer through Götterdämmerung and one production each of Rienzi and Parsifal.35 The 1958 Festwoche itself included 3 more works than the Bayreuth festival that year, offering 12 performances of 10 different works in the space of two weeks.36 As the undisputed epicenter of Wagner reception in the GDR in the mid1950s, the Festwoche provided cultural leaders with a much-needed forum to mold a Wagner for the East.37 From the outset, Dessau aimed to rival Bayreuth not just in terms of the sheer number of performances but also in terms of its mission. At its most fundamental level, the Festwoche offered a people’s alternative to Bayreuth. Early criticisms of Bayreuth in the GDR press focused



imagining richard wagner 137

heavily on its exclusive, capitalistic climate. Ernst Krause, for example, reporting on the 1951 festival in Musik und Gesellschaft, described scathingly a musically ignorant audience being ferried to Bayreuth in “eight-seater, doublechauffeured Cadillacs.” Acknowledging that “the people who can afford the steep admission charge of 30 to 50 Westmark are surely not all snobs,” Krause lamented that still “they are not the true Wagner friends and equally not the people [Volk] that the master wanted to introduce to art.” He concluded that “the great common cause of the Bayreuth festival requires different friends.”38 Dessau, in contrast, prided itself on its accessibility. Upon assuming the role of the theater’s directorship, Bodenstein laid out his intentions to transform it “from a court theater to a people’s theater.”39 Accordingly, the Richard-WagnerFestwoche aimed to offer accessible productions to “a new public, the workers and peasants and members of the productive intelligentsia of our republic.”40 Bodenstein’s construction of Dessau as the socialist antithesis to a capitalist Bayreuth was symptomatic of a wider current underlying early attempts to shape Wagner reception in the GDR. Mirroring the East-West polarity of Dessau and Bayreuth, many commentators adopted a dual-level approach to Wagner, one that mapped the contradictions of his philosophical outlook and reception history across the ideological and geographic paradigms of East and West. That Wagner’s revolutionary years could be traced to locations in the GDR and his later reactionary stance to West Germany provided a useful basis for this strategy. Joachim Weinert declared in Musik und Gesellschaft in 1953, “Bayreuth is the historical location of the late Wagner, who struck up with a compromised world, which is not our world anymore. The places of activity of the young revolutionary Wagner are situated with us.”41 This narrative formed the basis for an image of Wagner with implications far beyond the confines of the opera house. Wagner emerged as a Janus head, a metaphor for the divided German nation beset by opposing reactionary and progressive forces: capitalism and socialism, fascism and antifascism. DE-NA ZIFICATION, ANTIFASCISM, AND NATIONALISM

These polarities came strongly into play in discussions of Neu-Bayreuth, which was painted as the epicenter of the reactionary Wagner tradition and by implication a manifestation of the imperialist-capitalist Western spirit. This construction of Bayreuth was particularly important in light of the disparate production styles of East and West. Notably, the “progressive” Wagner championed by Bodenstein and his colleagues remained heavily entrenched in the naturalistic realism of prewar Germany. Eckert, for example, describes the extreme conservatism of the Dessau Ring production of 1954, epitomized by “naturalistic atmospheric stage designs.”42 This adherence to tradition reflects

138 elaine kelly

not only Bodenstein’s innate conservatism but also, on a deeper level, wider ideological concerns. In the program for the 1954 Wagner Festwoche, Bodenstein admitted the need to free Wagner from the “misinterpretations and falsifications of fascism.”43 This involved, however, neither modernizing him nor stripping him of generations of tradition; on the contrary, one was simply obliged to “respect the will of the Master!” (Den Willen und das Wollen des Meisters achten!).44 Neu-Bayreuth’s zero-hour revival of Wagner, essentially a de-Nazification of the composer, did not sit comfortably with antifascist doctrine. Composers belonging to the progressive socialist canon were outside the trajectory of fascism and thus needed simply to be rescued in the wake of the war, not rehabilitated or cleansed.45 Anything resembling a de-Nazification of Wagner cast doubt on his right to a place in this canon. Thus Wieland Wagner’s approach was perceived at best as a failure to understand Wagner in his true context, at worst a continuation of Nazi practices of falsifying and misappropriating art. Particularly pointed in this respect was Werner Wolf’s discussion in Musik und Gesellschaft of the Bayreuth Festival of 1957, aptly titled “A Cleaning Out or a Violation?”: One does not need to “de-Nazify,” but only to perform faithfully; then particularly works such as Die Meistersinger and Der Ring der [sic] Nibelungen prove their still-undiminished power. When it is said, however, in 1957 in West Germany that Wagner would today represent the “European spirit” (naturally according to the Bonn model), this has the same meaning as the grossdeutsch thesis from the year 1939 that Wagner [if he had been alive] at that time would have become a National Socialist.46

Wolf’s alignment of Nazi Germany with the postwar West and his references to the “European spirit” and Bonn resonate with the broader trend of GDR propaganda during this period, in which World War II was depicted as a forerunner to the Cold War and both were reduced to a communist struggle against an imperialist fascist West hell-bent on destroying the German national spirit. Jeffrey Herf describes a speech given by Walter Ulbricht at a KPD party conference in 1949 that characteristically downplayed the role of the Western allies in the defeat of Hitler, portraying them instead as self-serving fascists: “The American and British war aim had not been the democratization and demilitarization of Germany but ‘the destruction of Germany as an independent state.’”47 In terms of the musical canon, this line of reasoning translated into vivid portrayals of the West demolishing the German people by using their own musical heritage as a weapon against them. Johanna Rudolph, for example, reporting on the Bach conference of 1950, scathingly described American attempts to jazzify Bach, claiming that such efforts were



imagining richard wagner 139

specifically intended to “disparage and humiliate the German people.”48 The political misappropriation of the canon by the U.S.–Adenauer regime was a favorite topic of the SED. The party’s “National Declaration for Bach” of 1950 warned that “reactionary powers try also to make use of the memory of the great German composer for their divisive, anti-national purposes.”49 Similarly, the official manifesto to celebrate the 125th anniversary of Beethoven’s death in 1952 claimed that “the American cultural barbarians and their lackeys violate the memory of Beethoven in that they misuse Bonn, the city of his birth, for the most pernicious national degradation.”50 Wieland Wagner’s political independence precluded him from such barbed accusations, but the abstract symbolism of his productions left him open to standard GDR criticisms of cosmopolitanism, a euphemism for antinationalism, among other things. Werner Wolf picked up on this theme elsewhere, writing in Musik und Gesellschaft in 1961, “The Bayreuth performances are not only at complete variance with the text and the music, [but they] also deface the works of Wagner anew, as evinced by the catholic and cosmopolitan perversity of [Die] Meistersinger, the similarly cosmopolitan, noncommittal Ring, [and] the Parsifal wrapped in mystical gloom.”51 The internationalism of Bayreuth was anathema to the GDR Wagner effort, which, like other celebrations of national culture, played a vital role in the SED’s attempts to convince the intelligentsia of the legitimacy of the GDR as an intrinsically German state rather than as a satellite of the Soviet Union.52 Thus much was made in the GDR of Wagner’s Germanness. Bodenstein, for example, hailed him as “a great German musician, a patriot and a humanist.”53 Any parallels to the nationalistic hubris associated with Wagner in the Third Reich raised little official concern; on the contrary, a commitment to a very German construction of Wagner served to underline the SED’s devotion to rebuilding the national spirit in the face of Western opposition and to achieve German reunification. Explaining the function of the Dessau festival in the 1954 program, Culture Minister Johannes R. Becher declared, “nothing lies closer to the hearts of our creative artists than championing the unity of German culture and contributing in this way to the preservation of peace and the reunification of our fatherland. I am positive that this sentiment will come alive in all participants during the second Richard Wagner Festwoche in Dessau.”54 Central to this image of Wagner as a figure to unite the German nation was Die Meistersinger, acclaimed in the GDR not only as a symbol of German nationalism but also as a proclamation for the SED’s vision of the German path to socialism. Politically, Die Meistersinger was arguably the most problematic of Wagner’s operas following its enthusiastic appropriation by the Nazis.55

140 elaine kelly

In contrast to other works that had played a prominent role in Nazi Germany, notably Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, its specifically Germanic content rendered it particularly awkward. Wieland Wagner notably waited until 1956 to introduce his interpretation to Bayreuth, and then produced a version devoid of the traditional nationalistic associations, a “Mastersingers without Nuremberg” as it was disparaged by right-wing critics.56 The SED were not troubled, however, by such concerns. New productions of the opera marked the opening of the Berlin Staatsoper at the newly renovated Unter den Linden opera house in 1955 and the Leipzig opera house in 1960,57 firmly cementing its role in the socialist canon. Regarding the 1955 production, Ernst Krause, reporting in Musik und Gesellschaft, declared, “The choice of a festive as well as popular opera by Richard Wagner proved to be a happy one. Die Meistersinger, which arose in the years of the struggle for the unification of Germany, can be interpreted, particularly now, in terms of an appeal to the nation.”58 Die Meistersinger lent itself well to party doctrine, being by far the most ideologically sound of Wagner’s operas. The Schopenhauerian pessimism that pervades his other mature operas is not overt; and there is a marked absence of gods, mysticism, and similar other-worldly elements that were anathema to the aesthetics of socialist realism. The opera draws not on myth but on German history and has at its center the German proletariat—tradesmen and their apprentices. From a musical perspective, the hard-core chromaticism of Tristan is replaced by a diatonic language that was more acceptable to the cultural aesthetics of the party. Particularly appealing was the focus in the opera on the superiority of Germanic music, which, most importantly, is portrayed not as an art of kings and noblemen but as an art of the people. For Marxist musicologists, the opera was an early example of socialist realist art and consequently represented the highpoint of Wagner’s achievements. Georg Knepler observed that it is not “a coincidence that Die Meistersinger, which contains the fewest ideological inconsistencies, is the most unified and uniform of Wagner’s works, one of the greatest masterpieces of the nineteenth century.”59 Far more problematic were those operas associated with the Western manifestation of Wagner: Tristan, Parsifal, and to a lesser extent the Ring, whose place in the GDR canon was suspect and depended very much on the conservative aesthetics of the state’s opera houses.60 The absence of innovation in areas of direction or set design allowed supporters of the composer and party opportunists to avoid dwelling on the pessimism and mysticism inherent in these works and to direct attention instead to the music. Hans Mayer, in his 1953 essay on Wagner in Sinn und Form, promoted Wagner on the grounds that the strength of his music superseded the more dubious aspects of his character, observing that “once the music starts, all recollections



imagining richard wagner 141

of the all-too-human Wagner disappear.”61 Similarly, the party hardliner Walther Siegmund-Schultze argued the case that in Wagner’s operas, it was the music rather than the dramatic content that had value for a socialist society: “In Wagner’s music dramas the music is the most important part. It gives the often dubious texts a realistic message, social impact, and positive ambition. It is wrong to want to interpret too much philosophy from or to insert [too much] into Wagner’s works.”62 Insights on the nonmusical aspects of productions tended to seek out the positive. Eckert, for instance, describes the upbeat consensus in the GDR press that Bodenstein’s 1954 Ring was one in which “the optimistic Siegfried tragedy triumphs over the pessimistic Wotan tragedy.”63 Gerard Dippel, writing about the same production, noted that it is “delightful that with this interpretation of the tetralogy, they have completely abstained from those abstract stage-direction experiments with which they try nowadays in Bayreuth to rejuvenate the Wagnerian music drama.”64 THE INFILTR ATION OF BAYREUTH AND MAR XIST RE ADINGS OF WAGNER

Serious fault lines began to appear in the GDR’s Wagner narrative in the second half of the 1950s as stage productions advanced. Problematically, many of the new ideas introduced came straight off the stage in Bayreuth. The set designer Wolf Hochheim, engaged in 1956 to reenergize the festival in Dessau, made no attempts to disguise his enthusiasm for Wieland Wagner.65 Nor did those at the helm of the 1956 Berlin Staatsoper’s Ring production, the director Erich Witte and the stage designer Heinz Pfeiffenberger. Indeed, Witte, who was also a tenor of international standing, had firsthand experience of the Neu-Bayreuth style, having sung the role of Loge under Wieland Wagner in the 1952 and 1953 Bayreuth Ring productions.66 Commenting on this trend in Theater der Zeit, Dieter Kranz admonished that “Wagner interpretation in the German Democratic Republic needs to transcend the style of the new Bayreuth festival,” which, he maintained, failed to grasp the sociopolitical relevance of Wagner’s dramas. The problem in the GDR, as he saw it, was that instead of making a genuine effort to develop “a scientifically based conception” for works such as Lohengrin, the Ring, and Tristan, directors were turning to “stylized scenery” in an attempt to “conform to the so-called ‘modern artistic sensibility.’”67 This turn of events served not only to blur the crucial distinction between Eastern and Western readings of Wagner; the introduction of Bayreuth-style techniques exposed the ideological inconsistencies in the operas themselves. Wieland Wagner’s practice of reducing the works to their fundamental essence brought to the fore those mystical and Schopenhauerian qualities that were irreconcilable with the aesthetics of socialist realism. As a

142 elaine kelly

detractor of the composer noted in Theater der Zeit, “Wagner depicts for us no genuine people, instead only mythologies on two legs (Neu-Bayreuth lets the cat out of the bag there).”68 The ramifications of the GDR’s increasingly westernized Wagner productions were compounded by the changing political climate. As the foundations of the state became more secure and the possibility of German reunification receded, the role of Wagner came under scrutiny. This manifested itself particularly in the growing ambivalence toward the Richard-Wagner-Festwoche, the propagandistic merits of which were increasingly unclear.69 Kranz, in his above-mentioned article, a review of the Festwoche’s 1958 Ring production, urged that Bodenstein be dissuaded from his “foolish ambitions to turn the theater into a type of ‘Super Bayreuth’ for the GDR.”70 Far more appropriate, he advised, would be a shorter festival in which the focus was on the works conceived in Wagner’s realist period. This call for a more critical reception of Wagner was by no means an isolated one. Heinz Bär’s “Wahllose Wagnerei,” published in the same issue of Theater der Zeit,71 and a vitriolic review by Erika Wilde of Witte’s new Lohengrin production at the Staatsoper, published in the following issue,72 expounded in far greater depth on the topic, controversially demanding that Wagner’s more dubious operas be eliminated altogether from the socialist canon. Bär and Wilde sparked a heated debate in Theater der Zeit that spanned more than six months. Carefully orchestrated, the debate was a very public attempt to reassess Wagner’s role in the GDR.73 The editorial in the October issue tellingly announced, “Richard Wagner? Nothing is clear, we stand just at the beginning of a new contemporary evaluation!”74 The timing of the debate was crucial, coming in the aftermath of Khrushchev’s condemnation of Stalin in his Secret Speech of February 1956 and the Hungarian revolution later that year. The revolution put an end to the open intellectual culture that de-Stalinization initially promised.75 Yet, with Lukács now vilified as a revisionist following his role in the Imre Nagy government and his most prominent supporters sidelined, a rare opportunity emerged to redefine the role and construction of the socialist canon.76 The Theater der Zeit exchange provided a platform for this discussion and reflected the changing orientation of accepted readings of Marxist-Leninist thought in the GDR. Lukács’s essentially liberal interpretation of the humanistic canon had long perturbed the GDR’s more utopian Communists. Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Bloch had both questioned his narrative of the past in the 1930s. Bloch, who was skeptical of Lukács’s division of the past into clear-cut progressive and reactionary strands, asked, “is there no dialectical relationship between decline and ascent? Does even the confused, immature, and incomprehensible



imagining richard wagner 143

material automatically belong, in all cases, to bourgeois decadence? Can it not also—contrary to this simplistic, surely not revolutionary opinion—belong to the transition from the old world into the new?”77 Brecht questioned the validity of appropriating a bourgeois canon for the working classes and took issue with Lukács’s preference for the old over the new, remarking, “There is no way back. It’s a matter not of the good old but the bad new.”78 Later, as Lukács’s aesthetics took hold in the GDR, the associated Soviet practice of elevating “positive” historical figures found a harsh critic in Hanns Eisler, who expressed concerns about the propagandistic use made of the cultural heritage by the SED. On reading the SED’s declaration in 1952 to celebrate Beethoven’s 125th anniversary, he complained that the “Marxist method must . . . not carve, as it were, historical stages or historical personalities according to the daily requirement, but that it [must] interpret them in all their complexities and contradictions, as ‘uncomfortable’ as that may be.”79 Such concerns had no place on the political agenda of the early 1950s, and Eisler notably came to blows with the SED in 1953 over the “false” concept of history espoused in his libretto Johannes Faustus, which explored the deutsche Misere reading of the past favored by Brecht and Abusch.80 That the SED was not comfortable with alternative narratives of German history at this stage owed much to the drive for national unity and the need to win over the bourgeois intelligentsia. Its reluctance to consider wider discourses on the relationship between communism and historical tradition also reflected the fact that the majority of those who questioned the SED’s Lukács-based narrative of the past had spent the war years in exile in the United States or Mexico. The inner circle of the SED, which consisted predominantly of Moscow exiles, viewed those returning from the West to the GDR with considerable suspicion. Any deviation from the party line was held as evidence of Western contamination, and returning émigrés were frequently subjected to accusations of cosmopolitanism.81 Notable here is the acrimony that surrounded Brecht and Paul Dessau’s Die Verurteilung des Lukullus of 1951.82 With the change of the guard in cultural politics after the mid-1950s, however, there was a marked shift in attitude, and the concerns of figures such as Brecht, Eisler, and Dessau regarding the social functions of the cultural heritage began to infiltrate and impact on public debates. In this context, the Wagner altercation in Theater der Zeit had implications far beyond its immediate subject. As Heinz Bär observed, the discussion was “not a matter of a fencing or boxing match between Wagnerians and anti-Wagnerians,” but centered on the much more fundamental issue of the basic makeup of the socialist canon.83 In this context Bär raised some particularly thorny issues, deconstructing the Janus-head image of Wagner and casting doubt on his right to a place

144 elaine kelly

in the canon. Critical of the blinkered zealousness with which the progressive elements of Wagner’s biography were trumpeted, Bär called for an examination of those biographical aspects that “make Wagner’s appraisal uncomfortable in our time.” He dismissed the notion that one could sidestep Wagner’s ideological issues by focusing exclusively on the music; on the contrary, he countered, the music, particularly in the case of the later operas, could not be separated from Wagner’s “world outlook.” The Ring, he explained, cannot be recommended by socialists as “a drama of avarice, a capitalistic destruction of virtue. In truth, in the Ring the world plainly perishes.” Consequently, he maintained, the opera was not reconcilable with dialectical materialism. Bär similarly dispensed with Parsifal, Tristan, and Lohengrin, noting in the case of the latter that Lohengrin’s “never shall you ask me” call, his demand for unquestioning faithfulness from Elsa, “is the exact opposite of a dialectical investigation of the world.” Most provocatively, Bär raised the unspeakable specter of fascism, claiming that the destructive qualities of Wagner’s operas, “the mystical distortion of reality” and so on, were conducive to misappropriation, and it was no coincidence that Wagner had been Hitler’s favorite composer.84 Bär and Wilde’s call to remove Wagner’s less salubrious operas from the canon unsurprisingly provoked outrage among staunch Wagnerians. Wilde’s conclusion that Lohengrin had no relevance for the people of the GDR met with much derision from Ernst Krause, who dismissed her arguments as “ideological hammering” and invoked the queues of “working-class opera lovers, many students and youths” at the premiere of Witte’s production as evidence of the opera’s ever-present power.85 This point was brought more forcefully to bear by Eduard Plate, professor at the Dresden Akademie für Musik und Theater, who praised the “healthy instincts” of the GDR’s opera-loving youths and observed, “the tickets for the three performances [of Lohengrin] in Berlin were sold out within two hours. And the auditorium of the Berlin Staatsoper, as is generally known, is very big! Those who are ‘finished’ with Richard Wagner, such as Beckmesser, Eduard Hanslick, Erika Wilde, and Walther Victor, can avoid him.”86 Such arguments had little impact on Wagner’s detractors. To reports of the popularity of Lohengrin, Erika Wilde retorted, “as if the value of a work could be read from the ticket sales!”87 Arguments in support of Wagner’s artistic merits met with a similar response: Paul Dessau declared that it was not Wagner’s genius that was at issue; at issue was whether his genius had relevance for the GDR in political terms. Dessau concluded that it did not.88 The arguments of the anti-Wagner deliberation hinged on the role that the canon should play in a socialist society. Bär criticized its relegation to that of a “museum,” serving only to house old works indiscriminately with no regard to their ideological value.89 Dessau followed this line of thought



imagining richard wagner 145

and stressed that the socialist heritage should be an educatory one. It should inspire “rational reflection.”90 As far he was concerned, Wagner’s more problematic operas were incapable of achieving the latter, for as he explained, “the work of Wagner is filled with poisonous intoxication.”91 The reference to intoxication music or Rauschmusik was a loaded one. Used widely in the GDR to describe the excesses associated with the reactionary Western tradition, it placed Wagner firmly in the realm of the imperialist fascists. The danger that his Rauschmusik posed for the GDR’s opera-going youth was brought to bear in two letters purported by the editors of Theater der Zeit to have been sent by “semi-anonymous” fascists, a G. Psylander and a Prof. Dr. A. Gerold.92 The first of these correspondents, who responded to Erika Wilde’s assault on Lohengrin by questioning her Germanness, caused particular concern for Heinz Bär.93 Bär revealed that Psylander had penned a second, unpublished letter to the journal in which he revealed himself not as a stalwart of the old guard but worryingly as a “young opera friend and Wagner fan . . . who communicates the opinion of the wider circle of the Dresden theatergoers.”94 The excerpts published by Bär exposed Psylander more as a critic of the SED than as a fascist.95 No matter, he was steadfastly held aloft as evidence of the damage the uncritical reception of Wagner had already inflicted on the 20-something generation. The operetta composer Herbert Kawan echoed Bär’s fears. Thanking Theater der Zeit for alerting the public to such dangers, he noted that Wagner’s name still had fervid “brown” (i.e., Nazi) associations for such people.96 Kawan concluded, “must we really let our youth first become intoxicated at the theater and then be reeducated through life? Would it not be easier the other way around?”97 The acknowledgment that Nazi sentiments were still prevalent in the GDR represented an aberration from the official antifascist rhetoric of the early 1950s, which off-loaded the responsibility for and repercussions of German actions in the Third Reich onto the West. The contentious issues surrounding Wagner and anti-Semitism were given a decidedly wide berth in the early years of the GDR, a situation undoubtedly influenced by the fact that the Jewish question had no role to play in antifascist rhetoric.98 In fact, the sidelining of Communists who had spent the war years in the West had decidedly anti-Semitic undertones; as Jeffrey Herf convincingly demonstrates, Jews and the cosmopolitan West were frequently considered to be synonymous.99 This is a mindset that is apparent in early readings of Die Meistersinger. Within the opera, the foreign threat is manifest in the shape of Sixtus Beckmesser, who in the GDR was held as a masterful depiction of the Western Other, a deceitful cultural barbarian obsessed with formalistic rules and incapable of understanding German music. According to Stephan Stompor, writing in Musik

146 elaine kelly

und Gesellschaft in 1953, “Wagner embodies in him a malicious philistine who monitors compliance with formal and long-obsolete singing rules with painstaking exactness and wants in addition, through the power of his position of Marker, to get a troublesome rival off his back. Typical petty-bourgeoisie characteristics, such as narrow-minded conservatism and [the] misuse of an official position, are exhibited in the shape of Beckmesser.”100 Historically, the character of Beckmesser has been steeped in controversy. Theodor Adorno famously claimed with regard to Mime, Alberich, and Beckmesser that “all the rejects of Wagner’s works are caricatures of Jews.”101 More recent studies by Barry Millington and David Levin make a convincing case that Beckmesser is strongly connected to nineteenth-century anti-Semitic stereotypes.102 What is interesting here is that those characteristics of Beckmesser, which according to Millington can be traced back directly to Wagner’s characterization of the Jew in Judaism in Music—his small-mindedness, dishonesty, complete lack of musicality, and consequent inability to comprehend true German music in the shape of Walther’s song—mirror those attributed by Stompor to Beckmesser’s bourgeois status.103 Millington describes the shrieking and bizarre coloratura effects of Beckmesser’s “Serenade” as a parody of the Jewish cantorial style and explains the unusually high tessitura of the part as yet another caricature of Jewish stereotypes.104 Stompor similarly highlights these effects, noting in particular the exposed high tessitura, “through which Beckmesser’s speeches appear particularly disagreeable and peevish.” For him, however, these negative features serve to ensure “a pointed emphasis on social conflicts, in particular the struggle between progressive and reactionary forces.”105 The retreat from the open anti-Semitism of the early 1950s,106 and the acceptance of Jewish composers such as Eisler and Dessau into the upper echelons of the GDR’s cultural brigade, called for an acknowledgment of the more difficult aspects of Wagner’s legacy,107 particularly given the repeated emphasis in the Theater der Zeit debate on the dangers of the extreme elements of the “Wagner cult.”108 Conspicuous in this context is the inclusion by Theater der Zeit of the blatantly anti-Semitic comments of the second “fascist” correspondent, Prof. Dr. A. Gerold, who dismisses Wilde’s judgment on Lohengrin as typifying a “specific renowned Jewish style.”109 Thus, when the Theater der Zeit debate came to a close in the January issue of 1959, the upper hand appeared to be with Wagner’s opponents. Their pinpointing of his reactionary tendencies as a problem directly affecting the GDR rather than one confined to the West rendered him politically unpalatable. Although Wagner continued to be performed,110 there was a noticeable hiatus on new productions of



imagining richard wagner 147

his works in the Berlin Staatsoper,111 and the festival at Dessau gradually came to a standstill.112 Even though this reading of Wagner had certain long-term implications for his reception, the GDR was by no means “finished” with him. Eisler notably remarked with chagrin in 1961, “with displeasure I hear that opera houses playing only Wagner are also sold out.”113 Wagner’s appeal with the public was still significant; and consequently in the early 1960s, with the impending anniversary of his 150th birthday, the government determined to reassess his position once again. The reluctance of the government to relinquish the canon to ideological principles was not evident only in the case of Wagner. Typical was the response to Richard Petzoldt’s article published in the pedagogical journal, Musik in der Schule, on the occasion of Mendelssohn’s 150th birthday in 1959.114 Petzoldt ascribed the failure of attempts to rejuvenate Mendelssohn’s reputation fully in the wake of World War II to the fact that he was essentially a bourgeois composer whose relevance in a socialist society was questionable. The SED member Ernst Hermann Meyer condemned the article as “dangerous.”115 Hanns Eisler, speaking on behalf of the Akademie der Künste, described it as a “crass aberration of science and taste.”116 Deputy Culture Minister Hans Pischner launched a direct attack on it in his speech at the opening of Mendelssohn’s birthday celebrations, denouncing the article as vulgar socialism, a common response to unwanted ideological challenges.117 Such charges had been leveled at Bär in the Theater der Zeit debate; René Svanda, for instance, dismissed his reasoning with the observation that “it is more dangerous and amiss to be pseudo-dialectical than undialectical.”118 The second assessment of Wagner, which took place in a very different post-Wall environment, notably involved a move away from dialectical thought, pseudo or otherwise, and a return to the more amenable image of him as a Janus head. WAGNER’S 150TH BIRTHDAY

The initial plans drawn up for Wagner’s 150th birthday by the section head of the Music Department in the Ministry for Culture, Hans-Georg Uszkoreit, envisaged grand-scale celebrations, including the publication of a complete edition of Wagner’s letters, an autograph facsimile of the Wesendonck letters, and a collection of essays.119 Keen once again to introduce Wagner to a wider audience, the ministry proposed selling records of his music at cut price and the publication of suitable articles in the newspapers.120 Notably, the East-West polarities also returned to dominate discussions as the GDR resumed its role as keeper of Wagner’s heritage. A statement by Culture Minister Hans Bentzien highlighted the “leading role of the German Democratic Republic for all

148 elaine kelly

of Germany,” explaining that “while in the German Democratic Republic, a genuinely creative, absorbing appropriation of Wagner’s work is taking place, this is suspended in West Germany as a result of the most varying clusters of interpretations ranging from reactionary mysticism to formalism.”121 In 1961, the Ministry for Culture charged the Central Institute for Musicological Research, a subsidiary of the VDK or Association of German Composers and Musicologists, with the establishment of a Wagner committee to formulate a suitable reading of the composer in preparation for his birthday.122 The committee covered the spectrum of Wagner views within the GDR, including among its members Hanns Eisler; Georg Knepler; Ernst Hermann Meyer; the opera director Joachim Herz; the music critic and ardent Wagner enthusiast Werner Wolf; Harry Goldschmidt, head of the Central Institute for Musicological Research; Nathan Notowicz, leader of the VDK; Deputy Culture Minister Hans Pischner; and Hans-Georg Uszkoreit.123 Goldschmidt convened the committee.124 Knepler, the GDR’s preeminent nineteenth-century musicologist, was charged with the task of channeling the deliberations of the committee into a celebratory article that would form the bedrock of the 1963 festivities.125 Uszkoreit served as the mediator between the committee and the Ministry for Culture, using the findings of the committee as a basis on which to draft a plan of action for ministry involvement in the birthday year.126 The committee’s main task was to attempt, yet again, to reconcile Wagner with the conflicting demands of socialist ideology and national legitimation, and with this goal in mind, the committee established 12 problem areas for discussion, many of which had been highlighted during the Theater der Zeit debate: I. Wagner in his time II. Social and ideological contradictions in his work III. Wagner’s relationship to tradition 1. Philosophy 2. Spoken theater 3. Opera 4. Instrumental music IV. Individual studies 1. Wagner and Beethoven 2. Wagner and Bach 3. Wagner and music theater 4. Tristan 5. Parsifal V. Is there a coherency in Wagner’s works?





imagining richard wagner 149

VI. Bayreuth after Wagner’s death VII. Can his works be separated from the Wagner cult? VIII. Contemporary relevance—positive and negative—of his work IX. Does the argument of intoxicating art (Rauschkunst) hold against Wagner? X. Is Wagner only valued by musicians? XI. Was Wagner a precursor of Hitler or not? XII. From which standpoint should the preservation of Wagner be guided in a country that is constructing socialism?127

The issue highlighted repeatedly in committee discussions was the extent of the contradictions in Wagner’s work. Socialist realist art was supposed to reflect, and have meaning for, society. This demanded a level of ideological consistency in the message contained in the body of works. As Knepler noted elsewhere in a comparison of Tristan und Isolde and the Die Meistersinger, “Tristan teaches us that there is only one happiness: . . . obliteration in night, . . . closure in oblivion. If that were so, then Die Meistersinger would be unintelligible.”128 The main objective of the committee was not, however, to provide a rigorous ideological critique of the composer but to render an acceptable narrative that could be used for propagandistic purposes. His involvement in the 1849 uprising in Dresden and his writings on the democracy of art represented the focus of much of the coverage, providing vindication for his early operas. In a draft for a committee Festrede, Knepler noted that when Wagner wrote Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin, “an optimistic worldview within the framework of the bourgeoisie world was still possible, even though great intellectual difficulties were involved.”129 The initial 1848 draft of Der Ring des Nibelungen was hailed as a critique of capitalism. Knepler interpreted Wagner’s depiction of injustice clinging to the gods due to their acquisition of power through violence and cunning as a metaphor for the fate of the bourgeoisie, to whom “the injustice of exploitation clings.”130 Despite Lohengrin’s return to the fold, the calls in Theater der Zeit for a critical appropriation of Wagner’s works had had a lasting impact. The committee interpreted the 1848 revolution as a watershed in Wagner’s oeuvre, deeming the works that followed, with the exception of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, which was considered a happy aberration, to be ideologically problematic. The “Directions and Recommendations for the Richard-WagnerCelebrations 1963,” prepared in January 1963 by Kurt Bork, head of the government’s Department of Performing Arts, explained: “This contradictory attitude of Wagner is reflected clearly in his works. Already in the Ring, but especially in Tristan and Parsival [sic], we find mystical and world-denying traits

150 elaine kelly

that have their cause in the hopelessness of the bourgeois people of this time. Such traits are essentially alien to his music dramas of the prerevolutionary period, and they also do not appear in Die Meistersinger, dating from 1867.”131 The possibility that a genuine East-West divide existed in Wagner’s works was mooted by the committee, who observed that Wieland Wagner’s production style was most effective with Parsifal, the least ideologically sound of the operas, and least effective with Die Meistersinger.132 Yet the committee was not yet ready to relinquish any of Wagner’s works. The guidelines prepared for the Ministry for Culture by Uszkoreit emphasized that “everything of Wagner’s is performable.” He acknowledged that “Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal raise larger problems,” and suggested that to counteract these, “Parsifal in particular should be performed by one of the most capable opera houses with the best artists.”133 Similarly, it is noteworthy that the committee did not demand a whitewash of those aspects of Wagner that did not sit comfortably with socialist ideology. On the contrary, the statement put together by Knepler stressed the need to understand all aspects of Wagner’s character and art. “Hitler fascism” and later “reactionary circles” misunderstood and misappropriated Wagner precisely because they failed to comprehend the totality of his music and ideology. They focused only on the negative characteristics in what amounted to “a corruption of the oeuvre.”134 To counteract this, the committee painted Wagner as a socialist realist composer. The contradictions in his work existed because he was a man of his time who responded musically to the problems and conflicts inherent in his society.135 Knepler declared, Wagner’s work is first of all a mirror of the German intelligentsia of the previous century with its ambitious ideals and hopes but also with its deep-seated pessimism and its incapacity to grasp the developmental trends of the time. From the world of sagas and legends, from the German enchanted forest, we encounter the bourgeois person of the last century. A good part of the effect of the Wagnerian music drama is to be ascribed to the fact that it takes as its basis conflicts that are also unresolved in the bourgeois world of today.136

Yet again Wagner was held up as a mirror of the German nation. This reading, however, portrayed him not as a metaphor for the current East-West divide but as its historical precedent. Wagner represented the bourgeois German soul, a soul in which the progressive Self and the reactionary Other existed side by side, a soul that tenuously linked East and West. The findings of the committee failed to convince the SED that Wagner was on a par with Beethoven or Handel as a cultural authority for the GDR. In a letter to Bork of 15 February 1963 concerning the final version of the mandate



imagining richard wagner 151

for the jubilee celebrations, Uszkoreit noted some last-minute changes arising from an intervention by Peter Czerny from the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the SED. The party had decided to scale back the celebrations. The planned festival week would be replaced by a single ceremony and a colloquium. More important, the SED determined that the official significance of the celebrations should be reduced; a musicologist from the Wagner committee would now give the keynote speech instead of a representative from the government.137 Yet the government’s reluctance to endorse the festival openly did not diminish the discourse on Wagner, which had now come full circle in that the focus of Wagner reception returned to the stage. Among the publications issued to mark the 150th celebrations was a handbook by the Kulturbund, which offered source materials and suggestions for local-level celebrations, lectures, and discussions.138 Pertinent in the handbook are the references to performance practices in which a new polarity emerges, that of Bayreuth and Leipzig: “Bayreuth and Leipzig, deep psychological abstraction and music-theater realism, these are the two poles of contemporary Wagner productions.”139 The rise of the Leipzig opera house in the 1960s under the auspices of its director, Joachim Herz, represented a significant turning point in the GDR’s Wagner reception. Notably, Herz provided a practical expression of the Wagner committee’s emphasis on historical relevance. Central to the rise of Leipzig as a worthy opponent to Neu-Bayreuth was Herz’s belief that the problems inherent in Wagner’s work could be resolved only on the stage. In an essay of 1965 he observed, “it is the duty of scholarship to point out, explain and not conceal from us the contradictions in Wagner’s worldview. . . . It must be the duty of the stage to judge [the worldview].”140 Herz’s approach to Wagner was significant on two counts. First, his production aesthetics were steeped in the realistic traditions of Brecht and Felsenstein and as such represented a third way forward for Wagner productions that avoided both the connotations of the naturalistic style favored in Dessau and the symbolism of Bayreuth.141 Second, like Knepler, he was convinced that Wagner’s works can be understood only in terms of their sociohistorical context.142 Such an understanding, Herz maintained, laid to rest many of the fears surrounding Wagner’s operas. Presented in their true contexts, the works would not intoxicate audiences, “but would demonstrate to them how intoxicating circumstances can be brought about.”143 Significant in this regard is his production of Der fliegende Holländer, premiered in 1962 and turned into a film in 1964, which portrays the opera as a study of bourgeois constraints. The Dutchman is presented not as a mystical alternative to the mundane realities of everyday life but as a figment of

152 elaine kelly

Senta’s dream world, a world in which the restrictions of her actual life with Eric do not evaporate but are heightened.144 Lydia Goehr observes, “for Herz, a bourgeois society is populated by the living—or the already dead, embodied not only by the Dutchman and his crew . . . but also by the women whose lives are confined to spinning wheels and spinning tales.”145 Accordingly, escape comes for Senta not in the form of the Dutchman, whose ties to fate mirror her own, but in turning her back on bourgeois society altogether and walking away from both Eric and the Dutchman. Herz’s historical reading of Wagner, also manifest in his interpretation of the Ring as a metaphor for the social implications of nineteenth-century capitalism,146 offered an important way forward for Wagner reception in the GDR, assimilating many of the concerns that had been expressed in previous debates. His realistic and didactic approach rendered Wagner more palatable to those who had previously argued that the composer had no place in the socialist canon. Seiferth observes that “Herz proved that Wagner belonged to our heritage.”147 Ultimately, he marked the beginning of a new era in Wagner reception in the GDR. As the debates of the 1950s and 1960s subsided, so too did the need to read Wagner in terms of a national divide. For the new generation of opera directors, Herz, Ruth Berghaus, Götz Friedrich, and Harry Kupfer, the challenge was not to undermine or oppose the Wagner of Neu-Bayreuth but to create a Wagner who had relevance in both East and West.148

CHAPTER  8

FROM IRON CURTAIN TO SILVER SCREEN IMAGINING THE WEST IN THE KHRUSHCHEV ER A

Anne E. Gorsuch

In 1957, the Soviet newspaper Komsomol´skaia pravda railed against the Hollywood film Silk Stockings for its “cheap, vulgar” portrayal of Soviet tourists to Paris. Not only were they poorly dressed, but they were purported to know nothing even about “ordinary silk stockings.”1 Notably, Komsomol´skaia pravda did not question the idea of Soviet citizens traveling to Paris, nor that they should be dressed in a contemporary and elegant manner while there. Instead, the newspaper objected to the Hollywood portrayal of Soviet citizens as uneducated about universally accepted norms of “Western” culture. In contrast, Soviet films of the same era portrayed their citizens as contemporary in style, and Soviet cities as desirable destinations for both domestic and international seekers of cultural capital. In the 1965 movie Inostranka (A Foreign Woman), a prerevolutionary citizen of Russia living in France returns as a tourist to her native city of Odessa.2 Scenes of beautiful, sunny Odessa replete with parks, nice cars, and shops—all accompanied by a soundtrack of soft jazz—are meant to suggest to the viewer that between Odessa and Paris, there is not much difference. This chapter explores the place of Soviet film in negotiating Soviet citizens’ understandings of the “West,” and of their own identity in relationship to the West, during the Khrushchev era.3 I am especially interested in what 153

154 anne e. gorsuch

portrayals of travel and tourism in Soviet feature films suggest about the mutually constitutive relationship between imaginings of the Western Other and of the Soviet Self. In the 1950s and 1960s, Soviet citizens were newly permitted to travel to places previously unexplored or out of bounds, including Siberia and the Baltics but also Eastern Europe and the capitalist West. This was emblematic of a shift away from the ideological rigidity of late Stalinism and unalloyed fear of the Other toward the comparative (if still cautious) openness and universalist yearnings of the Thaw. “Dance and then leap into your saddles,” Victor encourages his younger brother Dimka in Vasilii Aksenov’s popular 1961 novel, A Ticket to the Stars: “Dive into the depths of the sea, climb mountains, fear nothing, all this is your world.”4 Whereas before 1955 almost all Soviet tourism was domestic,5 by the mid-1960s hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens traveled abroad each year, the vast majority to Eastern Europe.6 Fewer traveled as tourists to “capitalist” countries: travel abroad (especially to capitalist countries) required proper political understanding, a squeaky clean past, well-massaged connections with party and trade union hierarchies, and money.7 These fortunate few performed on behalf of a new, post-Stalin, Soviet socialism, singing Soviet songs in trains and on buses, meeting with foreign dignitaries and journalists, answering questions and giving lectures. They also traveled as students of European history and civilization and as consumers (within limits) of leisure and of material items.8 For most Soviet citizens, however, the West remained behind an Iron Curtain. Still, the distribution of the travel experience at home via film was part of an explosion of cultural exchange projects, including travel accounts, exhibitions, and radio broadcasts, that helped introduce a Soviet citizenry to a West now officially available for the public imagination. After years of being told little about the rest of the world except that most of it was dangerous, the comparative permeability of Soviet borders in the Khrushchev era was revelatory. In his memoir, the Russian art critic Mikhail German presents encounters with the West (through language, culture, material items, and travel) as the defining experience of the Thaw.9 Notably, many of the windows on the West that German enjoyed—learning French and English, meeting foreigners at home, traveling—were encouraged or, at the very least, permitted by the regime. In contrast to scholarship such as that of Walter Hixson, who has argued in Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War that it was American “cultural infiltration”—the Voice of America, U.S. exhibitions in Moscow—which led to the eventual collapse of communism by teaching Soviet citizens about Western alternatives,10 I take a less triumphalist approach that emphasizes the importance of Soviet agency over American cultural penetration. Soviet citizens did not need to learn about



from iron curtain to silver screen 155

jazz from illicit listening to Voice of America broadcasts or from watching foreign movies: soft jazz served as the soundtrack to popular homegrown Soviet films. As this suggests, it was not only that “Western” differences could be tolerated, but that some of these differences were made acceptably, and even officially, “Soviet.” There was a blurring of older Stalinist binaries between “us” and “them” with (as described in the 1961 party program) Soviet citizens now imagined as “absorbing and developing all the best that has been created by world culture.”11 Film is an especially valuable source for exploring the normalization of the previously excluded, both for what it foregrounds and for what we can see in “background” shots of street scenes, apartment interiors, and fashions, all of which help display and construct a new Soviet “normal.” The regime was not unambiguously enthusiastic about opening the Soviet Union to international exchanges and transnational influences. Consumption was a place of particular anxiety and ambivalence. The Khrushchev regime aimed to distinguish itself from its Stalinist predecessor through its new attention to the consumptive needs of the Soviet population, but rapid progress toward these goals depended on emulating capitalist successes. The Seven-Year Plan adopted in 1959 pledged improvements in the quantity and variety of consumer goods. The quality and variety of fabrics, shoes, children’s goods, television sets, electric irons, color tablecloths, and women’s spring coats were all to be improved.12 The 1961 party program went further, promising that the 1960s would usher in the era of communism—meaning mass political activism, international respect, and the fulfillment of dreams of abundance for all. “The mood of the people and the productivity of their labor to a large extent depend on living conditions and good service,” Khrushchev insisted at the Twenty-Second Party Congress in 1961.13 Soviet citizens were increasingly seen as individuals with needs and desires that the state needed to fulfill: for comfortable living conditions, for more rights in the workplace, for better clothing and food, for the possibility of a holiday abroad.14 If Soviet success meant “outstripping the more advanced capitalist countries in their standard of living,” beating them at their own game, so to speak, how then to distinguish between socialist consumption and capitalist consumerism?15 Khrushchev was eager, as György Péteri felicitously puts it, to “provide a workable way toward an alternative modernity,” with “distinctly socialist characteristics.”16 Khrushchev struggled to define the difference between socialist consumption and capitalist consumerism in his speech to the Twenty-Second Party Congress. “Personal ownership by the toiler of a large number of things” is “not at variance with the principles of communist construction as long as it keeps within reasonable bounds and does not become an end itself.”17 In capitalist consumerism, in contrast, “the concept ‘mine’ is

156 anne e. gorsuch

a supreme principle,” and “the prosperity of some is possible only through the expense and ruin of others.”18 Alexei Yurchak has explicated the distinction as one between the positive, enriching traits of internationalism and the negative, undermining qualities of cosmopolitanism.19 Appreciation for “aesthetic beauty, technological achievement, and the genius of the working people who created [bourgeois luxuries]” was to be encouraged.20 The enthusiasm of the black marketeer for foreign clothing and culture was, on the other hand, emblematic of cosmopolitanism. The distinction, I argue, is largely one of intention: appreciation versus enthusiasm, affinity versus intimacy. Discerning the difference was sometimes difficult. The difficulty is suggested in Khrushchev’s remembrances about his own experiences as statesman-tourist in the United States in 1959. Khrushchev praised American technological achievement (a Boeing 707 was described as “very powerful,” “beautiful”); American corn and farming techniques (“there are many, many things we could learn from our class enemies”); and American hot dogs (“I must say they were delicious. They were served with mustard of superior quality—not at all bitter, and with a nice smell”).21 Khrushchev condemned elements of capitalist culture which he found vulgar, including the can-can (“for our public, for the Soviet people, the movie Can-Can was fairly provocative. We weren’t accustomed to such things. We considered it indecent”) and the field on his farm that President Eisenhower had set aside specifically for hunting (“This was too much. I’d say he even outdid our landowners in prerevolutionary Russia”).22 Film was one way to help Soviet citizens at home distinguish good from bad by making both available for consideration. The first film I consider—the 1960 film Russkii suvenir (Russian Souvenir)—celebrates a new, more positive, and more peaceful relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States.23 In the film a group of high-flying Western tourists visiting the Soviet Union—an American millionaire and his male secretary, an Italian countess, and a British Bible scholar—are shown to be naïvely prejudiced but educable and worth befriending. In the second film under discussion—Ia shagaiu po Moskve (I Walk around Moscow)—contemporary Moscow is portrayed as a consumer haven (if not yet a paradise), as sophisticated and romantic, and as a tourist destination.24 These ideals are international, largely imported from postwar, Western consumer models. In the movie, Moi mladshii brat (My Younger Brother), the beauties of medieval European architecture help make Estonia a socialist “West” for those from the rest of the Soviet Union.25 The final two films explored in this chapter warn Soviet citizens not to take their enthusiasms for the West too far. In its cinematographic representation of touristic encounters with capitalist culture, the 1961 film Inostrantsy (Foreigners) offers guidance about what not to be, do, and think.26 So, too, in the



from iron curtain to silver screen 157

1964 film Ia Kuba/Soy Cuba (I Am Cuba), which compares decadent Batista-era tourist Cuba with its bikini-clad women, rooftop pools, and nightclubs to the revolutionary enthusiasm of Fidel’s Cuba.27 FILM AND TOURISM

One of the attractions of the moviegoing experience is being engulfed in the action on screen—a snowstorm, a dark alley, a jazz club in Paris—images that make viewers feel as if they are “living within this great breathing, palpable place.”28 The all-encompassing nature of film, which is rooted in its visual and auditory qualities, in its scale, and in the illusion of movement, helps to convince the viewer not only that what she is seeing might, someday or somewhere, be experienced, but that she is in fact experiencing it.29 Going to the movies, as this suggests, is itself a kind of tourism. Fundamental to the epistemologies of both film and tourism is the centrality of movement and the capacity to influence the imagination through sight and sound. Also fundamental to both is an ambiguous relation to the “authentic.”30 Both film and travel partake in what Ellen Strain has called “the illusion of demediation,” an illusion that “offers the false promise of communion with authenticity.”31 The Bolsheviks were alert to the transformative potential of blending illusion and reality. In Dziga Vertov’s 1926 film, Shestaia chast´ mira (A Sixth of the World), the immersive powers of film enabled Soviet armchair viewers to travel across Soviet territory in a series of (staged) expeditions aimed to help them imagine the as yet unmapped territories of the Soviet Union as Soviet space.32 Combining the (seemingly) truth-telling aspects of a visual encounter with the imaginary aspects of storytelling is not unique to Soviet cinema, of course. More particular to the Soviet Union was the effort to make people believe that the fantastical was “authentic,” or would be someday. In the 1954 movie Zapasnoi igrok (The Reserve), the images of luxury tourism aboard a Soviet cruise ship are impossibly utopian.33 A beautiful restaurant on board is decorated with Greek-style columns, there are flowers on the tables, and the helpful waiters wear clean white jackets. Denying the economic realities and severe shortages of the early 1950s, the film shows female Soviet tourists lounging on a Black Sea beach in well-fitting swimsuits and fashionable hats (unlikely at a time when many Soviet citizens still wore their underwear for a dip in the sea!). Tourism and film can both be fantasy breakers as well as makers. The films of the Thaw were aimed in part at challenging the fantasy world of socialist realism, even as they arguably sought to build new fantasies. As part of the post-Stalin turn, cultural producers in the Khrushchev era argued against the “varnished and prettified” image of reality shown in socialist realist films.34

158 anne e. gorsuch

Admittedly, this was far from a straightforward process; there were many continuities with the past.35 Commentators observed that newer Soviet films still did not always rise above the stereotypical, even if these stereotypes were sometimes new ones. An article in Izvestiia derided the “commonplaces” of the 1960 Soviet film Roman i Francheska (Roman and Francesca), even though these commonplaces were now about Italy: “The screen takes the viewer to Italy, where the action of Roman and Francesca takes place. The streets of a large city, the priest in black cassock and wide-brimmed hat, the nun in the clothes of her order, the crowd of ‘common people’ listening to a street singer—are these not the same old images that arise in everyone’s mind, the same ‘tested’ color that we have already met in travel diaries?”36 After Khrushchev’s 1956 Secret Speech at the Twentieth Party Congress denouncing the cult of Stalin, however, Soviet cinema increasingly experienced more autonomy in subject matter and form; films offered various and sometimes contradictory opinions about contemporary questions, exploring the uncertain boundaries of appropriate expressions of difference in a postStalin world. This is not to say that Soviet cinema did not still respond to “specific, identifiable, social imperatives.”37 The regime controlled the financing and circulation of movies, and films that went beyond the accepted parameters of debate were, at times, censured and removed from circulation. In some areas, however, of which positive images of capitalist culture were one, social imperatives shifted away from earlier Cold War rigidities in which the “West” was unhesitatingly portrayed as an alien and dangerous other. Mikhail Romm—the director of the Thaw film Deviat´ dnei odnogo goda (Nine Days of One Year), which opened up the secret world of Soviet physics for Soviet filmgoers—argued that opening up the secret world of the West was also necessary: “We have lost the habit of considering that something also exists in the West. And this in Russia, the country of the world where more foreign literature is translated than anywhere else. One of the strong points of Russian intellectuals was precisely the fact that they read all of world literature, that they stood at the top in knowledge of world culture. This, too, is one of our traditions.”38 New kinds of films contributed to cinema’s popularity and importance, also bolstered by Khrushchev-era policies of encouraging moviegoing by producing more movies, building more theaters, and lowering ticket prices.39 There is a difference, of course, between watching a film about travel and the actual experience of traveling. Insulted by American mockery of Soviet style, the newspaper Komsomol´skaia pravda railed against the Hollywood film Silk Stockings, but when Khrushchev traveled to the 1955 Geneva summit, he

from iron curtain to silver screen 159



was indeed embarrassed by his lack of appropriate attire, in this case an unfashionable “baggy pale-mauve” summer suit with “flapping trousers.”40 It is in experiences such as these that the corporeal experience of travel—the physical sensations associated with the body moving through space and being itself subject to the gaze of the host community—differ from the visual experience of celluloid tourism. When watching a film about the West, socialist audiences did not necessarily experience their clothing as out of fashion. Being there in person, in contrast, offered the possibility for knowledge and excitement but also for humiliation and exile. “After a while, I became aware that people were looking at me,” the Polish travel writer Ryszard Kapuściński recalled about his first trip abroad to Italy in the late 1950s. I had on a new suit, an Italian shirt white as snow, and a very fashionable polka-dotted tie [all purchased on arrival with the help of a friendly Italian journalist], but there must have been something in my appearance, in my way of sitting and moving, that gave me away. I sensed that I stuck out, and although I should have been happy, sitting there beneath the miraculous skies of Rome, I began to feel awkward and uncomfortable. I have changed my suit, but I could not conceal whatever lay beneath it. Here I was in the wide, wonderful world, and it was only serving to remind me how alien I felt.41

It was easier in film than in real life to imagine one’s communist self as equivalent to that of people in the capitalist West; by domesticating capitalist culture, Soviet films removed any unpleasantness but also the danger of uncomfortable firsthand comparisons and the attendant risk of disillusionment to which they sometimes led.42 PE ACEFUL COE XISTENCE

The Soviet pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair promoted the Soviet Union as modern, industrialized, ethnically diverse, and ideologically superior. Visitors to the pavilion entered through a main hall that included enormous bronze sculptures of a male worker and a female peasant, red banners running floor to ceiling, and—as a focal point at the far end—a sculpture of Lenin posed in front of a backdrop of the Kremlin.43 The two exhibit floors emphasized industry, heavy machinery, and scientific advances with displays of Soviet automobiles, working replicas of an oil drill and coal mine, and exhibits about space exploration.44 Nothing could substitute for firsthand knowledge, however, and visitors to the Soviet pavilion were encouraged to take more than just a virtual tour. On the second floor, just before the exit, was an Intourist booth that invited people to “make a closer study of the world’s first social-

160 anne e. gorsuch

ist country, its science, engineering, history, and culture and come to know its industrious, gifted people.”45 While the Soviet pavilion displayed a largerthan-life version of Soviet accomplishments, the tourist encounter presented an opportunity for contact with the human face of Soviet socialism. Peaceful coexistence did not mean the end of competition, however, and tourism was also imagined as a means of selling Soviet strength and superiority through personal encounter and performance. The 1960 film Russian Souvenir embodied the international politics of the Khrushchev era in which newly friendly relations between East and West were possible, if the socialist Soviet Union remained superior. The film begins with the emergency landing of a plane of wealthy Western tourists. Originally headed to Moscow, the travelers end up instead in the middle of Siberia. The film follows their adventurous efforts to get to Moscow, a premise that allows Russian Souvenir to display the natural resources and industrial achievements of the Soviet Union, and to show the gradual transformation of the tourists from prejudiced and uninformed to friendly and admiring. On landing in Siberia, the Westerners expect the worst, their images of Siberia being informed by its tsarist and Stalinist history as a site of prison camps. Western tourists are also shown to question the story of Soviet modernization. Throughout the film, the tourists’ expectations are repeatedly overthrown, however. When the group seeks shelter from the snow in an old prison, they expect to find scenes of horror but find instead a group of young people singing Western songs (“Old Man River”) at what turns out to be a popular holiday spot. The new Khrushchev-era Siberia has thrown off its past: it is no longer a place of exile and imprisonment but one of enormous economic and social potential: energetic industrial activity, vast natural resources, and pioneering spirit. As the Soviet writer Boris Polevoi explained to the visiting journalist Alexander Werth in the late 1950s, “The mineral wealth in East and Northeast Siberia is something quite fantastic. . . . There’s quite a gold and diamond rush there at present; I shouldn’t be surprised if thousands of young Americans wanted to join in this rush! . . . The winters are tough, but it isn’t a horrible country, as some still imagine. It’s the most beautiful country in the world.”46 The film Russian Souvenir promotes Siberia, and friendly relations with the West, in just these terms. On their travels through Siberia back to Moscow, the tourists in Russian Souvenir are shown enormous diamonds, visit larger-than-life sites of enormous industrial activity, and witness a rocket launching. The difference between the socialist East and the capitalist West is made explicit in a dreamlike sequence in which the American millionaire imagines turning a small Siberian village into an American mecca of dancing girls, nightclubs, champagne, and loud jazz music, while a Russian woman



from iron curtain to silver screen 161

dreams of a beautiful sanatorium, a theater, a house of culture, and boats sailing on a peaceful lake. The trope of Western decadence versus Soviet industry and attention to the needs of everyday people is familiar; Russian Souvenir might in this sense be seen as a cinematographic version of the Brussels World’s Fair. What distinguishes the film from the Brussels exhibition of Soviet superiority is the story of personal encounter in which citizens of the socialist East and tourists from the capitalist West are allowed to meet, discuss, and even fall in love. In every case, it is the Westerner who changes, influenced by the truth of Soviet superiority: unlike Cold War exposés, however, even disagreements are shown to be friendly and Soviet superiority is of a benign kind. When the tourists first set across the steppes in the direction of Moscow, the countess struggles through the snow in her high heels. A Soviet woman steps up to take charge, giving the Italian her own warmer, more practical shoes, and carrying her across a wobbly, rustic bridge while wearing the Italian’s high heels. While the tourists are revealed to be ignorant and coddled, they are not dangerous. Citizens of both the socialist East and the capitalist West are shown to be looking for happiness and love and an end to war. The movie ends with two marriages between Russians and their Western visitors, political antagonism overcome by personal attraction. The “Russian souvenir” these tourists take home is their changed attitude toward the Soviet Union. ORDINARY MOSCOW

Russian Souvenir portrays Western travelers experiencing an “authentic” USSR as represented by the virtues of a larger-than-life Siberia. In real life, too, tourist excursions like that shown in Russian Souvenir were thought necessary to offset the usual, more hostile, capitalist perspective. This perspective was satirized in a 1959 cartoon in the Soviet satirical magazine Krokodil. The cartoon shows a Western tourist—identifiable by his Hawaiian shirt and black beret—photographing three large posters of “old” Moscow held up by Western impresarios.47 The staged scenes include a dilapidated wooden house, a horse and carriage, and two crudely dressed peasants carrying a samovar and a balalaika. Behind these staged images, the “real” Moscow is visible with multistory apartment buildings, a parking lot full of cars, and a store window with mannequins dressed in contemporary styles. Entitled “An Objective View,” the cartoon mocks the ideological blinders of Western tourists while it smugly reassures Soviet citizens that socialism will provide for their every consumer desire. Like Russian Souvenir, the popular hit I Walk around Moscow purported to get beyond the false façade of Western propaganda. It was a cinematographic version of the second panel of the Krokodil cartoon, aiming to

162 anne e. gorsuch

show both Soviet citizens and the film’s large international audience the “reallife” Moscow behind the staged scenes of Western propaganda, complete with the very apartment buildings, cars, and well-dressed citizens of the Krokodil cartoon. There are multiple perspectives from which the virtual tourist/movie­ goer can “walk around” Moscow in the film. He or she might see Moscow through the eyes of Volodia, an earnest young Siberian visiting Moscow for a day. Alternatively, the viewer might identify with the carefree young Muscovite, Kolia, a construction worker who meets Volodia by chance on the Metro and becomes his informal tour guide. Whether tourist or tour guide, the theme of the journey is evident from the opening images, which begin with a scene of arrival at a Moscow airport. Arrival in Moscow is at first slow and quiet, but the movie quickly speeds up with scenes of a bustling capital: cars and buses, crowds of people rushing to and fro, a busy Moscow Metro. In this, I Walk around Moscow resembles earlier cinematographic tributes to Moscow, such as the 1938 film by Aleksandr Medvedkin, Novaia Moskva (New Moscow), in which a young man from a rural village and his grandmother travel to a dynamic Moscow with its fast-moving trolley buses and pedestrians, massive construction scenes, and planes flying overhead.48 (In Russian Souvenir, Moscow is also shown to be larger than life with its grand boulevards packed with cars, double-decker bridges, and skyscraper hotels.) Although symbols of industrial and technological modernity were not particular to the Khrushchev era, in I Walk around Moscow these older expressions of identity, which emphasized the Soviet capacity for industrial production, are joined with newer images that emphasize possibilities for individual consumption, the attractive modernity of the contemporary urban landscape, and foreign tourism. All this is shown as ordinary. “Nothing controversial, let alone subversive, shadows I walk around Moscow,” Josephine Woll argues in her history of Khrushchev-era film.49 It is just this ordinariness of the international that is significant. What makes regular Moscow a good place to live (and a good place to visit) has changed from the Stalinist utopias of the socialist realist film, which, in the words of Richard Taylor, were “hermetically sealed against the outside world.”50 Ordinary Moscow is visible in the everyday background of I Walk around Moscow. Here, consumption—specifically the provision of adequate items to consume—is part of what defines Khrushchev-era Moscow as a modern, internationally competitive city.51 Stores are shown full of food. When Kolia and Volodia go for a stroll through GUM, the enormous tsarist-era shopping arcade reopened under Khrushchev, the screen audience hears in the background repeated announcements of all the things that one can buy, includ-



from iron curtain to silver screen 163

ing cameras, televisions, and gardening equipment. Housing needs are also taken care of. Kolia’s family lives in a spacious single-family apartment in central Moscow furnished with both a television and a piano. In Russian Souvenir there are similar scenes, including images of a family moving from an older, run-down house to a clean, new apartment with a smart kitchen and a prominently displayed telephone, all emblematic of the Khrushchev-era housing campaigns. But notably in I Walk around Moscow, some of what is available to experience and consume is “Western.” The sounds of English trumpet loudly on a neighborhood street as a young man learns a new language with the aid of lessons on a record player (the voice on the record slowly intonating “nation/national/international”). A Muscovite buys an English orchestral performance of Tchaikovsky rather than a Russian one. A large crowd listens to a concert of Latin American music in the park. Another group dances to a jazz band. There are limits—the jazz is big band style rather than the edgier jazz popular elsewhere in the late 1950s—but other international influences that were previously decried as cosmopolitan are now made acceptable by being shown as ordinary. It is not only that Western cultural products are now available in postStalin Moscow, but that what it means to be modern and civilized is now based on a Western, specifically European, model. Moscow is promoted as prosperous, sophisticated, and dynamic, no longer through scenes of industrial achievement and agricultural production but through images of women dressed in smart summer dresses, of clean neighborhood cafés, of beautiful parks lit up at night, and of roadways full of cars. This evokes Khrushchevera tourist accounts about Western Europe that often emphasized the civilized and carefree beauty of the European urban landscape, its attractive city squares, parks, cafés, and shops. In his 1962 travel account Po obe storony okeana (Both Sides of the Ocean), Victor Nekrasov sang the praises of the “sweet” Italian trattoria with its life of casual contemplation and observation.52 The typical Soviet café, according to Nekrasov, was altogether different: Oh, if it were only like [the Italian café] at the Abkhazia in Kiev! [In Italy] you go in and you don’t smell the rank, meaty odors of the kitchen, and the waitress doesn’t snap at you like a she-wolf and tell you, “Wait a minute, it won’t kill you. There are many of you and only one of me!” The tablecloths are all clean, and the waitresses don’t squabble over forks and knives, and there are no plush curtains with tassels, and no angry, haughty doorman. . . . Oh, how good it would be!53

The sunny, romantic, and dynamic Moscow portrayed in I Walk around Moscow is the opposite of Kiev’s Abkhazia. The filmic Moscow resembles Nekra-

164 anne e. gorsuch

sov’s Italy, or indeed, Soviet cinematographic images of Europe as pictured, for example, in a 1960 Soviet short documentary film about Soviet tourists to Sweden.54 Both Moscow and Stockholm are shown to be beautiful, well provisioned capitals with friendly citizens. Both have pretty parks, full shop windows, and streets full of cars. The correct soundtrack for both cities, as suggested by these films, is a light jazz accompaniment. Moscow, like Stockholm, is also a tourist destination. In the postwar Western world, the provision of tourism for one’s own citizens plus the impressive hosting of foreign others, was an acknowledged symbol of “modernization” and a way to compete on the world stage.55 So, too, in the Soviet Union of the 1960s. In I Walk around Moscow, tourism is shown to have become so commonplace—as suggested by an image of tour buses lined up outside Red Square—that Kolia feels free to gently make fun of it. In one scene, the two young protagonists observe a tired tour guide standing with a group of Central Asian tourists in front of St. Basil’s Cathedral. Kolia interrupts the tour guide’s lecture to point to nearby GUM, saying sotto voce, “And here is GUM, an example of pseudo-Russian architecture of the late nineteenth century.” It is not only Soviet citizens who travel to Moscow. There is a lengthy scene of an encounter between an English-speaking Japanese tourist traveling through Moscow, who stops his taxi to ask the boys for directions. Although they barely understand each other’s language, the relations are friendly and nonthreatening. The boys are bemused, unsurprised, and hop in the taxi to help the tourist find his way. The connection between the film and tourism was made explicit with the publication of a 1966 travel guide to Moscow which took its title—Ia shagaiu po Moskve—from the movie.56 The message of both book and movie was that despite the appeal of the Western, home remained the best, in part because the Moscow of the movie now included much of what made the West appear so attractive. A WINDOW TO THE WEST

If the first two films promoted Moscow and Siberia as enviable destinations for domestic and international travelers, the third film under discussion, My Younger Brother, explored the Baltics. The Baltic republics—newly a part of the Soviet Union—were a popular destination for Soviet tourists as they satisfied a longing both for the “away” in a general sense and for the West in particular.57 The Soviet Union’s western frontier—Estonia in particular—had a reputation as the “inner abroad” (russkaia/sovetskaia zagranitsa), a new “window to the West” where Soviet tourists could partake in more varied forms of Western popular culture, as well as participate in Estonia’s own more freewheeling youth subcultures.58



from iron curtain to silver screen 165

Soviet tourist authorities took advantage of the Baltics’ association with the West in their marketing of Tallinn as a tourist destination for both Soviet citizens and foreign visitors. Soviet guidebooks, postcards, and documentary scenics of Tallinn combined the expected images of modernistic buildings and industrial achievements with pictures of Tallinn’s medieval Old Town, including stone gargoyles, ancient city walls, and the Gothic arches of the Town Hall.59 “European” Tallinn resembled Nekrasov’s rhapsodic portrait of the Italian town San Gimignano, again from Both Sides of the Ocean: “It is Dante. It is Boccaccio. It is the whistling of rapiers, the fluttering of capes, silk ladders hung down from balconies, the dying sound of lutes, the hollow steps of the night watch on the cobbled walks, the trembling flame of lanterns blown by the wind.”60 As Eva Näripea argues, Soviet authorities deployed the “ideologically conflicting heritage of the Old Town”—its European imagery—in the “service of Soviet propaganda,” weaving it into the new international texture of the Soviet Union and making its Westernization a part of the story of Soviet progress.61 In scenic films such as the audiovisual album Tallinna mosaiik (The Mosaic of Tallinn), Estonia’s location in the West was also signaled by references to consumer plenty (shiny shop windows, well-dressed women and children, lots of food in stores), romantic love, and outdoor cafés.62 The “Western” heritage of Estonia, together with a higher standard of living, was deployed to help sell the Soviet Union to foreign tourists as successful, contemporary, and a good place to spend hard currency. But Estonia’s combination of historic European architecture and modern style were also marketed as a touristic form of difference now acceptable for Soviet tourists by virtue of Soviet political control. Soviet representations of a beautiful “European” Old Town resembled those of prewar tourist brochures for Tallinn (from the period of Estonian independence), except that the prewar brochures showed a map of Estonia with ships and planes connecting Estonia to Western Europe and nothing except an unmarked train track connecting it to Russia.63 The 1962 movie My Younger Brother follows a group of four teenage friends who leave behind stifling Moscow for the attractions of the Soviet republic of Estonia. Although a less popular film than I Walk around Moscow (and in many critics’ opinions both then and now, also less effective), My Younger Brother is important for this essay as a journey film which again uses travel as a way to explore new ideological and geographical boundaries, and their limits, during the Thaw. Three male protagonists—Dima, Alik, and Iurka—together with a girl—Galia—set off to Estonia as a way to escape the confines of a planned life; they yearn for adventure, a journey into unknown, and an escape from the certainties of adulthood. Their trip is decidedly not a typical planned Soviet tourist excursion: the script plays with Russian verbs of

166 anne e. gorsuch

motion to indicate various kinds of “traveling”—with a single, firm destination in mind or, as in this case, without.64 When they are asked on the train why they are not joining other youth traveling to contribute their labor to the socialist cause in Siberia, the young protagonist Dima responds, “Everybody is going east; we are going west.” In Tallinn, Dima and his friends enjoy the beauty of a Bach organ prelude slipping through the church walls to enchant passersby and the powerful emotions of first love experienced on the romantic cobbled streets of Tallinn’s Old Town. Elements of Estonia’s “Western” culture and history are openly admired, especially the timeless beauties of Tallinn’s Old Town. My Younger Brother is more cautious, however, about the appeal of contemporary Western culture. The restaurant at the Hotel Tallinn is clean and attractive, but is full of wealthy, vaguely menacing men. The loud jazz soundtrack signals danger, not sophistication. Galia is condemned as a “Bridget Bardot” when she abandons Dima to flirtatiously dance with an older man. This quiet hostility distinguishes the movie from the book on which it was based. Aksenov’s Ticket to the Stars was more admiring of Estonia’s carefree lifestyle as influenced by contemporary Western culture: in it the newsstands are said to contain magazines with pictures of Laurence Olivier and Sophia Loren, and the protagonists visit a chic café where they drink Cognac under a magical ceiling studded with stars.65 In contrast, when transforming the novel into a film, Aksenov and the film’s director, Aleksandr Zarkhi, were told that the movie should not resemble the book too closely or it would not be accepted.66 Here we see awareness of a difference between film and fiction, authorities apparently understanding that there was something possibly dangerous about seeing contemporary Western culture, rather than reading about it, given the powerfully immersionary aspects of celluloid tourism. If novels can leave out the controversial, film is not as easily sanitized, requiring background shots and visual context, and approaching in this way something closer to the actual experience of travel. The film and the book do conclude similarly. In both, Dima and his friends settle on a new, Soviet path that leads them to give up their idle lifestyle. Under the influence of a group of older and more settled local men they take up employment in a fishing collective and learn the value of hard work. “Wasn’t I capable of anything more daring than rock ‘n’ roll, the Charleston, calypso, and the smell of coffee and brandy and the taste of lemon slices covered with sugar?” Dima asks himself in Ticket to the Stars.67 In the film, too, the vitality of youth is shown to be attractive, but young people are truly Soviet only when they work hard, listen to their elders, and show the potential to grow up. In this, both the film and book resemble other well-known “youth



from iron curtain to silver screen 167

novels” from the period, in which young people are transformed by a trip to the periphery.68 Most often, the periphery is Siberia. In Anatolii Kuznetsov’s 1957 novella The Journey, and Sergei Antonov’s novel Alyona, decadent youth from Moscow are transformed into satisfied socialist citizens through their work on behalf of the Soviet Union in the virgin lands and in Siberia.69 If in My Younger Brother, the destination is Estonia rather than Siberia, the message of transformation is perhaps all the stronger given Estonia’s ambiguous imagining as the Soviet Union’s “West.” WESTERN CIGARE T TES AND HAWAIIAN SHIRTS

If My Younger Brother shows the good and bad of capitalist culture, the 1961 film Foreigners focuses on the truly unacceptable. A short film, part of a “Comedy Almanac” of five short films directed by Eduard Zmoiro, Foreigners uses social satire to condemn the desires of young people interested in capitalist consumer culture, especially that illegally purchased from Western tourists. The opening credits of the film are projected against a background of material items typically associated with tourism in the West: an SAS brochure, suitcase labels, postcards relating to foreign travel, Western cigarettes, and a Hawaiian shirt. The movie begins with a shot of a young man sprawled in an unkempt bed. He arises to the lively sounds of the song “Rock around the Clock,” dances about the room in his underwear, and pauses only to swig a quick drink. After struggling into a pair of tight jeans, he heads out the door. We next see him at a hotel for foreign tourists where it becomes evident that he is a black marketeer when he checks out the people walking by and eventually approaches a man carrying an Air France bag. The rest of the movie focuses on the relationship between the young man and a tourist named “Frank,” whom the black marketeer tries to both befriend and exploit. What the viewer quickly learns, but the black marketeer does not know, is that “Frank” is a Russian journalist writing an exposé about black marketeers. The young man and his friends are portrayed as foolish imitators of capitalist culture. In one scene, young men and women laze about in a stupor murmuring the words “Pepsi-Cola” (a soft drink famously first introduced to Soviet citizens at the American Exhibition of 1959). A girl asks “Frank” to do her hair in the latest style with absurd results, including multiple ponytails sticking every-whichway. The marketeers learn that “Frank” is not all he seems only when they surreptitiously look through his suitcase and find out with surprise that the labels in his clothing are Soviet. The final shot of the film is of a newspaper article condemning the black marketeer and his friends.70 In his passion for foreign clothing—though not in his naïve idiocy— the protagonist of Foreigners resembled the real-life Soviet jazz musician and

168 anne e. gorsuch

clothing aficionado Aleksei Kozlov. In his 1998 memoir, Kozlov recalls how for him all clothing was divided into two categories: “firmennoe, that is produced abroad and without fail having the label of some [foreign] company, and ours, Soviet-sewn, which we designated, of course, ‘sovparshiv’ [Soviet party clothes].”71 Kozlov trolled resale shops in hopes of coming across clothing left for sale by foreign embassy personnel. He also, more riskily, approached foreigners on the street to see if they would sell him their clothes.72 Stylish youth like Kozlov—a group that included the stiliagi but also other groups of fashion-conscious and “idle youth” involved in speculation in foreign goods—were the target of the movie Foreigners and of Komsomol and Communist Party press campaigns.73 In a 1960 article in Literaturnaia gazeta, Vasilii Aksenov fretted about these idle young Russians in terms very like those of Foreigners. Their life, Aksenov wrote, “consists of the hotels, buzzing with an unfamiliar and hence interesting life; the windshields of cars bearing stickers showing the flags of foreign countries; the chords of jazz behind the plate glass windows of restaurants.”74 Aksenov was not entirely unsympathetic. He argued that youth were drawn to the wrong kinds of bourgeois culture because the official youth culture offered them was so “stultifying.”75 While he condemned the unconsidered appropriation of popular culture and capitalist goods for personal gain, Aksenov wrote admiringly about the subtle integration of a universally accepted high culture. He praised Hemingway and Remarque, Picasso and Matisse. He described Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, and Benny Goodman as “wonderful.”76 Foreigners appears, at first glance, less discriminating. The young speculators are made to appear as ridiculous deviationists without redeeming qualities, and no blame is attached to Soviet institutions. While viewers are advised to avoid the vulgarity of those aspiring to outlandish Western fashion, however, they are also advised to avoid the now passé dress of the obviously working class. Soviet authorities in the Khrushchev era hoped to counteract fantasies of personal consumption and pleasure associated with West, but they also encouraged, as Susan Reid puts it, a “contemporary,” and “measured use of fashion.”77 Thus the journalist “Frank” appears cultured and intelligent in his handsomely cut suit and good haircut, suggesting that the most appropriate attire for the Soviet man of the 1950s and 1960s was refined and modestly Western-influenced, if Soviet-made.78 Indeed, it is “Frank” who speaks good English—a now admirable trait of the “cultured” Soviet person—and the young marketeer who is unable to recognize that his English is not native. If the movie condemns the uninformed aping of capitalist commercial culture, it, like Aksenov, offers a Khrushchev-era alternative.



from iron curtain to silver screen 169

THE E XOTIC, DISTANT CARIBBE AN SE A

Viewers of Foreigners were supposed to leave the theater disgusted by the foolish greed of black marketeers. But the snappy music and glimpse of Western styles may, for some, have had the opposite effect. The challenges of using film as a medium for instructing viewers how to distinguish between cosmopolitanism and internationalism are especially evident in the 1964 joint SovietCuban production I Am Cuba. I Am Cuba is not in any obvious way about tourism; the film celebrates the Cuban revolution through its idealized and hugely expressive images of the legacy of colonialism and American domination, the tragedy of the peasants, the struggle of students and workers, and the final battles in the Sierra Maestra Mountains. But the touristic experience is central to the film in two ways. The gaze of the camera is like the gaze of the tourist: the viewer sees the island as if from an airplane, swims with the camera in underwater shots, plunges through the sugarcane fields with Cuban workers, forges her way across crowded streets. The camera, like the tourist, also revels in Cuba’s palm trees and expansive beaches. Contradictorily, however—and here we find the second aspect of the touristic—it is images of the tropical appeal of Cuba, and specifically the decadent world of Batista-era American tourism, that are used to bludgeon the past and condemn the excesses of colonialism. Of all the films discussed thus far, I Am Cuba is the most explicitly antiWestern. There is little here of the acceptably internationalist influence seen in I Walk around Moscow. The “West” is entirely that of American culture, spectacle, and sex. In one of the film’s most famous scenes, the camera descends in a long traveling shot from an opening rooftop image of sensuous bikini-clad women competing in a beauty contest, to a scene of privileged guests sipping cocktails and taking photographs, to conclude with the camera diving into a swimming pool. All of it is accompanied by swinging pop music. In another scene, wealthy American businessman-tourists exploit Cuban women, the American patrons (shown in exaggerated form with awkward Southern accents) dancing with unwilling black prostitutes in a nightclub. “All gentlemen are created equal,” one American businessman drawls. “This is a democracy. Let’s draw lots for the girls.” These images of the decadent eroticism of the tourist experience in colonial Cuba are undeniably anti-American. At the same time, they are undeniably attractive even when contrasted with scenes of poor villages, naked children, and revolutionary enthusiasm. In a recent interview, the Soviet coauthor of the script, the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, discussed his then genu-

170 anne e. gorsuch

ine enthusiasm for the Cuban revolution but also admitted how much he himself frequented Cuban nightclubs and drank Cuban cocktails while writing the script.79 As the authors of a booklet accompanying Milestone Film and Video’s reissue of I Am Cuba observe, “the film explores (perhaps a bit too enthusiastically for the prescribed purposes of the film) the seductive, decadent (and marvelously photogenic) world of Batista’s Cuba.”80 This did not go unnoticed by Soviet authorities. According to the film’s cinematographer, Sergei Urusevsky, the film was panned in Moscow because it portrayed scenes of American life in Cuba, which authorities did not want shown on Soviet screens.81 The Cuban revolution was, as described by Petr Vail and Aleksandr Genis in their book about the Soviet 1960s, “a striking event for the Soviet person of the 1960s, a powerful, creative social revolution combined with an exotic, distant [Caribbean] sea.”82 Soviet authorities were pointedly more comfortable with the revolutionary than with the exotic. CULTURED, NOT CAPITALIST

Easier to monitor than real tourism, yet visually captivating, films about travel provided a mechanism by which Soviet citizens at home could safely visit a domesticated elsewhere without leaving home. In contrast to the conventions of many twenty-first-century travel narratives, Soviet films about travel did not relish the exotic but domesticated acceptable differences and demonized dangerous ones. Traveling via film rather than in person circumscribed opportunities to go off the beaten path. The Soviet imagined “West(s)” portrayed in the films described here were not meant to be sites for developing individualism but for learning and affirming officially approved values about which kinds of Western culture were acceptable. In this, Soviet films stood in pointed, and deliberate, contrast to Hollywood productions with their dangerously seductive representations of the glamorous life.83 These efforts were not always successful. As we have seen, the immersionary aspects of film meant that viewers saw and heard elements of capitalist culture that were attractive and intriguing even as they were being condemned as decadent. But at their core these films were reinforcing a limited kind of tourism in which “travel” confirmed the superiorities of home. The nature of a Khrushchev-era “home” was different from that which followed, however. These films also suggest that the Soviet Union was not impenetrable, nor did it wish to be. Its citizens were believed to be confident enough about the Soviet Union’s own virtues to be allowed to mix with the foreign, if still mostly at home rather than abroad. As portrayed in the films described here, the educated and internationally aware Soviet citizen was supposed to be cultured (but not capitalist), youthful and adventuresome (but



from iron curtain to silver screen 171

not immature), romantic (but not sexy), a consumer (but not a black marketeer), and confidently open to new ideas and foreign cultures (but still a Soviet patriot). These films were helping construct a new kind of post-Stalinist Soviet viewer. The peculiarities of the Khrushchev era are underscored if one compares the films discussed above with the 1967 Brezhnev-era movie Iul´skii dozhd´ (July Rain).84 In July Rain, Muscovites get glimpses of the outside world, but these glimpses are no longer presented optimistically. Khrushchev’s famous phrase “peaceful coexistence” is used cynically to describe relations between individuals. Some Western imports have become so commonplace that young people have become blasé: they read French novels and dance to jazz music but none of it with great enthusiasm. Instead, the movie emphasizes the persistent distance between the Soviet Union and the capitalist West. One characteristic scene shows elegantly dressed foreign dignitaries emerging from fancy cars on one side of the street while watched from the other side of the street by the ordinary, and distinctly inelegant, citizens of Moscow. July Rain represents Brezhnev-era pessimism about the possibility of the Soviet Union becoming truly “international.” In contrast, Soviet films about tourism in the Thaw combine cautious optimism about permitting a now Sovietized “difference” with profound anxiety about the threats too much of this might pose: an uneasy combination which, I argue, is characteristic of the Khrushchev era.

CHAPTER  9

MIRROR, MIRROR, ON THE WALL . . . IS THE WEST THE FAIREST OF THEM ALL? CZECHOSLOVAK NORMALIZATION AND ITS (DIS)CONTENTS

Paulina Bren

Against the backdrop of Stalinist show trials, intellectual censorship, and sealed-off borders, Czechs and Slovaks during the 1950s watched as the “West” was transformed from the once familiar to the imagined. This shift was a particularly heavy blow for the Czechs who, until then, had considered themselves to sit squarely within the tradition of West European culture and thought, sharing in the positive attributes that came with it. Yet Western Europe and its concomitant values had seemingly slipped from their hands and moved irreversibly to the other side of the Iron Curtain. When they looked into their collective mirror, it was the “East” and the Soviet bloc that they now saw. But the Soviet Union, embraced immediately after World War II when it was briefly seen as a centrifuge of progress and political liberation, was increasingly viewed by many in Czechoslovakia as a non-European, and indeed decidedly alien, political, and social entity. If asked, most Czechs no longer considered the Soviet Union and Stalin to be “the fairest of them all.” Differences between East and West, both imagined and real, were emphatically symbolized by the existence and impermeability of the Iron Curtain. Not only did citizens assign symbolic significance to this “other Europe,” now out of their reach, but so too did the newly installed communist govern172

Mirror, Mirror, on the wall . . . Is the West the Fairest of Them All? 173

ments anxious to deflect sympathies for the West. Within the state media, the West sometimes became imagined in the most vivid sense, as, for example, in the early 1950s when a genuine agricultural crisis coincided with the Slánský Stalinist show trial. In the press, the presumed guilt of the trial’s defendants was reified as potato beetle plagues let loose on the Eastern bloc by the West. These ruinous “American beetles,” as they were known, were said to have been swept in with the “help of the clouds and winds of the Western imperialists, as well as with the help of their terrorist agents sent over.”1 More commonly, any knowledge of the West was simply expunged from everyday life. As Heda Kovály writes in her memoir, “Once I was listening to the news on the radio and caught the word ‘Netherlands.’ I pricked up my ears but the news item was only that the Soviet Folk Dance Collective had enjoyed a great success in Amsterdam. That was the only bit of news from the West that we had had for months.”2 Both the silence and the caricatures began to dissolve in the 1960s as the West was permitted finally to permeate the Iron Curtain. Simultaneously, intense feelings emerged over what that Cold War barrier—both its physical incarnation and its intellectual, political, and economic fallout—had meant to postwar Czechoslovakia. Famously, at the 1967 Writers’ Congress in a castle outside Prague, Czechoslovakia’s best-known writers and intellectuals publicly expressed for the first time their deep disappointment over postwar socialism and bore witness to this collective bitterness over Czechoslovakia’s ejection from the “West.” Here the writer Ludvík Vaculík took to the podium to lament, “in 20 years not one social question [lidská otázka] has been solved—from people’s primary needs . . . to more subtle needs. . . . And I fear that neither did we rise on the world scene; I feel that our republic has lost its good name.”3 What he meant was that the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic had lost its place in the West—both geographically and culturally. As political and social liberalization now crept into Czechoslovakia, culminating in the Prague Spring, the “West,” like a long-censured monument to the dear and departed, was slowly unveiled again and opened to the viewing public. My purpose here is to trace how the “West,” once resuscitated from the censure of the Stalinist 1950s, was reimagined in various forms and incorporated into the project of communism in quite surprising ways.4 My focus is on two periods; first, the 1960s and the Prague Spring; and second, the 1970s and 1980s, known as normalization. During the Prague Spring, it was both the Communist Party and the public who manipulated images of the West for their own purposes of political, economic, and social reform. In contrast, during normalization, the state was primarily in charge of reimagining the West;

174 paulina bren

the public, however, reworked the state-procured images for its own uses. The thread that brings these often quite disjointed interpretations of the West together—the West itself was (and is) an elusive term, perpetually shifting between concrete and abstract definitions—is travel.5 Throughout this period, socialist citizens’ snapshots of the West were facilitated through travel; in the 1960s, it was their own firsthand travel experiences, whereas in the 1970s and 1980s, second- and thirdhand experiences dominated. In particular, for the normalization period, I pay attention to the public accounts of so-called “returnees”—post–1968 émigrés who, of their own accord, made their way back home to communist Czechoslovakia. My focus on travel to the West (and the return home, to the East) is coupled with an emphasis not on consumerism per se but on something larger but also less definable—namely, lifestyle. What tourists, travelers, and, later, short-term émigrés to the West were best able to pick up on were the differences in living standards between East and West. Needless to say, the West was always suggestive of political freedoms not available in the Eastern bloc, but consumer freedoms were gaining precedence as a potent measuring stick. This was all the more true for the late communist period when bare necessities were generally available to all citizens in Europe, East and West, and thus increasingly taken for granted.6 Subsequently, consumer freedoms were conflated with or even superseded political freedoms. This emphasis on lifestyle is directly related to my focus on the scarcely studied period of post–1968. It remains astonishing that almost 20 years after the end of communism in Eastern Europe, most historians continue to write about the postwar period as if it had ended in the 1960s. This has led to a continued lack of serious differentiation between early postwar communism and late communism, thereby unwittingly feeding into a discredited Cold War view that insisted on the “totality” of the communist experience. The primacy of lifestyle was apparent in the West by the 1970s and 1980s.7 As this chapter seeks to show, it also became a convenient viewpoint for the Czechoslovak normalization leadership, and indeed for late communist governments throughout the Eastern bloc, to embrace. Public discussion in the 1960s began by pointing to living standards East and West (a game that the Soviet bloc could hardly win); in the 1970s this state-endorsed dialogue began to shift its emphasis to lifestyle, which eventually morphed into an insistence on the socialist way of life as offering not a better living standard but a superior lifestyle. Lifestyle choice—as opposed specifically to either consumer or political choice—offered the Husák-led normalization government the chance to insist, quite persuasively at times, that they could be “the fairest of them all.”

Mirror, Mirror, on the wall . . . Is the West the Fairest of Them All? 175 TR AVELING WEST

It was Czechoslovakia’s economic decline that first provoked the critical voices within the ranks of the Czechoslovak Communist Party itself, leading to a reform movement that eventually transmuted into the all-embracing Prague Spring. These early 1960s critiques frequently took the form of internally circulated memos (marked “secret” but numerous enough to attract the attention of most apparatchiks) that sought to compare the socialist East with the capitalist West. Contrary to what had been the earlier norm, the purpose of these memorandums was not to cheerlead communism’s economic leaps and bounds. Rather, these comparisons were intended as wake-up calls. Here were the first numbers explicitly showing that Czechoslovakia was lagging economically behind all Western countries. Then, as the press became more daring as of the mid-1960s, these previously restricted revelations began also to appear in the media with increasing frequency. By 1967, the still state-controlled media regularly sounded the alarm about Czechoslovakia’s declining economic status, a status that was never compared to other countries of the Soviet bloc but rather to European nations on the other side of the Iron Curtain and to the United States, the ultimate “West” in matters economic. By the time the cat was out of the bag about Czechoslovakia’s dire economic situation, it was also generally understood that this failure to develop side-by-side with the postwar West had begun with the 1948 Communist Party takeover and had not ceased since. The media illustrated this postwar downward slope through an obsessive counting, accounting, and recounting of per capita ownership. The items of ownership most often used as examples were the sort of luxuries that had become de rigueur in any better-off postwar home: television sets, washing machines, refrigerators, automobiles, and the like. The countries most often used in these ever more popular comparisons were neighboring Austria (seen by some as Czechoslovakia’s far luckier doppelgänger) and West Germany. Anxiety, both personal and governmental, was central to these comparisons: in August 1967, the Czech newspapers Rudé právo and Lidová demokracie, as well as radio station Rádio Praha, ran related articles and broadcasts that compared Austria with Czechoslovakia in terms of what basic items an average consumer in each country was able to purchase. The unfavorable conclusions clearly demonstrated that Czechoslovakia was severely lagging behind Austria. Since in 1967 the media were not yet independent enough to explore serious reasons for these economic differences, the deficiencies were attributed not to the country’s lower quality of technological equipment and materials or its faulty distributive system, let alone to its po-

176 paulina bren

litical system, but instead to the Czechoslovak people themselves—their laziness, negligence, and low quality of work.8 The growing obsession with comparison-making, popularized by newspaper editorials and radio and television discussions, was bolstered above all by an experience that before the 1960s had been barred to most citizens—the opportunity to travel abroad. In 1965, Czechoslovak citizens were legally permitted to apply for and receive a passport for travel outside the Soviet bloc for purposes other than specially approved work assignments or conferences. While some travel restrictions continued, and hard currency for travel remained difficult to come by, the chance to travel was largely available and those who could grasp the opportunity did so. Thus, as the Iron Curtain became more permeable, for the first time since 1948 Czechs and Slovaks were offered the chance to see the West for themselves. Interestingly, it was not Alexander Dubček’s Prague Spring government but the conservative pre-1968 government of Antonín Novotný that permitted these unprecedented levels of travel to the previously unseen and only imagined countries outside the Soviet bloc. Many of his fellow party apparatchiks at the time warned of the potential political fallout from this state-endorsed traveling fever to the West. At a 1965 meeting of the Central Committee’s Ideological Commission, one member worried, “As the numbers show, visits by our citizens to capitalist states are greatly expanding, and not only visits to relatives and friends but straightforward tourist trips whether in a group tour or as an individual traveler . . . as a result of the fact that our citizens spend a relatively short time in capitalist countries (two to three weeks), it might well lead to distorted impressions about life in these states.”9 This concern extended to secondhand interactions as well, the worry being that “since people see the best Western films, the best literature, they have an image of Western culture that is a little askew.”10 Askew or not, these vacationing hordes of ordinary citizens were fast gaining firsthand knowledge of capitalism, information that was not only spread in private conversation but which some used strategically within the expanding public dialogue against the government itself. In 1967, for example, one angry reader of the newspaper Lidová demokracie, who signed himself as František Novák, countered an economist’s typically bogus explanations of the faltering national economy by leaning on his recent experiences abroad: “Today every fox terrier can see that our standard of living is decreasing rapidly.” He added that, having visited the West, he also knew “how everything is moving forward there in great strides.” The communist economist, apparently untrained for this sort of combat, responded by devoting an entire newspaper article to “Mr. Novák” and his letter of complaint. The economist’s counterat-

Mirror, Mirror, on the wall . . . Is the West the Fairest of Them All? 177

tack was focused almost exclusively on Mr. Novák, who, he said, claimed to be a construction worker even though his letter was entirely without grammar mistakes. This proved, argued the economist, that Mr. Novák was undoubtedly a member of the intelligentsia out to provoke him.11 But regardless of whether Mr. Novák was indeed what he claimed to be, ordinary citizens were finally getting an unfettered glimpse of the “West,” which bore little resemblance to the propagandistic version on which a postwar generation had been weaned. GOING WEST

The period when Czechs and Slovaks were able to gain firsthand experience of the West proved to be brief: in August 1968, the Prague Spring was brought to an abrupt end with the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. With it went not only the political and social reforms that had been planned by the Dubček-led government, but also direct access to life on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The next 20 years, bracketed on one end by the 1968 Soviet invasion and on the other by the 1989 Velvet Revolution, were referred to both officially and unofficially as “normalization” (normalizace), denoting the Communist Party’s intention to return Czechoslovakia to “normality” following the “abnormality” of the Prague Spring. But although the door to the West was now shut, normalization’s ideological frontman, Central Committee Secretary Jan Fojtík, was right to worry (as early as 1970) about the effects of the “imagined West.” “It was decidedly unpleasant for me,” he announced to his colleagues, when it was brought to my attention recently that in our universities our students look upon Vietnamese students somewhat disparagingly, whereas everything that comes from the West, and all the more whatever comes from America, they admire. At the same time, we face a problem about which we cannot keep silent. Many of our people stayed abroad in the West, and a great number who will graduate from university here long to work in the West. They connect their dreams of making a name for themselves with assumptions about the structures of Western society.12

Fojtík’s concern that the fascination with the West was unlikely to end was well-founded. As he himself stated, “many of our people stayed abroad in the West.” These citizens—most of them in their 20s—were spending the summer of 1968 traveling in Western Europe or the United States. Others were taking advantage of the numerous academic exchanges that were offered to them that year. When Czechoslovakia was suddenly invaded on 21 August, many decided to stay where they were rather than return.

178 paulina bren

But Fojtík was being disingenuous when he spoke only of those who had “stayed abroad.” There were also those, far more of those in fact, who had decided to go abroad in the aftermath of the invasion. Faced with the bleakness of Soviet occupation, Czechoslovakia witnessed an exodus captured in the film version of Milan Kundera’s novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. There is a scene when the two protagonists, the innocent Tereza and her philandering husband, Tomas, traumatized by the invasion, make their way with thousands of others across the border into the West. They sit patiently as a convoy of cars, loaded down with possessions, winds its way past passport control. When their turn comes, the border guard perfunctorily glances at their documents and waves them on their way, wishing them well in their future lives.13 In this, the film is correct: Czechoslovakia’s borders remained unofficially open for 13 months after the invasion as part of an unspoken yet state-endorsed escape route.14 Two-thirds of the exodus was made up of people between the ages of 20 and 40 who, typically, were not blue-collar workers but employed in white-collar professions such as academia, engineering, medicine, and the media.15 In other words, this was also a brain drain, which the regime must have realized. But even as early as 1968–69, the new normalization leadership was already willing to sacrifice practical necessities for social consensus. Once the borders were sealed again, every adult who had left the country was tried in absentia for the “abandonment of the republic,”16 a romanticsounding misnomer of a crime that had been made into law in October 1948, a few months after the postwar Communist Party takeover. More colloquially, but with the same undertow of patriotism used in the service of communism, these people were referred to as “runaways.” Although they had been provided with opportunities to make their exit, their disappearance made for bad publicity. The regime thus struck a contradictory pose: on the one hand, for those first 13 months following the invasion, it kept borders relatively permeable to allow people determined enough to leave to do so; on the other hand, the government made repeated efforts to coax back those now abroad, even offering loans for airplane tickets home to Czechoslovakia.17 As early as 29 August 1968, just a week after the invasion, Czechoslovak state agencies abroad were being instructed to make contact with fellow citizens there and pave the way for their legal return home, often by extending their travel permit documents so as to ensure a smooth and unfettered return. This mild-mannered tactic changed abruptly in January 1969 when the same Czechoslovak agencies were advised to use assorted means of pressure for reluctant returnees, including threats of judicial prosecution and the seizure of their property.18 With approximately 70,000 Czechoslovak citizens abroad, in May 1969 the government declared amnesty for everyone who would return by 15 September,

Mirror, Mirror, on the wall . . . Is the West the Fairest of Them All? 179

promising to waive their potential prison sentences.19 Altogether, from 1 January 1969 to 31 December 1970, 3,723 persons returned.20 A second amnesty was declared in February 1973.21 For the first few years following General Secretary Gustav Husák’s assumption of power, the regime kept open the possibility of a presidential pardon for those who were considering making their way back home to the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Both the act of fleeing and the act of returning were rarely discussed in the media in political terms, for that would invoke too many discomfiting memories of the recent Prague Spring. Instead, emigration to the West was officially cast as an economically driven betrayal of socialism and one’s fellow citizens who had remained to fight the good fight; a returnee’s re-emigration “home” to Czechoslovakia was described as the emotionally loaded recognition that not all was as it had first appeared on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Not uncommon was the sort of propaganda published in 1971 in Rudé právo, which claimed to excerpt recent “overheard” statements made by émigrés at the going-away party of another émigré who had decided to return home to Czechoslovakia. The emphasis was on the returnee’s deeply emotional nostalgia for “home,” and his now cool-headed regret for having fallen sway to Prague Spring’s mass hysteria. His friends, gathered around him at the party, begin to fall apart as the evening progresses: K. Vaník . . . find out back at home if I too could return. I didn’t kill anyone; I only went a little crazy in 1968 . . . A. Nosková . . . I ask you to please send me a letter about conditions back home, I’d like to see my grandchildren before I die . . . J. Švenlák . . . I left a girl behind in Prague, I didn’t even say good-bye to her. If only I knew if she’s still single. . . . H. Klauser . . . when I recall the volleyball pitch in the forest, the campground, the lads in the weekend cottages . . . then I’d just like to throw in the towel.22

Such emotionally laden and indeed fear-inducing scenarios presented by the official media for loyal citizens’ consumption further served the purpose of shifting the compass of common sense: such excerpted conversations suggested that these émigrés’ flights from Czechoslovakia were the acts of madmen, whereas a regime that had ceased to allow its citizens to travel back and forth across the border between East and West represented level-headedness. The campaign against emigration continued throughout normalization because emigration continued throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In a 1985 outline of Czechoslovak Television’s contributions to this campaign (the report

180 paulina bren

was comprehensively titled “The Contribution of Czechoslovak Television in the Fight against Emigration and for the Development of Socialist Patriotism”), negative images of émigrés and emigration were described as being most effective when inserted within seemingly unrelated programs: “to make the reality of life in capitalist countries familiar means incontrovertibly to correct misconceptions and illusions that still linger.”23 Sometimes, however, such propaganda proved counterproductive: amusingly, a Czech journalist admitted in an article in Tvorba that he had been asked countless times why, if conditions were so bad in the West, workers did not emigrate to Czechoslovakia just as some Czechs had emigrated to the West. The journalist explained that these class-conscious workers chose to stay in the West in order to work on turning their own societies into communist ones.24 In terms of content, the regime’s campaign against émigrés generally worked on two levels. On the one hand, the association of exile with loneliness, fear, disorientation, and rejection was evoked frequently to deter others from attempting such an escape themselves. The alarming consequences of an emigrant’s inability to orient himself within a new environment consisting of a foreign language and unfamiliar cultural cues were, for example, clearly laid out in a novel entitled If You Abandon Me, advertised as a narrative “about the fate of those who had tasted the life of an emigrant”; it was later turned into a radio play and a television drama.25 At the same time, the regime actively linked émigrés’ motivations for leaving Czechoslovakia with avarice; the claim was made that, once abroad, an émigré was rewarded handsomely for “declaring that he doesn’t agree with the political development of his own motherland, that he distances himself from all honest fellow citizens in the republic.”26 Thus, “abandonment of the republic” came to mean not just a punishable criminal act but, more significantly still, the abandonment of a socialist and collective way of life in favor of personal desires and garish riches. In the course of the 1970s and 1980s, this became a powerfully embedded image by which, consciously and subconsciously, citizens remaining in Czechoslovakia often defined themselves as well, seeing themselves as “honest . . . citizens” for having remained.27 This paradigm of abandonment—of good, salt-of-the-earth socialist citizens being forsaken by their dollar-seeking brethren—was also tied in with recent historical calamities and the consequent victimization of Czechoslovak citizens. Another “overheard conversation,” this one published in Tribuna, took place between two women sitting on Prague’s number 14 tram. One of the two women expressed disapproval and incomprehension over an acquaintance’s decision to divorce her husband rather than join him in West Germany

Mirror, Mirror, on the wall . . . Is the West the Fairest of Them All? 181

(where he had fled after the invasion); the other made clear her approval of the woman’s decision to remain behind in socialist Czechoslovakia, explaining, I too wouldn’t go to him there . . . What kind of fortune would I be in search of there? What are we missing here . . . versus there? What, so I could spend my time visiting meetings of the Sudeten Germans and applauding them . . . for having killed my dad in 1938? . . . Or so I should live among the Czech crème de la crème who ran away in 1948 or, worse, among those who in 1968 confused ordinary people who then had to pay for their mistakes while they themselves are sitting in warmth, cozily counting out their money? The woman beside her, until then a seeming champion of emigration and life in the West, pauses and then says: “and you know what, you’re right.”28 RE TURNING E AST

Although not everyone was quite so easy to convince as this woman on Tram 14, the Czechoslovak government did manage to persuade some of its citizens who had emigrated or else stayed abroad in the aftermath of the invasion to return under the auspices of the amnesties. Not surprisingly, those who took up the offer were automatically incorporated into the state-sponsored campaign against emigration. Less expected was the way in which their narratives of life in the West were used to help define the script for life in socialist Czechoslovakia during normalization. These “returnees” or “re-emigrants,” as they have been referred to, obviously returned to socialist Czechoslovakia for a variety of reasons. Emigration never failed to test both people and their relationships more severely than expected, and reasons for the return could be as much psychological as economic. The earlier mentioned film version of Unbearable Lightness of Being bears witness to this phenomenon too: Tereza and Tomas, despite their having established successful new lives in Geneva, return to communist Czechoslovakia.29 Many of these returnees were interviewed as they deboarded planes at Prague’s Ruzyň Airport and later, once they had had a chance to unpack, on radio programs and television shows. They most often described their return to socialist Czechoslovakia as based on a newfound, firsthand knowledge of the capitalist West and the concomitant collapse of previously held illusions. As one young male returnee instructively told Rádio Hvězda, “Well, these were [our] illusions about the West. It was being said in our country that in the West there were better working conditions, that the standard of living was higher than ours; so we thought that we would go and seek that better prosperity.”30 His experiences, of course, did not match his expectations.

182 paulina bren

Predictably, the lack of job security and a sufficient social welfare system in the West was emphasized in the returnees’ often media-savvy or else officially shaped confessions. As one man who had spent five years in Canada explained in answer to a reporter’s question about what it took for a worker to be fired in Canada, “It’s enough, for example, when you tell him [your boss], I can’t keep up or I’m not feeling well . . . that could not happen here at home.” He then described his own experience of receiving a pink slip: “So I open it [the envelope], and there is the pink slip with a note that says, basically, that at the moment there isn’t much work, that when there’s more work, they’ll call me. And what does that mean but, basically, not to rely on that they call you but to start looking for other work!”31 Similarly, stories about the lack of unemployment benefits and the absence of a national health insurance scheme were frequently related to the public through these returnees’ accounts of everyday life in the West. Břetislav and Ludmila Janoušek and their two children, for instance, went as far as to return to Czechoslovakia without being sure of the government’s current position toward returnees. Thus they calculated into their plans the possibility that they might actually have to serve the prison term to which all emigrants had been sentenced. But to them the gamble still seemed worth it: Mr. Janoušek explained to television viewers, “we were telling ourselves that even if worst came to worst, if we had to serve the sentence, it still cannot be equal to staying for one’s whole life in such conditions and society as we learned to know [in the United States].”32 For the Janoušek family, it was the conditions of life in America—rather than the now tightly sealed borders of post-1968 Czechoslovakia—that functioned as a prison from which one longed to escape. In contrast, the social benefits available in Czechoslovakia pointed to security and, therefore, freedom. Another frequently publicized returnees’ refrain focused on the excessive work tempo forced upon them in capitalism, which as socialist citizens they were neither prepared for nor willing to accept. A woman, a nurse by training, took work at a factory in Austria making artificial flowers and was struck by the owner’s (an earlier Czech émigré himself) instructions to one of her colleagues: “Faster, faster, you have to work faster.” Another returnee was quizzed by Czech radio about the “work morale” in Austrian factories. The young man replied, “There one regularly begins at 6:30 a.m. and works until 5:00 p.m. You have to be at your station about 5–10 minutes [beforehand], dressed, waiting by the machine and as soon as the horn goes off, it’s as if a command to attack is sounded, all the machines start all at once and off we go. There you really have to work.” The young man concluded his account with a frank statement that played directly counter to images of communist

Mirror, Mirror, on the wall . . . Is the West the Fairest of Them All? 183

industriousness ingrained in the political consciousness during the 1950s and 1960s: when asked the leading question, “Was it [this tempo] a little unfamiliar after the way you worked here?” the young man replies, “It was, because it’s a fact—let’s face it—that here I made enough money and I practically didn’t do any work.”33 Similarly, a cook from Pardubice, although he successfully had found work as a cook in a hotel in Innsbruck, returned to Czechoslovakia, and “what brought him home was the unbelievably high work tempo that—as is well known—we are not accustomed to in the ČSSR.”34 What stands out in such statements is the alacrity with which the regime admitted to accepting low work discipline as a pillar of normalized Czechoslovakia. As new experts on comparative lifestyles, as bearers of an authority that had been acquired through real experience, these returnees were presented to the public as well suited to describe the advantages of communism and to explain indirectly why normalization was preferable to what was on offer further west. A young Slovak man, who had experienced the “unpleasant looks of those Austrians,” summarized the great advantages of life in normalized socialist Czechoslovakia: he was now happy at home because “we need not fear that we will be sacked from work. We can go peacefully to bed in the evening, (since we know) that in the morning we will still have this job, that nobody can take it away from us.”35 Altogether, the returnees’ narrations implied that a much slower pace of work combined with a higher level of job security embodied socialism’s continued promise. Although such statements certainly played on the old, familiar themes of capitalism versus communism—of greedy factory bosses urging workers to work beyond their capacity while refusing to share in the resulting financial bounties—a new element was introduced: the notion of a calm and quiet life, removed from the tumultuousness of both 1968 politics and late twentieth-century capitalism. The message was that a “socialist way of life” was potentially able to challenge and even surpass capitalism not by offering the same or better material commodities (for it could not) but by offering an unmatchable “quality of life.” This less quantifiable measurement of living standards frequently cropped up in the returnees’ public memories of roughing it in the West, implying that life in the Soviet bloc was more than the sum of work performed for the state and the monetary remuneration received for it. QUALIT Y OVER QUANTIT Y

Speaking to reporters on the tarmac of Prague’s airport, one woman who had just returned from the United States explained that although in America clothes might be available and cheap, they were in fact shoddy: “My husband

184 paulina bren

and I always said: at home things are relatively expensive, but genuinely of good quality.”36 The implication was that “good quality” stretched beyond seams and hemlines. The woman who had found clothes to be lacking “quality” in the United States had also found life outside the workplace to be lacking quality. As she confessed, in America she had never visited a cinema because over there “a person must give up all sorts of amusements and everything else that costs money.”37 Another returnee who was met by a reporter at the airport had the following exchange about the experience of everyday life in the United States: Returnee: “On the materialistic side—well, experiences vary. For example, if you were to wish to live the same way as you lived in Czechoslovakia, going to the theater, the cinema, out to dinner once in a while, or to some club—clubs, by the way, are a very expensive affair—then you’ll practically have to hand over your whole salary. I’ll give you one example. Let’s take the example of the Podolí swimming pool here in Prague. There you can go—I don’t know how much it costs now, but five years ago it was, I believe, 4 crowns. . . .” Reporter: “Yes, it still costs 4 crowns!” Returnee: “It still costs that, great! Thanks for the info, I’ll go there straight away tomorrow. Because I’ll tell you what, back there [in America] I hardly had any chance to go to any swimming pool, because there public pools don’t exist!”38

Another émigré, a talented bicyclist who had left for Sweden, “found out abroad that because of his life’s mistake [of emigrating], he had simply closed off the path to being an active athlete.”39 Having to work around the clock at his job, there was no time or money for training. As a reporter prompted yet another returnee, “But a person is nourished not only by his work?”40 Quality of life, in other words, counted. Another returnee pointed out that the “relations between people in America are on an incredibly low level,” the dynamic development of society and people that he had expected to find there was entirely lacking, and “on the contrary, in America one can say that their circumstances have worsened more so in the last 30 years than they have here at home.”41 Thus he had decided to “return at whatever cost,” firmly believing that the normalization regime would understand his mistake, because Czechoslovakia was after all a “more spiritually mature nation than America.”42 This last comment, in addition to playing up old European prejudices in the service of communist propaganda, summed up the ways in which Czechoslovakia’s leadership wished to have normalization viewed by its citizens. The returnee, presumably flattering the regime in return for amnesty, pointed to

Mirror, Mirror, on the wall . . . Is the West the Fairest of Them All? 185

its “spiritual,” rather than its economic, superiority over the United States. This remark was in line with the script that the normalizers gradually drew up for post–1968 communism. This script was not entirely rooted in a new form of socialist consumerism, as is often thought. Certainly, the promise of subsidized basic foodstuffs and the brief but visible influx of previously unseen products during the early 1970s did much to appease the average citizen. But normalization could not have existed and, one might argue, even thrived on this alone; Czechoslovakia’s relative prosperity was just that—a prosperity about which one could become enthralled only when contrasted with the meager consumer opportunities available in the less industrialized and less economically developed countries of the Soviet bloc. But the Czechs had never compared themselves to their Eastern neighbors and were not about to start doing so now; at the same time, levels of consumption in Czechoslovakia would never be able to match those in the West. Thus the key supplement to this meager socialist consumerism would need to be something of which there was an ever-dwindling supply under capitalism. LIVING IN THE E AST

The opportunity to live a life not merely—in fact, not at all—defined by work became a common trope of normalization. The 1985 report on television’s role in the anti-emigration campaign, discussed above, spelled it out clearly: “In terms of television’s overall influence, when it comes to asserting socialist patriotism, the center of gravity is rooted in the systematic presentation of the priorities of ‘real socialism.’ . . . Television does not describe our reality in terms of a society of plenty but first and foremost as a system in which a person can fully realize his human essence.”43 During normalization, realizing one’s “human essence” was to take priority over more concrete economic concerns. The terms “self-actualization” (sebeaktualizace) and “self-realization” (seberealizace) became favorite catchwords of the regime; both indicated a person’s chance to develop his or her best self, and to indulge in whatever activities that would require. It was the counterpoint to the sort of life lived on the other side of the Iron Curtain and described most vividly by Czechoslovakia’s returnees. “Self-actualization” and “self-realization” as key aspects of everyday life in late communism were especially prominent in the sphere of work and economic output in Czechoslovakia during the 1970s and 1980s. The Czech economist Otakar Turek argues that an entirely new principle steered economic decisions during this period, a principle that he refers to as “social comfort” (sociální pohodlí). According to Turek, “social comfort” and “social calm” were the two main concerns of the normalization regime, so much so that they

186 paulina bren

directly determined economic decisions. As a result, economic enterprises during normalization did not act as profit-seeking companies but as social institutions.44 As social institutions they tolerated work habits that would have been unacceptable to an economically geared institution: It was estimated that in each workplace 20 percent of employees were “unemployed” and simply collected a salary; during work hours it was permissible both to take care of other business and to partake of celebratory office parties; and if the management was clever, it even negotiated decent wages. Fears that these practices might threaten the enterprise’s competitive skills and perhaps even its existence never entered anyone’s mind. Economic damage produced by a system based on social comfort did not fall on the doorsteps of the originators but instead was collectivized and affected everyone. The credo of an average person was, on the one hand, “work as in socialism and live as in capitalism,” but because he understood that the two don’t go together, he was thankful even for the first half [of this formula].45

As Turek concludes, “In the workplace it was possible to live well.”46 The Czech sociologist Lenka Kalinová, who also investigated the conditions of the workplace during normalization, adopted a similar notion of social comfort as a way to explain how the limited possibilities to purchase consumer goods widely available in “developed countries” was “partially compensated for by certain social comforts in other areas.” These social comforts included “full employment, a tolerance for a low output and quality of work, cheap housing and cheap services, such as health care, transportation, public canteens, cultural services, and so on.” As a result, salaries were not a transparent indicator of wealth during normalization: “[Salaries] made up only a part of a family’s income. A large part was also made up of social revenues: pensions and other monetary benefits, free-of-charge services, different forms of appropriation and tax relief. . . . Rewards for work often satisfied social criteria, enterprises provided some social services, such as recreation, cheap meals and even housing, and so on.” As Kalinová points out, “During the ’70s and ’80s, the sources for satisfying the needs of citizens changed.”47 So what was behind this array of socialist perquisites by which the 1970s and 1980s became defined, and not only in Czechoslovakia but elsewhere in communist Eastern Europe? At a practical level, it meant that when specific goods and products could not be offered, then services and bonuses of a different kind were deployed. But at a more ideological level, Husák’s regime was attempting something far greater: to redefine the meaning of the economic ideal, to persuade Czechoslovakia’s citizens that, in the late twentieth century,

Mirror, Mirror, on the wall . . . Is the West the Fairest of Them All? 187

surrounded by the cacophony of not just capitalism’s rewards but also its tireless demands, Snow White (as well as her untainted innocence) was embodied in the “East” and not the “West.” It was an ambitious viewpoint, but hatched from necessity rather than political commitment to a set of socialist-inspired ideals. LIVING IT UP IN THE E AST

Not surprisingly, Czechs and Slovaks, faced with the drabness of normalization, were all too willing to embrace their newly articulated right as socialist citizens to “self-realize” as well as the concomitant state-endorsed workplace inefficiency that would allow for their self-realization. The problem—whether simply unanticipated by the leadership or else considered worthwhile for the sake of political consensus—was that although they did not belong to a capitalist system, a large number of Czech and Slovak citizens now chose to selfrealize as consumers. As early as 1972, a television exposé revealed that several dozen families had responded to an advertisement offering a car in exchange for a child. In a radio program that followed up on this story, the radio commentator made the point to his listeners that although it was not unusual for a young couple to wait some time before starting a family, “it is no longer in order if the birth, and the very need to have children, comes last, which means for many people it is first important to obtain an apartment, to furnish it with the best possible comforts, to get a car, to build a country getaway, and only then to consider perhaps having a child.”48 A month later, in February, General Secretary Husák saw fit to address the public on the radio to criticize the “indolence” that “makes them [young couples] attach greater importance to a car than to a child.”49 The conservative secretary of ideology Vasil Bil’ak, not one to be swayed by the whim of the people, admitted in 1971, just prior to the pivotal Fourteenth Party Congress that would set out the program of normalization, that second- and third-generation socialist citizens had different expectations from the postwar generation, expectations that the Communist Party would now have to confront: “[In 1948] we had posters in the shop windows about how socialism is going to look, and people were receptive to it. That was a different kind of excitement and a different historical time, and today we can’t put up posters about how socialism is going to look, but today shop windows have to be full of goods so that we can document that we are moving toward socialism [sic] and that we have socialism here.50 In many ways, the party was attempting to tackle this issue by introducing “self-realization” and “self-

188 paulina bren

actualization” into the lexicon of everyday life and thereby insisting that this spiritual exercise was fundamental to what was more generally called the “socialist way of life.” But as self-realization was sought by an increasing number of citizens through consumption, the distinctions between the “socialist way of life” and the frequently mocked “capitalist way of life” became more and more difficult to identify. In a 1976 letter to Rudé právo, a reader from the town of Liberec made this observation: “You write about a socialist way of life as if it were somehow different from life in capitalist countries. I see no substantial difference in the two. There, just as here, people chase after things, and everyone wants a car, a country cottage, and to live well. . . . I often read about consumer society in the West. Is it that here it’s called a ‘socialist way of life’ and in capitalist countries it’s called a consumer society?”51 The official reply was that while the normalization regime wished to ensure that people “can buy themselves a country cottage, a car, a washing machine, and a refrigerator,” in a “socialist way of life” these material objects function to improve the quality of one’s life. In contrast, in a capitalist consumer society, material objects define life.52 In other words, as another Rudé právo article titled “To Be Does Not Only Mean to Have” explained, in socialist society material objects are intended as a means for one’s “self-actualization,” and not an end unto themselves.53 It was a subtle difference that, much to the chagrin of the party, was lost on many a citizen. If anything, the state-sponsored program of self-realization, coupled with consumer opportunities both within and off the official grid, created a beast unique to late communism. A 1985 Czechoslovak government assessment of normalization titled, rather ethereally, “The Status and Tendencies Present in the Development of Socialist Society’s Consciousness,” and written specifically for the Central Committee, attempted to alert the leadership to this beast. The report outlined how socialist petit-bourgeois mentalities were colliding with “incorrect opinions from the crisis years [1968] and from the period of the bourgeois republic [the interwar years],” both of which still “linger in the consciousness of certain people.”54 Normalization, the authors of the report admitted, had exacerbated these already ingrained tendencies toward petit-bourgeois behavior, so that they were not only surviving but in fact were being “reproduced in new forms.” The ripple effect was yet more nefarious: A high standard of living brought features of a consumerist way of life, which generates specific petit-bourgeois thinking in some layers of our society. . . . The thinking of these people in turn produces individualism and weakens the ability of the Party to strengthen the efficacy of commu-

Mirror, Mirror, on the wall . . . Is the West the Fairest of Them All? 189

nal work. Along with this there coexists a tendency to admire the capitalist way of life, which itself is linked with the assumption that only private property opens up the space for human endeavor. . . . These negative phenomena in the consciousness of a part of our people are accompanied by their efforts to disturb the socialist way of life, socialist law, and to become rich through extra-curricular non-workplace methods, etc.55

Offered the chance to self-realize under late communism, too many socialist citizens had decided that consumer goods would be the most pleasurable means of identity formation. The result was a socialist East that differed quantitatively but not so much qualitatively from the capitalist West. While the report referred to the perpetrators as a “part of our people,” it then went on to confess that not only were white-collar workers (the intelligentsia) guilty of these attitudes, but so was the very backbone of communist society—the workers. What the report omitted, of course, was the yet more incendiary admission that Czechoslovakia’s leaders could be accused of the very same; and that in this, and only this, regard were they “of the people.” Their own blatant consumerist desires and capitalist copycat practices were frequently whispered about. Anonymous letters of complaint sent during the 1980s to Czechoslovak Television headquarters in Prague (a popular recipient of citizens’ gripes) reveals public knowledge of the party leaders’ lifestyles.56 One anonymous letter (thought by the Department of Correspondence to have been penned by a senior citizen, and a member of the party no less) complained about the private property of the ruling circle and specifically pointed to Secretary of Ideology Bil’ak’s then current project to adapt a small castle in the town of Lnář.57 Indeed, Bil’ak’s castle was merely a larger and more elaborate version of the average Czech’s own preoccupations with a weekend country cottage, known as the chata. This ubiquitous phenomenon, referred to as “chata mania” by the authorities, functioned as a unique outlet for the “second economy” and for more advanced consumerist fantasy. It was the epitome of self-realization run amok in late communism.58 RESISTING TEMPTATION

Those who resisted normalization and called on others to do the same thus also dealt in the currency of consumption and its false value as an identity creator. Milan Kundera, belligerent toward emigration in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, eventually moved to Paris. According to his own admissions, he would often find himself at dinner parties among his French intellectual peers, listening in as they discussed their favorite television shows. It must have been in these moments that he wistfully recalled his Central Eu-

190 paulina bren

rope, where culture still mattered; or so he wished to believe.59 Václav Havel, with whom he had once had the bitter debate about emigration (Kundera had sniggered at the defeatism of those who were leaving Czechoslovakia soon after the invasion), had remained in Prague. In normalization’s Prague, Havel had come to see that the East Central Europe of which Kundera dreamed was gone, gutted by communist rule, and had taken on the feel of any other late twentieth-century Western society. He thus referred to normalization as “posttotalitarianism” and described it as the “historical coming together of a dictatorship and a consumer society.”60 To some extent, Havel’s claim suggests, the pursuit of comparable lifestyles had erased differences between “East” and “West.” If this was so, then resistance to normalization’s status quo was not just about protesting political censorship. Indeed, in the 1980s, a layer of Czechoslovak youth who were not aligned with organized dissent but who lived in opposition to the state-endorsed ethos came into sharper focus. The samizdat journal Vokno (Window) was the setting for a debate about the failure of the cultural underground to embrace these youth who were increasingly tiring of normalization’s consumerist definitions of self-realization. One anonymous contributor argued that there were many youth who, although not outright dissidents, nevertheless resisted joining the camp of those who were “totally idiotic consumers, so-called discothèque cretins, unable to think of anything other than the latest hairdo, and who suit the authorities perfectly, because they are satisfied with getting hold of some knock-off of Western culture in the form of discothèques or Adidas.”61 These young people resisted the cultural status quo by identifying themselves with a low-key, unambitious, and anticonsumerist existence. A popular song among them went as follows: “Let Me Live”62 What have I done to you? Why do I have to live with you? I do not feel like staining my hands With the dust of stinking idle days. I do not feel like stealing Just to make a silly dream come true.63 I am happy with a tiny shelter And a large beer for dinner (No one believes I own no car) I do not want to hear a crooner64 Or to wax lyrical over TV commercials Or to spend 300 on shoes. In short, I want to be fit to live

Mirror, Mirror, on the wall . . . Is the West the Fairest of Them All? 191

Get stuffed with your Tuzex woolens,65 Japanese radios and jogging shoes. Keep your color tellies And the girls with bras called Nellie’s. By the way, just try to understand That life should not be daft Kindness that must be paid for.66 Bones that get crushed, People toppling over dumbly, How can I stay calm? I find no pleasure in your sex games, Your polished Chryslers and your harlots.67 Incidentally, I can make love better than you, And I am sick all over just living in this stew. To brag about who knows better. . . . I have no interest in your arguments Or in quarterly bonuses and a castle on the lake. I am content with what I can earn myself And would like to tell you this: Life is more than prattle And life is not bread alone So what’s the matter with you?

It was these same youth who, quite famously, and without any seeming organization behind them, began to congregate during the last year of communism beside the John Lennon mural wall on Kampa Island in Prague’s Little Quarter, and who became central to the Velvet Revolution that soon followed. When one considers which country of the Eastern bloc had the most visible “mirror, mirror, on the wall,” the German Democratic Republic comes to mind. After all, it had both the mirror (namely, West Germany) and the wall, and one was intimately tied to the other. Indeed, this relationship between mirror and wall, so to say, has spurred a body of excellent scholarship in the past decade by German historians of both East and West. For those wishing to participate in the necessary rethinking of the Cold War, particularly as seen from the vantage point of the Eastern bloc, their work is vital. The common denominator in this new historiography is the emphasis on consumerism, and the sense (if not always the conclusion), summarized early on by Katherine Verdery, that these countries and their communist governments ultimately could not sustain the tempo of their citizens’ consumerist desires.68

192 paulina bren

This emphasis on consumerism, and the paradigm it has forged, can, however, also impede investigations into the experience of communism in Eastern bloc countries other than the GDR. For elsewhere, as this chapter has shown, although there was a “mirror” through which images of the West were projected, the mirror itself and the view it offered was far more limited than the one afforded to citizens of East Germany who, after all, were regular consumers of West German television programming, radio broadcasts, and more. In addition, their wall was not built until 1961 whereas, in the case of Czechoslovakia (as well as Poland and Hungary), a “wall” had been erected long before, in 1948. Thus, although questions of consumerism are doubtless central to understanding the postwar communist period in Eastern Europe, there are multiple variations on the theme, so much so that the very meaning of communist consumerism must come under scrutiny. As Svetlana Boym wrote, Lefebvrian critiques of consumption and of middle-class fixations on commodities and the collection of goods, associated with the “West,” cannot readily be transferred onto Soviet Russia. In pointing to her Aunt Liuba’s china cupboard in Leningrad, filled with incongruous, often kitschy collections of bits and pieces, Boym insists that they represented not commodities but artifacts, and “an aesthetic need, a desire for beauty met with minimal available means, or the aesthetic ‘domestication’ of the hostile outside world.”69 This is not to say that citizens of communist Eastern Europe did not want to consume like their brethren on the other side of the Iron Curtain. If there was one practice that truly linked these often disparate communisms, it was their citizens’ eagerness to display the red and white can of Coca-Cola or the empty bottle of Johnny Walker scotch on top of the television console. As Judd Stitziel, writing on East German fashion shows, rightly notes, “the unique consumer culture that had become established in the GDR by the early 1970s was a contradictory and tension-filled amalgam of ‘capitalist’ and ‘socialist’ images, promises, values, and practices.” This capitalist-socialist mosaic was a recognizable feature across the region. But Stitziel, in asking “why East German citizens judged their standard of living using the ‘capitalist’ criteria of individual consumption while taking for granted subsidized social consumption,” concludes that they did so because their regime insisted on competing “with the West on capitalism’s own terms.”70 He is right—for the case of East Germany. But as I have shown here, Czechoslovakia’s post–1968 leadership recognized early on that while it should compete with Western consumption, it could not. In its place, albeit in a piecemeal fashion, it constructed the idea of a socialist lifestyle (referred to as a “socialist way of life”) that, in theory, was

Mirror, Mirror, on the wall . . . Is the West the Fairest of Them All? 193

supposed to provide things that the West could not; the most important of these was the opportunity to “self-realize” outside (and within) the workplace. Even if the leaders’ efforts ultimately failed, they should not and cannot be discounted. Normalization’s leadership may not have succeeded in downgrading the preeminence of consumerism in the late twentieth century, but that does not mean it failed to imprint new and competing priorities on late communist culture. Certainly, the majority of citizens grabbed the wrong end of the officially sanctioned stick and proceeded to link their much touted selfrealization with the much maligned Western-style consumption. But in so doing, they were still participating in a new model of socialism. They came to understand their rights (and obligations) as citizens as existing not within a political collective but within individualized spaces of self-realization. Moreover, these were spaces that transcended early communist notions of public and private. The result was an entirely new experience of communism in the 1970s and 1980s, the impact of which is still felt today. Thus, when this particular Snow White was awakened in 1989—many would say by the amorous advances of the West—hers was not the unadulterated “happily ever after” that so many had been led to believe.

CHAPTER  10

WHO WILL BEAT WHOM? SOVIET POPUL AR RECEPTION OF THE AMERICAN NATIONAL EXHIBITION IN MOSCOW, 1959

Susan E. Reid

The U.S. industrialist Norman K. Winston, special adviser to the American National Exhibition held in Moscow from 25 July to 4 September 1959, had predicted to This Week magazine earlier that year: We know the life we have is good. By the end of the summer, the millions of Russians who have seen our exhibit will know it too. . . . Unless I am a completely inept judge of human nature, that experience is going to stir not only hearts but also desires. Let it. Let the Russians want what we have. Let them clamor for it from their leaders. And let the clamor be so loud that it will demand answering. Perhaps then the Russian leaders, to keep their people happy, will divert some of their manufacturing facilities from weapons to the production of furniture, electric mixers, and prefabricated homes.1

In 2005, Victoria de Grazia invoked the exhibition and the famous NixonKhrushchev Kitchen Debate that took place there to illustrate a pan-European prostration before America’s “irresistible” market empire: By the end of the 1950s, it was clear that the United States had won handsdown on the scorecard of standard of living. True, the left press, as well as 194



who will beat whom? 195

a wide band of public opinion, would have agreed that in the United States there were no social safeguards for workers: as Khrushchev was quoted, “if you don’t have the money, you sleep on the street.” But whatever the defects, the USSR was becoming irrelevant as offering an alternative vision of collective well-being.2

The American National Exhibition (ANEM) was the first Soviet mass encounter with America—as America wanted itself to be seen—on Soviet turf. “A transplanted slice of the American way of life,” emphasizing leisure, consumption, and domesticity, the experience it offered Soviet viewers was a kind of virtual day trip to America in the heart of Moscow, in the absence of any realistic prospect of their being able to travel to see the real thing.3 It was held in Sokol´niki Park under a September 1958 agreement between the United States and the USSR, according to which national exhibitions demonstrating developments in science, technology, and culture were to be exchanged; the reciprocal Soviet National Exhibition had already opened at New York’s Coliseum on 29 June 1959.4 Among the exhibits at ANEM were a life-size model modern home of “the average American,” in whose yellow General Electric kitchen the notorious Kitchen Debate between Nixon and Khrushchev took place, three further kitchens including Whirlpool’s fully automated “Miracle” kitchen of the future, consumer goods for the home, toys, cars, fashion, voting machines meant to demonstrate the mechanisms of democracy, books, contemporary art, and the Family of Man photographic exhibition.5 Visited by some 2.7 million Soviet citizens over its six-week run, did ANEM stir the hearts and desires of these millions, as Winston and others predicted, and make them covet and clamor for what Americans had?6 Conceived, as he indicates, as a soft weapon of the Cold War against the Soviet Union, did the exhibition have the decisive impact historians have ascribed to it? Was it the fatal close encounter that “led” inexorably to the collapse of the Soviet Union 32 years later, when the United States “won” the standard-ofliving race “hands-down” and left the USSR’s alternative, socialist vision of collective well-being in the dust?7 “You are mistaken if you think you can convert [the USSR] to capitalism,” Khrushchev warned U.S. governors visiting Moscow a few weeks before the exhibition opened. “The Soviet people are proud of the accomplishments like the Sputnik, et cetera. They will not be converted.”8 Khrushchev would say that, of course. But was his confidence misplaced bravado? Contemporary U.S. reports from this Cold War front, produced during and immediately after the exhibition, were also significantly less confident in its success, as even Walter Hixson’s doggedly triumphalist account acknowledges.9 One of the American

196 susan e. reid

guides, Joan Barth, ended her report to the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), “Did our Exhibition jive with basic Russian impulses? No!”10 A USIA postmortem concluded that although the U.S. press back home had represented the fair as a smash hit that had “wowed” Moscow, “it wasn’t” and “it didn’t.”11 The truism that history is written from the standpoint of victors should alert us to the pitfalls of fitting the 1959 Soviet encounter with Amerika into a post-1991 teleological account of how the Soviet system collapsed, capitalism triumphed, and America won the Cold War. If the Soviet Union was still with us today, how might we now be trying to fit the encounter between its citizens and the United States’ self-projection at ANEM into an explanation of the Soviet system’s sustainability, sources of popular legitimacy and belonging, rather than into a narrative of communism’s fatal flaw? Might we not, in that case, look back to 1959 as a battle of claims and images in which the Soviet steel was tempered, resources to resist the incursions of the “Irresistible Empire” of American-style consumer culture were honed, and out of which Soviet social cohesion, identification, and national pride emerged strengthened? I pose this counterfactual question not out of nostalgia for a communist future that never was, nor simply to invert the received narrative, but to offer it as a lens through which to reconstruct the complexities, ambiguities, and possibilities that still seemed open in that historical moment. Rather than whiggishly tracing the genealogy of the inevitable collapse of the Soviet system and triumph of market capitalism back to the historical encounter in the appliance-saturated kitchen of 1959, let us give due consideration to the substantial evidence to the contrary, attending to contemporary sources that indicate that American “triumph” was far from a foregone conclusion. This evidence was systematically marginalized by Hixson.12 Yet, if it so profoundly impressed Soviet citizens, as Hixson writes, why were they, in his words, “still willing to be patient and give the socialist system the time it needed to catch up with the West”?13 A reassessment of the sources indicates that the exhibition’s effects were not simply, as the U.S. planners and sponsors expected and as some of the contemporary U.S. press claimed, to discredit the communist project and trigger a stampede of frustrated would-be consumers, but more ambivalent. In that response, the advantages of a system that promised social security, services, housing, and free education and health care still represented important sources of identification and patriotic pride. The archival record of responses to ANEM can also offer additional insights concerning Soviet society and attitudes under Khrushchev and the resilience or transformation of the “Stalinist subject” during the Thaw. For ANEM did not only project the ideal self-image of America across the Iron



who will beat whom? 197

Curtain. It was at once a shop window on the United States for Soviet citizens, and a window on the Soviet Union for American observers. As a rare occasion to have a large U.S. presence in the USSR, it offered an unprecedented opportunity for information-gathering concerning Soviet popular attitudes. A wealth of data was produced during and after the exhibition, which complements the observations of journalists who, in some cases returning to the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death, were fascinated by changes in how people dressed, lived, and comported themselves.14 Journalists’ efforts aside, the main means available to track Soviet popular attitudes had been through the testimony of émigrés to the United States and of people displaced by the war who found themselves in the U.S. zone of occupation in Europe. Notably, the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System, consisting of 705 interviews with refugees from the USSR between 1950 and 1953, produced data primarily on the period from 1917 to the mid1940s.15 Since the informants had left the Soviet Union before the death of Stalin, the Harvard Project was of limited use in tracking current shifts in public moods within the Soviet Union. It could not illuminate the social effects of, for example, Khrushchev’s secret speech, the intensive mass housing campaign launched in 1957, and the pledges to raise living standards, nor measure popular acceptance of or incredulity at the party’s pledge to “catch up and overtake America.”16 Data gathered around ANEM supplement Harvard Project materials in ways that not only served U.S. policy makers at the time but can also be useful retrospectively for the historian. Yet relatively little use has been made of this material despite active research interest in the exhibition and the availability of the sources, in English, in the U.S. National Archives.17 This is partly a symptom of the “Americo-centricity” of Cold War studies, of which David Caute has complained.18 ANEM, along with other Cold War events, has been examined primarily in terms of U.S. domestic and global interests. Regarding its impact on the Soviet Union, its aims have been taken for effects, as if the message received were identical to the message transmitted.19 Neglect of the available sources for assessing the Soviet reception and experience of ANEM may also be attributed to the persistence of Cold War prejudices and assumptions, on the basis of which Soviet responses are dismissed as uninformative and unworthy of further consideration. Thus official press reports are just propaganda and Khrushchev’s pronouncements no more than knee-jerk reactions and bluff, while Soviet viewers’ comments written in the exhibition visitors’ books—or at least those that contradict the “success” narrative—are the passive mouthings of cowed subjects “parroting”

198 susan e. reid

received truths, the result of brainwashing, rote rehearsals of the official line, and therefore of no further use as an indicator of what Soviet people “really” thought and felt. More will be said below about the nature of the archival sources, including reports by U.S. personnel and observers, Soviet reports by brigades of party activists, and viewers’ written responses in comments books. They are highly problematic—but what sources are ever transparent? I propose that an analysis of the archival record concerning the reception of ANEM can contribute to the historical project of understanding the Soviet popular experience of the Cold War. It can cast light on the question, which the USIA was particularly interested in probing at the time, “what socialism/communism means personally to Soviet citizens.”20 The Cold War subject we seek is not something fully formed anterior to the media representations and propaganda battles but is shaped through the categories of the global conflict. For as the anthropologist Katherine Verdery has noted, the Cold War is an epistemological order, whose value-weighted binary oppositions structured knowledge of the world (as they do to this day).21 How did the Cold War, as a conflict of images of modernity and the good life, shape the everyday life of ordinary historical subjects? How did the virtual day trip to Amerika in Moscow contribute to the “redefinition of their understanding of the word ‘normal’”—identified by Yale Richmond as an effect of increased foreign contact—in regard to Soviet living? Did the glimpse it afforded of the (ideal) American way of life and of the kitchen at its heart raise Soviet horizons of expectation and entitlement?22 What myths, orthodoxies, and founts of national pride did viewers mobilize against this demonstration of American superiority on the home front? And what sense of themselves was produced in response to the image the “other” projected of itself and to the image of them it presupposed? SHOOTING THEMSELVES IN THE FOOT?

Before we can evaluate the exhibition’s “success” or otherwise in achieving its aims, we should briefly consider why the Soviet authorities allowed ANEM at all. The publicly stated objective of the American Exhibition in Moscow was “to strengthen the foundation of world peace by increasing understanding in the Soviet Union of the American people, the land in which they live, and the broad range of American life, including American science, technology, and culture.” For internal planning purposes the objectives were expressed somewhat differently. It was an unprecedented opportunity for counterpropaganda: “to counter Communist fiction with facts on which Soviet people could base their judgements of the US.”23 It was, moreover, an offensive weapon of propaganda and cultural infiltration of the USSR, “the best oppor-



who will beat whom? 199

tunity [the United States] has yet had to reach a highly important target audience, including the politically alert and potentially most influential citizens of the Soviet Union,” and to make a “big contribution to the present ferment of ideas, especially in the Soviet intelligentsia.”24 It was designed to “create and exploit troublesome problems for the USSR” and sow seeds of dissent and dissatisfaction in order to undermine and gradually destabilize the USSR.25 A key area for this offensive on which we focus here was consumption and the material conditions of everyday life. The exhibition was explicitly intended to advance the Cold War’s third front—the living-standards race. It aimed to instill envy, delegitimate the regime, and ruin the Soviet economy by raising demand for products available only to Western consumers, as Winston indicated in the statement quoted at the outset.26 Its focus on lavish displays of consumer goods, household appliances, homes, and light automobiles at the expense of heavy machinery, production processes, and science was not a foregone conclusion, but it was informed by a decade of experience of exhibiting in Europe.27 It fitted the particular conjunction of interests of the exhibition’s U.S. government and business sponsors, which included General Motors, General Electric, and other major U.S. corporations involved in the retooling of wartime military innovations in technology and materials into automobile and household-appliance production.28 It was also premised on a particular conception of progress, according to which high levels of individual consumption, comfort, and leisure were the hallmarks of modernity; and on stereotypes of the Soviet target audience, especially women, as deprived and frustrated would-be consumers. An official USIA dispatch after the opening of the exhibition predicted that the American kitchen could result in “a minor feminine revolution in Russia.”29 It was a Trojan horse of the “American way of life,” which aimed to breach the fortress of communism, steal away the hearts of millions of deprived Soviet Helens, and restore them to their true consumerist selves, from which state socialism had alienated them. Were the Soviet authorities, then, simply gullible Trojans in agreeing to allow the exhibition into Moscow? They surely knew to beware Greeks bearing gifts? Indeed, Khrushchev complained to U.S. governors a few weeks before the exhibition opened that Soviet intelligence had seen U.S. State Department documents that calculated that thousands of Soviet citizens would defect or want to overthrow his government as a result of ANEM.30 Why then did his regime allow this occupation of a corner of Moscow by the idealized America-in-miniature? The Khrushchev regime’s high-risk strategy of opening up the Soviet Union to foreign exchange and influence presents one of the period’s big conundrums for historians. Cumulative ad hoc decisions and catalogues of

200 susan e. reid

errors may be part of the story. But the decision to allow ANEM was based on the expectation of benefits important enough to justify the risks and on confidence that the USSR was well placed to repulse the threats and capitalize on its potential gains. This confidence arose in part from the launch of Sputnik and from the international success of socialist bloc pavilions at the Brussels World Fair in 1958, which contrasted with the United States’ relatively low impact.31 Second, given the reciprocal basis of the agreement, the risk of American contamination of the Soviet public was to be set against the opportunity for propaganda in America on the Soviet Union’s own terms. Third, international prestige was to be gained. Khrushchev actively sought an official exchange agreement with the United States because he considered that it would confirm the Soviet Union’s superpower status on a par with the United States.32 Fourth, Khrushchev was committed to the policy of peaceful coexistence and the defusion of arms escalation. Greater emphasis on diplomacy was, at least in part, motivated by the recognition that reduced defense expenditure was essential if Khrushchev was to deliver on his promises of higher living standards.33 Fifth, as Khrushchev told the U.S. governors, exchanges were all very well, but they should lead to increased trade.34 The exchange of exhibitions presented a chance to demonstrate Soviet technological progress and products in the United States and to send out the message, loud and clear, that the USSR was open for business. Although ANEM and the Soviet equivalent in New York were designated “national exhibitions” rather than trade fairs, increased trade links and contracts were, from the Soviet point of view, a likely and highly desirable spin-off from improved relations. The Soviet exhibition explicitly solicited trade.35 The two exhibitions were overshadowed, however, by an inauspiciously timed State Department statement on trade with USSR of 4 July 1959. Thus U.S. obstruction to trade agreements became a key theme in the Soviet response to ANEM.36 Sixth, the American exhibition was expected to play a positive role in enabling the Soviet Union to achieve its widely proclaimed goal to “catch up and overtake America.” Khrushchev informed the delegation of U.S. governors that in spite of their exhibition’s aggressive intent, he would encourage the Soviet people to visit it because the USSR was going to overtake the United States through the Seven-Year Plan and he wanted the people to see some of the things they would eventually have.37 In the same vein, Khrushchev’s speech at the exhibition’s official opening printed under the heading “We Will Overtake America,” declared the exhibition “instructive.” “We can learn something. We look at the American exhibition as an exhibition of our own achievements in the near future.”38 The Soviet authorities expected ANEM to promote the Soviet project



who will beat whom? 201

of catching up and overtaking America in two main ways. It would serve as an incentive, by making manifest, concretely and vividly, the rewards that awaited Soviet people’s continued efforts, a method familiar to the Soviet public in the form of socialist realism.39 Furthermore, the exhibition was to speed the Soviet Union toward attainment of the radiant future of communism in direct, practical ways, offering a vital opportunity to learn from the Cold War adversary. Reverse engineering and technology transfer provided ways to leapfrog whole stages of technological development and fast-forward the Soviet “Scientific Technological Revolution.”40 It was expected that models would be left behind, allowing Soviet engineers to “appropriate” them at leisure. The strategic access the exhibition was expected to afford to the latest Western scientific and technological developments was so essential in the postwar world that it outweighed the risks of ideological contamination. The expectation (both official and popular) that ANEM would be an instructive “museum of the future” from which to glean new processes and technologies determined the mode of spectatorship viewers brought to the exhibition. Finally, we should not underestimate the Marxist regime’s conviction of the historical superiority of socialism. Khrushchev and the party premised decisions on their own projection of the ideal Soviet person as a rational being who understood that the greatest good of the largest number of people lay not in capitalist self-interest and acquisitiveness but in the “alternative vision of collective well-being” offered by socialism. Indeed, De Grazia’s claim—that the socialist path to modernity, liberty, and happiness, based on social benefits and collective consumption, was becoming irrelevant already by 1959— was premature. Since Stalin’s death, promises had been repeatedly made and measures introduced to raise living standards. The greatest importance was attached, in the Seven-Year Plan adopted early in 1959, to the expansion and improvement of services and to the intensive construction of mass housing, although promises of increased quantities and varieties of consumer goods such as domestic appliances also figured. The British economist Alec Nove, writing in 1960, considered the Soviet regime’s commitment to improve welfare services momentous enough to call in question received Western assessments of the nature of the Soviet system, which were based on the assumption that it could maintain power only through coercive force.41 The promises and palpable signs of improvements were expected to underpin state socialism’s legitimacy and were kept vividly before the eyes of the populace before and during the exhibition.42 Although the potential gains were substantial, Khrushchev’s pledge “to catch up and overtake America” was, nonetheless, a contradictory and high-risk strategy. The state-socialist modernization project claimed to cre-

202 susan e. reid

ate a form of modern civilization that was distinct from, and in competition with, Western capitalist modernity. Yet the slogan positioned America as the benchmark of progress, thereby implying acceptance of its measures and locking the Soviet (and East European) leaders into constant comparison with the symbols of prosperity set by the West.43 This contradiction is now widely identified as the Achilles’ heel of state socialism, which, by placing it under irreconcilable tension, determined its collapse between 1989 and 1991. Would Soviet viewers in 1959 be able to reconcile the contradictions when confronted with America in Moscow? WHO WAS THE PUBLIC?

Who constituted the public for the exhibition? Substantial as the estimated audience figures were, we cannot assume that it constituted a representative cross-section of the Soviet population. Moreover, the absence of consistent demographic data, as well as of any representative sample or control group, makes it difficult to map responses reliably onto social categories, although we can make some informed guesses. Geographically, the balance was inevitably skewed toward Muscovites, but as one writer in the visitors’ book objected to the assumption of a previous contributor, “You think only Muscovites visit? That’s incorrect. There are many from other places.”44 Many comments in the visitors’ books were reportedly written in other languages of the Soviet Union, and a number of writers identified themselves as Latvians or Lithuanians.45 As for gender, according to Richmond, visitors to U.S. exhibitions in the Soviet Union over a 32-year period (of which ANEM was the first) were mostly young men, that being the group with the greatest freedom from commitments, allowing them to queue through the night for tickets.46 Men appear to have predominated particularly in one key group of visitors to Sokol´niki, party activists sent to the exhibition by their regional party committees to keep an eye on other visitors. U.S. staff reported that such “agitators” constituted “the preponderance of visitors” in the first week.47 Restricted access to tickets made attendance a privilege. The Soviet authorities controlled the distribution and sale of tickets, enabling the vetting of visitors, which favored politically reliable elements such as those rewarded for party loyalty or work feats.48 In the first two weeks, visitors to the exhibition apparently included an unrepresentative proportion of party members, gilded youth, and others whom the Soviet system had served well: people who had a stake in the system and could be expected to know how to present themselves as good Soviet citizens in order to get on in life.49 As the weeks went by, however, controls eased—especially after a meeting between Khrushchev and Eisenhower was agreed upon on 3 August—and the public, if not fully



who will beat whom? 203

representative, became quite mixed. Visitors included workers, since factories obtained tickets for selected workers as well as for bosses.50 And by week three, the Soviet middle class of technical and cultural intelligentsia and professionals were apparently well represented. U.S. Foreign Service personnel reported that the public was composed, to a significant extent, of “what might be called the ‘new class’ of intelligentsia, professionals, and persons privileged by relationship with prominent figures. They are apparently not being selected with particular care for political reliability.”51 The likelihood that the technical intelligentsia were well represented should be borne in mind below when we discuss the common complaint that the exhibition was insufficiently informative about technological developments. Awareness of the exhibition was not limited to those who were able to visit in person but spread through word of mouth, the circulation of souvenirs and brochures (especially pamphlets distributed by automobile companies), and through the official media coverage. Keen to demonstrate the exhibition’s reach, U.S. observers engaged in a kind of archaeology of the distribution of lapel buttons, mapping their trajectory across the Soviet Union from Vilnius to Siberia.52 Contemporary U.S. Foreign Service reports from Moscow to the State Department made much of such sightings, construing these, along with the queues for tickets and the frequent resort to illicit means to get in, as indicators of success.53 Quantitative data on audience preferences among the exhibits was also gathered by the voting machines.54 Like box-office receipts or ratings, however, such data are limited as an indicator of reception. The number of sightings of buttons does not tell us what it meant to wear one, for example, nor even that the wearer had seen the exhibition. A man in Vilnius said that wearing the button should be taken as a sign of sympathy for the United States; in other contexts and social milieus it was simply a status symbol.55 Likewise, as the authors of the USIA’s preliminary report on “Visitors’ Reactions” cautioned, “a person can go to an exhibit in order to laugh at it or disagree with it. The attendance figures alone, therefore, should be regarded as an ambiguous criterion of popularity, especially since it is out of line with the more direct testimony of the guides as to what people say about the Exhibit after they have seen it.”56 How can we evaluate whether or how the exhibition changed people’s minds? THE ARCHIVAL SOURCES AND THEIR LIMITATIONS

Unusually in the case of ANEM, the source base for researching reception is quite extensive.57 What problems do the available sources raise for the historian, and can they yield usable insights about Soviet society in 1959? “For many years we have been trying to get some sounding of the inter-

204 susan e. reid

ests of Soviet people—particularly in respect to life in the United States,” noted one U.S. embassy official.58 The USIA regularly undertook audience surveys to identify foreign attitudes toward American life and culture and monitored the effectiveness of its cultural offensive, including its impact at trade fairs and other international expositions.59 ANEM was no exception; although this was more difficult in the Soviet Union than in Western Europe, USIA also sought ways to gather information around the exhibition in Moscow.60 Soviet visitors were subjected to surveillance by U.S. embassy personnel and exhibition guides who listened in on their conversations, monitored their responses and conduct, took notes on the questions they asked, and used all means available to gather information concerning the exhibition’s impact and the current state of Soviet popular opinion. Weekly reports on the conduct of the exhibition, based on observations and reports on conversations with Soviet citizens by embassy staff and exhibition guides, were dispatched to Washington.61 Unsurprisingly, the central questions U.S. agencies pursued concerned attitudes toward the fundamental Cold War dichotomy: socialism versus capitalism. In debriefing the guides after ANEM, USIA interviewers wanted to know “what—in their personal life—[Soviet citizens] attribute to [the socialist] system and what they hope/expect it will give them in the future.”62 A report on “Soviet Attitudes and Public Opinion,” sent by the U.S. Embassy in Moscow to the State Department in Washington in June 1959, shortly before ANEM opened, sought to discern “the real attitude of the Soviet people towards the regime and the society in which they live.” According to the signing officer, First Secretary of the U.S. Embassy David Mark, From the point of view of U.S. policy, the most important factor in this realm relates to a judgment about the stability and essential internal cohesion of Soviet society. Is it likely to experience serious stresses? Does the populace in general aspire to a change in the basic economic and political framework? Do people formulate their individual and collective aspirations in terms of the present system or outside of it? Is the regime in power something external to most Soviets, or is it a fact of life, like the weather? Is there a potential for resistance to the regime? Is disaffection growing or declining?63

But gathering data on popular attitudes was not a simple matter for foreign agencies in the Soviet Union, nor was its contemporary interpretation free of Cold War categories and assumptions. A contributor to this report cautioned: “the nature of the totalitarian state with its monopoly of propaganda backed by the omnipresent potential to apply an unlimited amount of coercive force,



who will beat whom? 205

makes any estimate of popular attitudes a risky business.” Moreover, “two foreigners can and frequently do talk to the same Soviet citizen and come away with entirely different opinions of his real attitude.”64 This instability of meaning should not be put down solely to the subjectivity of the foreign observer’s interpretation of popular attitudes. It also points to the situatedness of the utterances, whereby an individual might adopt different positions in different contexts and with different interlocutors. When the USIA monitored opinion in Western Europe, it was able to commission local opinion-polling companies to disguise the fact that the questions were being asked on behalf of Americans and thereby to discount “courtesy bias”—that is, the tendency, in accordance with the rules of polite conversation, to say what one thinks the questioner wants to hear. In the absence of such a possibility in the USSR, fluent Russian-speaking Americans were deployed to gather opinions by mingling in the crowd at ANEM pretending to be ordinary Russian visitors.65 It is questionable, however, whether people who had grown up in America would have succeeded in passing themselves off as Russians in 1959; their dress and bearing were likely to betray their identity as foreigners, even if their language did not. Thus in assessing their findings, we should factor in the possibility of either courtesy bias or confusion and distrust. Moreover, in the USSR, U.S. information-gathering was dependent upon self-selected informants or chance encounters, without the possibility of constructing samples such as were used for surveys of public attitudes in Western Europe. To judge from the weekly Foreign Service dispatches from Moscow, opinion-soundings were based on a disproportionate representation of taxi drivers with whom embassy diplomats would strike up conversations. The conversations and reports on Soviet attitudes are also male-dominated: the named Foreign Service officers who provided information are all male and reveal little access to Russian women’s views, more often falling into conversation or friendships with other men (especially given the suspicion of diplomats having sexual relations with the Cold War enemy). The presence of many women among the 75 guides at ANEM with daily contact with Russians, male and female, went some way to redress this gender imbalance. The USIA interviewers, in debriefing the guides, showed an interest in questions about gender roles: how, for example, did visitors respond to the information that fewer American women work than Soviet women? Nevertheless, the women’s perspective is underrepresented in the data. Given the conventional gendering of interests, this circumstance is significant when we consider responses to consumer goods for the home. The written comments

206 susan e. reid

provide some corrective here, to the limited extent that the gender of the author can be determined. The information thus gathered was intended to assist the USIA in honing its tools and skills of soft warfare against the Soviet system. The interest was narcissistic, concerned primarily with the image of the United States as it was reflected back by the foreign audience.66 It was also necessary to demonstrate to Senate and business sponsors the cost-effectiveness of investment in the USIA’s cultural offensives. Thus the compilers of reports are likely to have sought out evidence that the exhibition was achieving its objectives and helping to fulfill the USIA’s brief, or—in cases of failure—ways of de-legitimating unwanted responses. We should expect, then, on balance, that evidence would be skewed toward demonstrating the exhibition’s success. Soviet visitors to ANEM were not only subjected to surveillance by U.S. embassy and exhibition staff. They were also closely observed by internal forces, including fellow viewers and brigades of party activists from institutes and enterprises around the city who were sent each day for this purpose by the Moscow City Party Committee. The reports of these brigades are cited by Hixson, but insofar as they provide evidence that contradicts his “success” narrative, he dismisses them as “not an accurate assessment of the typical response,” on the questionable assumption that they were designed to reassure CPSU superiors. Meanwhile, he privileges the evidence of U.S. exhibition and embassy personnel, although, as noted, this was surely also skewed toward reassuring their superiors.67 Yet to test the U.S. data and balance their bias toward evidence of the exhibition’s success, we need to attend to this Soviet material. It would be useful if we could also triangulate the somewhat haphazard data produced by listening in with references to ANEM in more systematic indigenous sociological surveys of public opinion. Systematic public opinion research in the Soviet Union began only after ANEM, however, with the formation in May 1960 of the Komsomol´skaia pravda Institute of Public Opinion under philosopher Boris Grushin.68 VIE WERS’ WRIT TEN COMMENTS

In the absence of any systematic contemporaneous survey of reception (aside from the crude, quantitative polling that was conducted by the voting machine), the responses that viewers wrote in the exhibition comments books are a valuable source. Visitors’ books were introduced in the second week of the exhibition, missing the first week when “agitators” reportedly predominated in the audience. They were located at various points around the grounds, although not every individual exhibit had its own book, which inevitably affected the distribution of comments on specific exhibits.69 Their introduction



who will beat whom? 207

was suggested by U.S. embassy staff; familiar with local custom, they knew that Soviet exhibition-goers were accustomed to having their opinions solicited in this format.70 The comments books were owned by the U.S. hosts. The Soviet authorities could “legitimately” access them only by having agents pass themselves off as ordinary visitors. Party activists could not, without risking an international incident, tear out pages, erase comments, remove the books overnight, or type them up to pass to higher instances as they might do with Soviet exhibitions.71 At best, they could take notes or memorize comments (as journalists appear to have done for citation in newspaper articles). The uses of comments books as a means to evaluate visitor reaction have been debated in museum studies in recent years.72 They differ from other types of data used in audience research, such as questionnaires, in the degree to which they are produced independently of the researcher and his or her interests. This has both advantages and disadvantages. On the down side, the applicability of “scientific” methods to analyze viewers’ written comments is limited. This generic limitation is exacerbated, in the present case, by the form in which the visitors’ books for ANEM are available to the researcher: typed up and translated into English, unbound, and somewhat haphazardly filed. It is not clear how the transcripts correspond to the way the visitors encountered them: whether they were typed in the order written, for example. According to the USIA’s preliminary report on visitors’ reactions, some two thousand visitors wrote comments, in which case the transcripts seem to be incomplete or selective (the typists and translators could have been instructed to select a sufficient quantity of positive comments or translated only those in Russian).73 These factors render any attempt at quantitative analysis not only uninformative but misleading, in that it would give an unwarranted veneer of scientific rigor. Although a quantification of “favorable” and “unfavorable” remarks on individual exhibits was attempted at the time (see table 10.1), it was apparently based on only a small proportion of comments and did not indicate whether each was counted once only (comments often referred to several exhibits and often mixed favorable and unfavorable points). Other losses are that the quality of the translations is not high, and the transcripts are deprived of the nontextual (visual and material) qualities that add an expressive layer of communication to original comments books for other Soviet exhibitions in the Thaw: dog-eared pages, drawings, arrows, and comments scribbled over others. Furthermore, unlike a formal sociological survey, the authors do not constitute a representative sample but are self-selected, and comments are rarely accompanied by sociodemographic information.74 Thus a systematic

208 susan e. reid

analysis by social category is impossible (although if the original Russian were available, the vocabulary, grammatical construction, and handwriting would allow informed guesses). As with the U.S. observers’ reports discussed above, this limitation is particularly regrettable regarding gender, given the stereotypically feminine address of the displays. If young men predominated in the audience, as suggested above, it does not follow that they predominated among those who chose to write in the comments books (a number of the authors of favorable comments on kitchens and domestic appliances identified themselves as female). On the plus side, comments books more closely reflect the comment writer’s agenda than the researcher’s, and this offers some advantages. Presenting no more than blank pages inviting viewers to set down their impressions, they are not structured by set questions that predetermine the focus of response. Thus, as Museum Studies expert Gordon Fyfe notes, they constitute a kind of “visitor research against the grain,” which has the advantage that they may Table 10.1. Quantified Breakdown of Comments on Specific Exhibits in Visitors’ Books for the American National Exhibition in Moscow, 1959 Category Favorable Unfavorable Cars 71 — Family of Man 28 2 Guides 26 8 Circarama 19 — Consumer goods 16 — Color TV 14 — Miracle kitchen 11 2 Model house 8 2 Art 7 37 + 5 (sculpture) Organization of exhibit (crowd control, signs, visibility, etc.) 5 19 + 2 (lack of signs) Books 4 — Machines & technology 6 82 (lack of science & technology) Voting machines 3 2 Fashions 3 — Geodesic dome 3 — Sports 3 — Music 2 — Pepsi-Cola 2 — Architecture 2 — Furniture 2 — Toys — 9 Source: NARA 306/1043/11.



who will beat whom? 209

“elicit unanticipated visitor responses.”75 The written comments are the closest we will come to hearing the viewers talk back “in their own words,” as opposed to reported speech and digests—although in what sense those words may be called “their own” is just one of numerous caveats. It would be naïve to see comments books as unmediated traces of “what the viewer really thought.” Although the page was not structured by a grid inviting viewers to fill in answers to specific questions and personal details, they are not free in the sense of being undetermined by cultural constraints, convention, format, or context. Writing in comments books has its own genre conventions and social rules. Studying inscriptions in the comments books of Israeli settlement museums in the 1980s, Tamar Katriel found them to be shaped by the model of polite guests paying a visit, with highly appreciative expressions of gratitude in semi-ritualized terms predominating. If comments were critical at all, then it was only of details. They never questioned the value or relevance of the enterprise as a whole.76 At ANEM, Soviet viewers were positioned as guests for the day in the “American Corner” of Moscow. The comments books were an “American” space, writing in which viewers clearly envisaged their addressee as the U.S. hosts—whether the exhibition organizers or the American people. Thus they may be conceived as guest books soliciting a ritualized comment on departure, and we might, then, expect a high proportion of polite general comments and bland platitudes. Inscriptions of the routine “thank you for your exhibition” or “we were there” type are far from predominant, however, and many such comments, having begun by thanking the Americans for their exhibition, go on to make substantive criticisms. Unlike Katriel’s polite guests who never questioned the value or relevance of the enterprise as a whole, a number of Soviet visitors claimed that they had got little or nothing out of the exhibition. Agitators’ reports (discussed below) suggest that this response was even more prevalent than the transcribed comments books reflect. Several factors operated in the contrary direction to the etiquette of the polite guest. First, we should entertain the possibility that Soviet visitors were unaware of the etiquette or less concerned with decorum than Katriel’s Israeli guests, or that Soviet culture had different conventions. But Soviet viewers who were regular exhibition- and museum-goers were certainly familiar with the custom of putting out books for comments—almost mandatory at Soviet exhibitions—and with the etiquette of politely responding to the “gift” of the exhibition (although not all viewers at ANEM fell into this category of initiates: one confessed in the guest book that he had never been to an exhibition before, preferring basketball).77 Second, writing in comments books took place in public, with an aware-

210 susan e. reid

ness that other visitors—some of whom could turn out to be snoops—might be watching and could read them and identify the author. According to U.S. reports, “agitator types,” mostly male, intimidated viewers and tried to discredit the guides with awkward questions.78 Moreover, some of the comments were interventions by activists posing as genuine viewers. Agitators’ surveillance and interventions are more than figments of Cold War paranoia; the reports that each brigade of party activists submitted to the Moscow City Party Committee after their watch gave specific examples of how they monitored viewers and of what they said or wrote.79 In cases where comments begin enthusiastically then abruptly launch into criticism, we cannot discount the possibility that the author was interrupted. Other viewers, fearing that they had been observed spending too long studying a display or talking to an American guide, might compensate by writing a hostile comment in the visitors’ book. An example of interruption is given in the agitators’ account. Some particularly zealous activists reported: When we went up to the comments book we saw a woman of middle age, not badly dressed, clearly from the white-collar milieu. She wrote a comment with the following content: “I like the exhibition a lot. We see that you have a higher standard of living than we have, the people live better than we do.” We asked her how she came to the conclusion that Americans live better. Perhaps various pots and pans had so stunned her that she couldn’t see anything else? She began to cover what she had written with her hand. We said one does that only when ashamed. In short, our presence made her finish her comment somewhat differently from how she had intended. She ended, “But our government also takes care of the people and tries to make life better.” . . . During our conversation with her, the public gathered around. They supported us, and as a result several others joined our signature. So that immediately after this comment . . . another was written underneath: “I didn’t like the exhibition, I am disappointed.”80

The same activists also reported that they had written a comment about the “typical” American house under pseudonymous female signatures. They cited the text they had inscribed, which appears also in the American transcript, standing out from many others by its length and authoritative tone, as in this excerpt: Poor little house! During twelve days of your existence more was said about you than any other exhibit here. People began talking about you before you were brought to our country. You were criticized because you were too expensive and because you were not typical of American conditions where thousands of families were cooped up in slums and it was laughable for them to hear that you were typical. We saw your slums with our own

who will beat whom? 211



eyes because we lived there several years. We know well the Italian and Latin blocks and Chinatown and even visited Harlem once in daylight, though apprehensively, because we could have been taken for Americans and killed by mistake. . . . We Russians say: “All this unquestionably is very nice. Thank you, Americans for trying to show us Russians what houses should be built and how to furnish them. Many thanks, but such lightweight buildings do not please us. Do not foist on us your manner of living.”81

The effects of agitators cannot be overlooked. But neither can we ignore critical comments on the exhibition, as some contemporaneous U.S. reports and retrospective analyses have done. In a circular argument or syllogism, they construe positive comments as authentic or sincere solely on the internal grounds that they are favorable, without external corroboration. Meanwhile, all comments that churlishly reject the American dream are discounted as inauthentic just because they are critical, explained away by reference to “brainwashing” and fear of surveillance. Thus one of the U.S. reports generalized, “Those individuals who are not conditioned by ideological outlook seem to come away from the Exhibition with positive impressions.”82 Hixson treats only favorable comments as legitimate, assuming that all critical comments are written by agitators or are the direct result of intimidation by them and can therefore be conveniently discounted. Conversely, he automatically ascribes the paucity of positive comments to intimidation by party officials monitoring activity around the books, assuming, without providing direct evidence or entertaining other possible causes, that most people would have written positive, pro-American, and anti-Soviet comments had they dared. Thus he constructs a narrative of the exhibition as an overwhelming success and maintains the Cold War story of Soviet intimidation and cowed people who would express anti-Soviet, pro-American sentiment were they not deprived of authorship and agency and alienated from their “real” responses.83 AGITATORS’ REPORTS

We should not get carried away, however. Only one comment can be securely attributed to activists and, aside from a handful of documented examples, we cannot know which ones were written under their eagle eye.84 Nor can we know what authors might have written had they not been watched. Lack of positive comments need not be attributed solely to intimidation. Their absence could indicate that people had nothing positive to say. Agitators overheard a railway worker in conversation with another visitor comparing ANEM unfavorably to the Soviet Exhibition of National Economic Achievements. He cited the quantity of notes he took as a measure of

212 susan e. reid

his relative approval: “Here [at ANEM] I wrote nothing, but there I wrote a whole notebook. I’ll bring it home to my workmates—there’ll be something to tell them about.”85 Brigades of agitators keeping vigil on different days reported that they overheard few positive comments, nor saw many written in the books. Their reports are full of notes on the good behavior, correct attitudes, and appropriately churlish responses of the Soviet public. Given that their role at the exhibition was to watch for pro-American manifestations and excesses of enthusiasm on the part of Soviet visitors (as well as to keep an eye on the Americans), this is surprising and—contra Hixson—should be taken seriously.86 Moreover, Americans eavesdropping on visitors’ conversations also recorded more negative comments than positive.87 Only occasionally do the agitators complain about bad behavior on the part of the public. “Unfortunately, sometimes visitors come to the help of the guides, especially young visitors. Some of them praise the American exhibition, American art, and even the American way of life. A directly anti-Soviet mood even appears.” A visitor was overheard declaring that “he was fed up with living in the USSR and wanted to leave as soon as possible.”88 One brigade reported on viewers taking the books from the book display. Yet, they excused this as the result of a misunderstanding that it was free literature meant to be taken away.89 Such responses appear to have been far from prevalent, however. In general, according to the agitators, the “majority behaved very well.” People knew what they should do when their country and everything it stood for was challenged by a foreign power. One report concluded that party committees “have explained well to Muscovites how they should conduct themselves at the exhibition.” Another found that “Soviet viewers behave with dignity at the exhibition without any obsequiousness toward America,” and “visitors take a critical attitude to the [U.S.] exhibition,” while showing great interest in the competing Soviet exhibition that was set out on the approach to it.90 One of the most common reactions agitators observed and overheard throughout the six-week period was disappointment. Report after report noted the impression “that the U.S. exhibition to a large extent disappoints the visitor. Everyone expected much more than it gives.” “Based on observation, the majority of visitors speak with disillusionment: ‘the exhibition didn’t particularly impress us’; ‘it is the twilight of American life’; ‘we expected more’; ‘in a week there won’t be many people here’; ‘having been here myself, I’ll tell others they may as well not bother coming.’” “As in previous days, visitors remain very dissatisfied with the exhibition. We heard: ‘why did we go, it was just a waste of time!’ ‘we expected to see a lot of interesting technology, automatization, and mechanization. To our surprise we found nothing of the sort and even the house of the “average American” so highly praised by the



who will beat whom? 213

Americans themselves, made no particular impression on us.’” “The Americans wanted to surprise us by showing objects of consumption but did not succeed. The shoes and clothes are much worse than ours, and no one here would want to wear them. The furniture is low and badly made.”91 Two weeks into the exhibition, activists heard no expressions of enthusiasm from the Soviet visitors, only a few positive comments about the cars. Even in this regard, a Moscow worker said, “We don’t need such huge and luxurious automobiles at this time. I wouldn’t buy one like that. But a little mini-car [mashinka] to drive with the family on a mushrooming or fishing outing at the weekend—that’s what I’d buy. But even in America they don’t have cars like that.”92 “A female citizen coming out of the exhibition declared: ‘don’t the Americans have anything more to show us?’”93 A brigade from the Institute of the World Economy and International Relations, keeping vigil outside the exhibition, conducted a kind of exit poll in which all respondents expressed disenchantment or, at most, measured and qualified admiration for individual exhibits.94 BR AINWASHED DUPES/LIBER AL SUBJECTS?

Disappointment is also one of the most common sentiments recorded in the comments books, as we will see. The writers may have been on their best behavior to pay a visit to the “American corner,” but best behavior could mean contradictory things. They were torn between the conventions of the polite guest and the positions of Soviet patriots, defending their country under attack. Some comments try to do the right thing by both norms, mixing in a single message polite platitude with substantive criticism. Many comments make one or more of the same points as appear in the agitators’ inscription. Are we to conclude that they are also by agitators masquerading as “simple” viewers? Or did the writers look back through the books and, impressed by the authoritative tone of the agitators’ comment, model their own statements on it? As visitors’ books for other exhibitions make clear, to write a comment was to enter into a virtual conversation with previous viewers, and it was normal practice to read their comments before formulating one’s own judgment, sometimes in opposition but often by appropriating the terms of earlier remarks.95 Above all, since the agitators were reproducing orthodoxies widely disseminated in the press, party lectures, and workplace briefings, viewers could have brought the stock phrases with them from other sources. Public opinion, as always, was formed and articulated within a discursive matrix, which included, among other things, their long-standing education about the benefits of socialism and inequities of capitalism, prior encounters with America’s own self representation (in the magazine Amerika, for example), Khrushchev’s

214 susan e. reid

ex cathedra judgment of the exhibition, and the media coverage of the exhibition and of Nixon’s visit. A number of standard lines were adopted in the press to discredit the exhibition. It was a Potemkin village that dissembled the inequities of American society; it had too few technological, industrial, and scientific exhibits and too many consumer goods, rendering it more like a department store than an exhibition of national achievement; there was nothing special there; and the display was a poorly organized miscellany.96 Responses were also shaped by other developments, discursive and material, including the party’s promises to give greater priority to consumer goods production and services; its intensive and already highly visible housing drive initiated in 1957; and the Soviet counterpropaganda measures such as the competing exhibitions that sought to play these achievements to the full. There is not space here to analyze the press coverage in detail or to unravel the complex interaction between the ways ordinary viewers articulated their response and the published professional pronouncements that mediated the exhibition. What is clear is that there is a close congruence between popular evaluations uttered in conversations with the guides, as well as in the comments books, and the authoritative reactions in the press (although the influence was not necessarily entirely unidirectional).97 The June USIA report found that the populace was widely conversant with “the propaganda clichés on every subject carried by information media, and these clichés are the usual substitute for independent thinking.”98 Soviet citizens also privately informed American personnel that their compatriots generally believed what the press said, although others, to the contrary, said they were given to skepticism.99 A U.S. report after the exhibition, based on the debriefing of guides, concluded: Perhaps the most striking single impression received by the guides at the American National Exhibition (and the most significant piece of new information drawn from their experience), was the high degree of similarity between the official Soviet depiction of the US and the image of America held by most Soviet visitors to the fair. What the Soviet regime, using its nearly total monopoly of the means of communication, has told the Soviet public about America and Americans, the Soviet public has largely accepted. This is a massive fact with which President Eisenhower must contend when he faces the Soviet people during his forthcoming visit to the USSR.100

Must we come back, then, to the model of the unitary state exercising total control over the means of communication and thence over people’s minds, and of subjects as no more than mouthpieces passively “parroting” received truths? While claiming to describe reality, this familiar picture, an aspect



who will beat whom? 215

of the totalitarian paradigm, served as a discursive instrument of the Cold War.101 The now equally familiar litany of this paradigm’s inadequacies need not be rehearsed here beyond a couple of points most pertinent to the problem of interpreting Soviet responses to ANEM. These relate to one of the most active areas of investigation in recent Soviet studies: the relationship between Soviet selfhood or subjectivity and authoritative discourse. The distinction between “genuine” or “un-ideological” comments of bona fide citizens and those of agitators, presuming that a response “un-conditioned by ideological outlook” was possible, is premised on an essentialist conception of the self as singular, stable, and presocial (fully given in advance before the act or utterance) and of meaning as existing anterior to discourse. If such a self could exist, historians would never be able to find it, relying as they do on forms of articulation that are already social, made knowable by means of the available conventions of their culture. At the same time, if we reject the explanation of critical comments as all the effect of agitators’ intimidation, does it follow that the comment-writers were passively acquiescent, brainwashed mouthpieces of orthodoxy and clichés, deprived of agency, intellectual initiative, and authorship?102 In Alexei Yurchak’s critique of such dehumanizing accounts of Soviet people and the assumptions about the experience and subjectivity on which they are based, he calls for “a language that does not reduce the description of socialist reality to dichotomies of the official and the unofficial, the state and the people, and to moral judgments shaped within cold war ideologies.”103 Studies of the production of the Soviet subject under Stalin, including through the writing of diaries and public letters, indicate some ways to think about the practice of comment-writing without resorting to essentialist dichotomies and notions of the integral self.104 But we are left with the question: are the comment-writers masquerading, cynically performing and speaking “Bolshevik,” while their “real” self thinks and would wish to act differently, or does their text reflect conviction at some level? Do they believe what they say—at least while they say it? I would tentatively suggest on the internal evidence of the comments, that, unlike the phenomenon of steb (dead irony), which Yurchak analyzes (in regard to late Soviet intelligentsia discourse), the appropriation of authoritative discourse here is not, on the whole, ironic, although there are occasional instances of consciously parodic mimicry. At the moment of writing the visitors are fully “in character,” identifying with and trying to act up to the persona and views they present. To seek to measure relative degrees of sincerity, irony, or dissembling is, however, a task with dubious returns. We have no independent access to

216 susan e. reid

sincerity, no historical lie detector to verify claims that one comment is more authentic than another. Is it even a possible or valid undertaking for the historian to hanker after “authentic” responses, opinions that may never have been articulated by the subject? If we cannot calibrate degrees of sincerity of individual comments premised on an essential “self” anterior to language and culture, what we can do is to distinguish different types of socially situated role performances that are entailed in making a certain kind of entry in the visitors’ books: that is, as a production, presentation, and alignment of self in which the available material of Soviet discourse is selectively appropriated and deployed.105 Thus we can read comments as performance of the role of polite guest, responsible citizen, guardian of public morals, opinionated individual (“Outraged of Omsk”), critic, or defender of socialism, personae that were firmly established in public discourse, for example in the genre of letters to the editor.106 We can also think about what motivated these citizens to write in this way—writing in the comments books was, after all, voluntary, and many chose not to do it. Although an individual’s response was not immaculately conceived or “free,” but both enabled and limited by discursive constructions or ideology, this does not mean that it is completely determined by such restraints.107 The mixed popular reception can be seen to correspond to, though not directly to reflect, divisions that ran throughout Soviet society. We should not forget that the available orthodoxies were not completely homogeneous or unambiguous in this period of ideological instability and struggle. What is often referred to in shorthand as official culture, the party line, or the regime elides struggles and splits within public discourse and cultural elites that surfaced during the Thaw.108 The “official” or authoritative position was neither unitary nor stable on such key issues in the response to ANEM as how much the Soviet Union should open up to Western influence, the legitimacy of modernist styles in art and design, and the status of consumption. The Soviet press response ranged from more considered, argued treatments to the vituperations of Literatura i zhizn´, the latter being “distinguished by a more than usually low approach and generally nasty tone which set it somewhat apart from the ‘normal’ run of criticism.”109 Amid the flux and fundamental reorientation, it is not surprising if individuals were uncertain about what was sanctioned by the party and what was not—what was the status of the United States, for example, irreconcilable Cold War foe or potential friend and source of help?—and wavered between antithetical opinions, hedged their bets, or sought to square circles when confronted with Amerika on Soviet soil. Some responded to disorientation by anchoring themselves to dogma. The Russian art historian Mikhail



who will beat whom? 217

German, in his post-Soviet memoirs, represents responses to the American exhibition as an example of an entrenched “slave mentality”: many people met the more adventurous public culture of the Thaw with bewilderment and fear of anything “different or contradictory.”110 But the contradictions and uncertainties also opened up a space for self-alignments, self-differentiation, and identifications, which did not necessarily fit either the intention of the exhibition or any party line.111 The contemporary and retrospective dismissal of comments that failed to embrace ANEM and its image of the American way also presumes that Soviet socialism had no social base of support in the late 1950s, or that those who indicate acceptance of its goals are either dissembling or victims of false consciousness. Contemporary observers, however, identified significant sources of legitimacy, regime support, social cohesion, and optimism about the future. Some of these were set out in the U.S. Embassy report on “Soviet Attitudes and Public Opinion” shortly before the opening of ANEM. These findings are particularly significant given that they contradicted intention: the signing officer observed that the Foreign Service personnel who had gathered the impressions during 1958 “perhaps tend to exaggerate the conscious discontent existing in contemporary Soviet society,” having looked expressly for such manifestations.112 The reasons for the appearance of widespread assent identified in the report provide a useful context for interpreting the visitors’ comments. The 14 years since the end of World War II had been “the longest period of relatively peaceful existence without major domestic or foreign upheavals and wars that the Soviet populace had ever experienced,” the report noted. The habit had been established of “working quite hard to build a better life step by step, and the tangible evidence of results is beginning to become apparent in everyday life.” Most Soviet citizens still had grievances, some economic, others political. Yet, “there is almost no mass concern in the country over the lack of individual opportunity for effective political expression, for influencing government policies, or for the absence of political as distinct from at least rudimentary civil liberties.” The bulk of Soviet citizens could imagine a political system only of the type under which they lived and believed that Western society was worse than their own, implying “dictatorship by the wealthy, political repression of the masses, racial discrimination, and gross inequalities.” This view was “not inconsistent with the idea that the US is still well ahead of the USSR in economic matters, an idea which the regime now officially sanctions in combination with the pledge that the gap is narrowing and will sooner or later be overcome.” Changes since Stalin’s death were found to have had significant effects on public opinion and attitudes, and the masses’ early skep-

218 susan e. reid

ticism toward Khrushchev was giving way to increasing enthusiasm about his leadership. The report concluded: “It would, of course, be a great jump for the Soviet regime to go from a position of merely being accepted with resignation and apathy by the mass of citizens to one where it became the desired and admired organ of societal management. This change has not yet taken place, but, unlike even a few years ago, it has become a possibility, at least among the Great Russian elements of the population.”113 Similar conclusions concerning a mood of optimism and sources of legitimacy were drawn from the debriefing of guides after the exhibition: Soviet people were proud of being citizens of a great power playing an important role in world events; they believed that the Stalinist terror would never return and the government could not do things the people did not want; they felt “that regardless of what they do in their personal lives they will be taken care of” and held that “things are so much better than a few years ago.”114 The report suggested that the U.S. offensive had come too late to be maximally effective. That it had missed its moment was also suggested by an Armenian acquaintance of an American diplomat. Although described as “profoundly anti-Soviet,” and critical of Khrushchev, the Armenian informed his American friend that ANEM had not fulfilled its mission to change the Soviet Union. This it could have done when the Soviet Union was weak, he said, but now the Soviet Union was strong and the United States had lost its best opportunity.115 THEMES IN THE POPUL AR RECEPTION

Notwithstanding the generic and specific interpretive challenges posed by the visitors’ books, it is instructive to analyze the themes of written comments, if only as a corrective to the one-dimensional and triumphalist portrayal of Soviet reception in the contemporary U.S. press and in historical accounts. The comments were far from simply and unanimously positive. Many writers were torn between the conflicting roles of polite guest and proud Soviet citizen or called on elements from authoritative discourse to negotiate rhetorically the challenge the exhibition presented to their picture of the world. There are very few comments directly critical of the Soviet Union in the visitors’ books; those wishing to tell the Americans about grievances with the Soviet system were unlikely to choose this forum but might speak or slip notes to the guides and other Americans present.116 The few explicitly anti-Soviet written comments came from non-Russians, especially Balts. “We are Lithuanians, and we can write and say only what the government orders us. We are unhappy and impatiently are awaiting the time when we can be our own masters.”117



who will beat whom? 219

The most unambiguously laudatory response, as Hixson notes, was attracted not by an exhibit but by the American guides. One wrote, “The American exhibition in the USSR has done a great deal for a better understanding of life in America. I was very pleased that we could talk freely with representatives of the American people in the USSR and received complete and detailed answers to all questions. A great deal in their answers was new and even surprising, as we had misconceptions about many questions of life in America.” Another commented that the guide on the automobile stand “is very well liked by all. Of all the exhibits, the automobile stand elicited the most unequivocal enthusiasm: ‘I want to buy your cars!’” The attempt to quantify reception (table 10.1) identified no negative comments on the cars and 71 favorable ones, that is, three times as many as for the runner-up, the Family of Man exhibition, and nine times as many as for the model house or Miracle kitchen. The response to consumer goods for domestic use was much more mixed than for cars. Some comment-writers congratulated the organizers for choosing to emphasize consumption and the American way of life, and seemed to accept the exhibition’s claim to show real existing conditions. “The idea of the exhibition—to show what the people use, and not the things which help to produce these items—is absolutely correct. The things are really faultless. The exhibition is good, it provides much pleasure and satisfaction. One must respect people who produce such things! It is interesting to learn something about this too, therefore the exhibition itself is a positive fact.” An engineer wrote, “I believe that the American exhibition presented a good picture of the average American’s [life]. Everything in this country is directed towards a more comfortable life and the satisfaction of different tastes.” A Latvian woman was aesthetically gratified: “I liked your exhibition in Moscow very much. Never in my life have I seen such a beautiful room arrangement, light furniture, bathrooms, etc. I was also immensely pleased by your stylish and beautiful cars.” Some—though far from all—were convinced by the attention to alleviating women’s work in the home, a matter over which Nixon and Khrushchev had made competing claims for superiority in the Kitchen Debate. “Much has been intelligently devised to make life more comfortable and to ease woman’s work.” “I liked all the exhibited items that facilitate housework for women.” A few used the United States’ high living standards as a foil for complaints about their own conditions in the Soviet Union. A veteran of Stalingrad wrote, “Everyday living conditions are the most important factor in human life, and the American people have solved this problem. Unfortunately, I can’t even dream of having such a house as is owned by the average American worker, or to have such a wonderfully equipped Miracle kitchen, or to have

220 susan e. reid

my own automobile the way an average American can. I would very much like to see, in person, the American way of life, but unfortunately for me, this is impossible.” A resident of Kiev wrote, Only the best products of your industry were shown at your exhibition, as at our exhibition in America. At the exhibition they do not speak about shortcomings, but a certain place should be set aside for them. We still have many shortcomings, but if we were living with you in peace and friendship there would be fewer shortcomings. With regard to shortcomings, we do not have to look very far. I came from Kiev to Moscow in order to try to improve my life a little. I am a disabled war veteran. I live in difficult housing conditions. I wanted to improve them in Moscow. Well, nothing came of it. Let us live in friendship and cease making atomic and hydrogen bombs; it is better if we improve our welfare.

However, to make favorable comments was not necessarily to be critical, let alone systemically opposed, to the communist project. Indeed, these writers left their full addresses, suggesting (if they were not naïve) that they were confident that they had said nothing that would get them into trouble. Comments that were generally positive about the exhibition rarely drew any conclusions about the systemic superiority of capitalism over socialism. Rather, they were couched in terms of the official discourse of peaceful coexistence as the premise for increased human welfare and prosperity.118 Given that the exhibition was authorized by the regime, citizens could presume—and many comment-writers adopted this line—that the exhibition should offer some benefit to the Soviet project of building communism. Far from being an instrument of the Cold War, it was a means to resolve international tensions, to make peace, get to know the adversary, and as a result improve conditions in the Soviet Union: “with the help of this exhibition the Americans and Russians have got to know each other and these two great nations will say ‘down with the Cold War.’” Many who referred to shortcomings in living standards did not blame the Soviet regime or socialist system but World War II and the Cold War and were optimistic that the exhibition was a harbinger of détente, which would bring improvements in everyday life. Their comments envision an imminent future in which the alleviation of the resource-hungry arms race would allow the USSR to transcend the Cold War divisions and reap the benefits of both systems for socialism. The American way of life was being shown as a model from which the Soviet people could learn, not in order to throw in the towel and converge with capitalism but to strengthen and advance the project of building communism. New opportunities for collaboration, exchange, and trade would enable the socialist bloc



who will beat whom? 221

to overcome its present shortcomings—regarded as temporary and not systemic—and thus make a leap forward to full communism. Numerous comment-writers expressed the hope that the products of American capitalism—mass-produced appliances, consumer goods, cars, and kitchens—shown at the exhibition would in the future become available to them.119 “There is much, very much, that we would like to see here in our country. . . . You are probably convinced that the Soviet people are interested not only in technology but in everyday life and living conditions. It seems we shall also have to pay more attention to matters of daily living.” “In viewing the exhibitions . . . one comes to the heartening conclusion that there are people in the world who have done so much to improve the living comforts of ordinary people. The greatest impression was made by the exhibits showing the comforts of everyday living and . . . its inexpensiveness. . . . In our Soviet daily living conditions we could learn a lot from the life of Americans.” A Soviet student wrote, “The Russian people have always been glad to borrow from another culture all that is best and in this way to help develop a dynamic outlook on life without which real progress is impossible. Let’s take from one another the very best, bringing closer the age of international culture.” As viewers put it, this was not about convergence or undermining the socialist system but about the ultimate triumph of communism. A young journalist expressed to an American diplomat acquaintance a longing for a “golden age of human welfare which would result if only our two nations laid aside their enmity and suspicions and joined forces for the benefit of mankind,” but another emphasized to the same American that the mainstay of Soviet policy was the victory of communism by peaceful methods because of communism’s (inherent) superiority as a social system.120 Comments often referred back to past experience when the United States had helped the Soviet Union to survive or move forward. Thereby, the periods during which the United States had helped provide the means to achieve Soviet modernity—assisting industrialization in the 1920s and 1930s through transfer of technology, mass production methods, and engineering expertise; as a source of aid during famine; and as a wartime ally—were repositioned as the norm, whereas periods of mutual hostility and Soviet autarky represented the aberration. “We were friends and you helped us in 1921 during the famine in the Volga region, and in 1930 you helped us with machinery.” “I am a resident of Leningrad and during the blockade we ate your products. Now I came from Leningrad to see your exhibition. . . . Such exhibitions are good for bringing our peoples closer.” One dreamed of a cocktail of “Russian ability to sacrifice and endure and American practicality—wouldn’t it be good to work at mixing the two into a drink like Pepsi-Cola!?” Hopes for a golden

222 susan e. reid

age of human welfare and bounty were also expressed in desires for fruitful scientific collaboration and exchange, for example in medical research: “Old age is a crutch for everybody from president to beggar. How good it would be if our scientists and American ones joined efforts and organized an international institute on the model of Dubna [the international nuclear physics research institute near Moscow where scientists from socialist bloc countries collaborated] for scientific work on the study of old age and struggle against it. It would consolidate peace and friendship.” Positive comments were often combined with calls for trade with the United States or with laments that it was currently blocking such trade. Khrushchev’s opening speech raised expectations that trade should ensue from international exchange, although U.S. obstruction to trade agreements became a key theme in the Soviet response to ANEM. Many viewers responded to the exhibition as if it were a trade fair giving advance advertising and samples of products that would become available to them in the future, whereby the working class would inherit the achievements of capitalism. “The kitchen and the house are wonderful, and the automobiles are excellent. It would be well if after the exchange of exhibitions and visits of comrade Khrushchev and President Eisenhower we would live in peace and all these kitchen utilities will become available to the working class.” “American friends. We would like to see some of your goods not only at the exhibition but also in our stores.” The chief advantage expected from the exhibition was the opportunity to study and copy the latest American technology. Reverse engineering was an established, efficient way for Soviet industry to leapfrog a stage of development.121 Official discourse conveniently treated science and technology as if these were not ideological, superstructural phenomena. Thus in spite of repeated declarations that peaceful coexistence required intensified ideological vigilance, a thaw in relations would allow Western technology to be appropriated to the Soviet project on a formula: advanced U.S. technology plus progressive socialist system = communism. Many viewers sought positive, practical advantage and information from the exhibition, in accordance with Khrushchev’s designation of it as an “instructive” aid to catching up and overtaking America. There were good reasons why visitors, particularly engineers and other technical and design specialists, wanted to see machines—preferably accompanied by detailed specifications. They expected the exhibition to provide nuts-and-bolts indications of how to catch up with America’s technological level. If the public included many representatives of the technical intelligentsia, it is understandable that they sought cutting-edge information about their specialties for the purpose of personal professional advancement.122 The expectation that the exhibition should give a leg up to Soviet de-



who will beat whom? 223

velopment was also grounds for the widespread disappointment recorded by agitators and U.S. observers alike.123 Expressions of disappointment were also common in the visitors’ books. “A shortcoming: you show what you produce, but you do not show what you produce it with.” The press fostered this response: from the first week of the exhibition it presented disappointment as the “typical”—that is, normative—public reaction, and set up a binary opposition between the paucity of technology, meaning heavy machinery, and the abundance of consumer goods. The Soviet viewer wanted more emphasis on how things were produced or how they worked, rather than on the finished products of consumption.124 Significantly, consumer durables, especially appliances for the home, were not counted as technology. “One gets the impression that your technology is directed only toward lightening women’s work. In that case we will undoubtedly catch up with you soon, as N. S. Khrushchev said.” “One feels that you have ignored our desire to see your technology. (The automobiles don’t count.)” Agitators reported that many visitors asked guides why there was no technology, machine tools, rockets, satellites, or heavy industry. When an American guide replied, “‘we wanted to show you our byt, our American way of life,” visitors responded: “for us Soviet people, Sputniks are our Soviet life.”125 The sanctimonious assertion that “Sputniks are our Soviet life” should detain us briefly. Technical specialists were a social group whose professional and moral authority was increasing in the Khrushchev era. Stock heroes of Thaw discourse were youthful inventors and engineers, who, in the face of resistance from recalcitrant managers and bureaucrats, dedicated themselves self-denyingly to their calling, seeking new techniques and innovations that would benefit the whole of society.126 Many viewers presented themselves as this valorized persona at ANEM. Although some may have had pragmatic, self-interested reasons for complaining that there was not enough heavy machinery or production processes (delegated by their enterprises to bring back information from the exhibition, they faced humiliation or having their expense accounts canceled), many claimed also to identify their personal advancement with that of their calling and of the country as a whole.127 The visitors who made the Sputnik comment were acting up to the model of the virtuous Soviet person for whom there was no split between private and public interests and desires, no contradiction between personal advantage and that of the country as a whole. Whatever they might have done when they went home that night, at the exhibition they took on the obligation of representing their nation to the foreign power. They identified with their professional capacity (many signing themselves “engineer”), speaking as dedicated specialists, and espousing national goals as their own.

224 susan e. reid TO CATCH UP AND OVERTAK E

As noted, Khrushchev’s repeated assertion of the goal “to catch up and overtake America” was contradictory and risky, calling into question claims for the distinctiveness of socialist modernity and locking the USSR into constant disadvantageous competition on the territory and standards set by the United States. A few visitors exploited the contradictions inherent in the “catch up and overtake” slogan. One quipped, “Just let me off at America as we go by.”128 Many members of the public, however, tried rhetorically to negotiate the confrontation between the Soviet pledge and ANEM’s aim to represent the United States in such a way as to make that goal unattainable.129 A number of strategies were adopted. Admiration of exhibits often cohabited with confident assertions that the Soviet Union was well on the way to having these things too and would soon surpass American production. Joan Barth reported, on the basis of her interactions with visitors as a guide, “Re ‘overtaking the US in per capita production across the board’: I felt that many people were convinced that this would soon take place.”130 Comments in the visitors’ books were sometimes bullish: “If your exhibition has shown everything, then we have already jumped ahead of the USA. . . . You will be riding in your automobiles and we in our Sputniks. Who will beat whom? That’s clear.” A teacher demonstrated mastery of the socialist realist confusion of present reality and future prospects typical of Soviet rhetoric: “The exhibition displays kitchens, a house, frigidaires, vacuum cleaners—all of which we have. If we don’t have enough of these things at present we will have more of them in the near future.” As Barth observed, feelings of envy and national inferiority could coexist with the apparently incompatible “‘wave of the future’ psychology.” “There seemed to be no contradiction between these impulses—most people seemed to feel all of them concurrently. Indeed, I felt that their envy of our material goods would only serve as an incentive to harder work in order to bring about fulfillment of their hopes for quickly surpassing us.”131 A student wrote: “The exhibition is remarkable. We shall catch up with you!!” Another wrote, “We need to learn the technology from the USA and then all the rest—in the presence of our system of State—will unavoidably exist in our country.” Another strategy viewers used to reclaim essential superiority for state socialism was to emphasize the low base from which progress had started in Russia after the revolution and the speed of development under Soviet power. The United States had a head start, but the socialist way was faster. Khrushchev had set the tone at the opening: “America has been in existence for 150



who will beat whom? 225

years, and this is the level she has reached. We have existed not quite 42 years and in another seven years we will be on the same level as America. When we catch you up, we will wave to you as we pass you by.”132 Some commentwriters recapitulated the theme with variations: “You have achieved all this in 150 years. We shall achieve it without fail in 50, this means our Soviet way of life is better.” A number invoked wartime destruction in the Soviet Union as the reason why it still lagged behind the United States: “We have suffered because of the war and therefore we are a little bit behind. We will overtake you and surpass you.” “We don’t have ‘Miracle kitchens’ yet, but we would have more if we were not hindered.” “A country that has existed without wars or destruction from external enemies for about two centuries should show greater achievements in technology, science, culture, and even everyday living.” Given that the United States had not had to overcome the destruction of war, it should be further “ahead” if the capitalist system was as good as it claimed to be. The other two main strategies for negotiating the implications of ANEM in light of the pledge to “catch up and overtake” both question the priority that the representation of U.S. modernity and well-being accorded to consumption and consumer goods. They will be analyzed in the remainder of this article. First, viewers denied that consumer goods and domestic, everyday life represented the “real America.” Second, they called into question the model of progress based on individual consumption, which ANEM presented (as par pro toto for U.S. capitalism), and affirmed socialist alternatives in its place. NOT THE “RE AL THING”

One of the most common official and popular complaints about the exhibition was that it focused too much on consumption, comfort, and entertainment. Not only was this emphasis at the expense of producer goods, but it also rendered the representation of America unreal or insubstantial. One man complained, “Where is the American technology that supposedly enabled you to reach your standard of living? It is not evident here, yet this is the most interesting thing that America can show. The exhibition would be much more interesting if you wouldn’t try so hard to put over the idea: ‘Look, see how wealthy we are.’ We were aware of this before the exhibition. But the real America I have not seen here.” By concentrating on consumer goods the exhibition had failed to present the “real America.” “I must confess that I was disappointed. It is stated in the official documents that the purpose of the exhibition is to acquaint the visitors with America. But where is it, this famous America, that great industrial power with its highly developed technology, sci-

226 susan e. reid

ence, and agriculture? Unfortunately I did not see it, with the exception of some elegant automobiles and several agricultural machines. One gains the impression that someone has played a bad joke on America.” These criticisms were based, in part, on inflated expectations that the exhibition should be an adequate substitute for real travel to the United States, as if it could bring America in its fullness to Moscow, or that it should live up to its image as they had encountered it already in film or in the magazine Amerika. A few remarks recorded by U.S. staff wished the exhibition had shown more, not less, luxury and representations of millionaires’ lifestyles, a reaction that the USIA had also encountered in Western Europe in response to American exhibitions there.133 But the comments also reflected other grounds for resisting the exhibition’s “reality” claims, especially in regard to the representation of consumption and domestic life. Viewers questioned ANEM’s veracity as a reflection of “typical” conditions existing on a mass scale, rather than as a socialist realist depiction of American “reality in its revolutionary development,” advertising, or propaganda: it was a projection for the future or, at most, a “reality” available only to a privileged minority. “We don’t need advertisements: we would much rather see the real achievements of America.” “I expected to see the achievements of the American people, but saw propaganda about the American way of life.” As Oleg Anisimov noted in a 1954 article on “The Attitude of the Soviet People toward the West,” most of those he consulted thought life in the United States was “freer, pleasanter, more prosperous, in general ‘better’ than in Russia, yet they considered official American sources of information no more trustworthy than Soviet propaganda—simply ‘our propaganda says one thing, and their propaganda says the exact opposite.’” A Soviet army defector told Anisimov that his compatriot soldiers likened Soviet policy in Eastern Europe to the way the U.S. government “dumped all sorts of useless trash in Europe under the guise of the Marshall Plan.”134 Official Soviet mediations worked to undermine the truth claims of the exhibition, notably regarding the alleged affordability and typicality of the life style represented.135 The model “house of the average American family” was the main focus of lectures about the United States that were held in factories (and presumably institutes) to prepare and manage the popular response to the exhibition. These portrayed it as a misrepresentation of American living conditions and stressed the burden of mortgage repayments.136 Many viewers demonstrated a detailed grasp of the economics of installment plans. Agitators reported that although the model house aroused great interest among viewers, the general opinion was that it was not actually affordable to American workers.137 One visitor wrote: “It isn’t a typical home [tipichnyi]. It is tipovoi



who will beat whom? 227

[the term for the standard or system-built housing] . . . they clearly got the translation wrong.” Another wrote, “The Miracle kitchen is very interesting but improbable.” Counterpropaganda aside, there was cause for skepticism. The Miracle kitchen, for example, was not a real kitchen available to U.S. consumers but a science-fiction fantasy of the robotic future.138 Agitators reported that viewers told guides they would rather see how American people lived now than how they would live in the future.139 Many also expressed doubts about the objectivity of displays concerning health care, social security, and education (not surprisingly, since they contradicted everything Soviet propaganda had taught: that social benefits were the prerogative of socialism).140 The exhibition’s claim to reality was also resisted on more ontological grounds. Consumer goods, so central to its display rhetoric, were perceived not only as an unrealistic depiction of American actuality but as an insubstantial spectacle. This was based on an assumption that the “real America”—that which was not shown—consisted in the productive base, not in consumption. Producer goods were “reality,” while consumer goods (cars partly exempted) were mere shimmering spectacle, trivial feminine superfices. Suppressing the mechanisms by which the effects were produced—the absent technology— the exhibition was a kind of sleight of hand. Agitators reported that viewers complained that the exhibition left an impression that was “not concrete.”141 In relation to the cars, this sense of insubstantiality was rationalized in the criticism that they would not withstand Soviet road conditions, while the model house was pronounced too flimsy for the Russian climate.142 Many written comments referred disparagingly to glitter and tinsel or shiny surfaces, as if ANEM were all an illusion that would fade or crumble to dust if you tried to grasp it. “Leaving the exhibition I carry with me an impression of glittering metal saucepans.” A “Soviet student” wrote, “Fellows, you are [illegible] with your pots and pans! Please remove them. . . . Show us something real, and do not try to impress us with aluminum tinsel.” “We expected that the American exhibition would show something grandiose, something equivalent to Soviet Sputniks. But you Americans want to stun us with the glitter of your kitchen pans and with fashions that do not appeal to us at all.” Frequent allusions to shiny surfaces and their intent to dazzle and stun are combined with disparaging comparisons of the exhibition to a department store. One writer sniffed at “your excellent department store where you collected good-for-nothing articles of luxury, yet you propose by your advertising to promote your way of life. Your trifles—it is difficult to understand why they are at your National Exhibition.” Another wrote, “The exhibition gives nothing to mind nor soul. It looks like a haberdashery store. Strange that technology is so poorly shown. There are more sofa cushions than things which might

228 susan e. reid

please us and let us understand what kind of people Americans are.” As in a (capitalist) department store, the play of reflective surfaces sought to disorient, intoxicate, and seduce the consumer, dissembling the boundary between reality and representation, actuality and dream. The agitators who hassled a member of the public, above, accused her of being so dazzled by the glittering surfaces that she lost her rational judgment and succumbed to desire. In place of enlightenment and information the exhibition offered those suspect experiences characteristic of capitalist modernity: superfices, spectacle, and phantasmagoria.143 Discerning “cultured” consumption had been an ideal characteristic of Soviet modernity since the mid-1930s.144 For decades, however, the regime had placed ideological and economic emphasis on production rather than consumption. It was only in the late 1950s—around the time of ANEM but not directly attributable to it—that consumption began to be framed as a mass entitlement and that mass production of consumer durables such as furniture or appliances became a priority.145 Authors of comments on ANEM do not yet—at least in this context—identify themselves primarily as entitled consumers but as producers. Or, insofar as they do cast themselves as consumers, they adopt the authorized role of “rational consumer” rather than that of a shopaholic with unreasonable and insatiable desires, as the victims of capitalist commodity fetishism were imagined.146 The Soviet person was supposed to be guided by higher reason. He or she could only meet with incomprehension a mode of consumerism driven by constantly escalating wants rather than real need. Performing this persona, one citizen asked the guides, “Nixon said that people buy 10 to 12 pairs of shoes. Why so many—are they so bad?”147 Although the U.S. press made much of reports that the irresistible desire aroused by the samples of the American way of life caused Soviet citizens to lose their customary discipline, and the Soviet authorities were wary of this potential effect, we saw above that these incidents were relatively rare; Soviet citizens were on their mettle to demonstrate their self-discipline in face of American temptation.148 The emphasis on consumer goods was resentfully rejected as a condescension based on a willful misrecognition of the nature of the Soviet public. Some articulated this condescension in gendered terms, considering the attempt to appeal to a stereotypically feminine desire for consumer goods and cozy homes was to “emasculate” the Soviet viewer. The American émigré Martha Dodd, writing in Ogonek, cited one visitor who allegedly dismissed it: “You know, this exhibition is intended more for women’s eyes than men’s!”149 The perceived condescension was also rebuffed as a would-be colonialist attempt to dazzle and subjugate Soviet people, as if they were primitives scram-



who will beat whom? 229

bling for gewgaws. A woman from the Urals wrote, “I think it was unnecessary to ship a frigidaire that cost more than ours across the ocean. One would expect greater scope and more courage from such a country as the USA. Yet, what are we being shown—pots and kettles, frying pans and shoes, as if we were savages.” The exhibition’s focus on consumption, creature comforts, and entertainment was an insult to their intelligence and advanced level of civilization. Hailing the Soviet target audience as frustrated would-be consumers, the U.S. planners had miscalculated, as many visitors hastened to inform them. The tone for this “insulted dignity” response was also set in the press, which told how Nixon attempted to give charity to a man he met in the Danilov market. The man rejected his “bribe” with dignity; as a Soviet citizen he had no need of such handouts, being well provided for by the solicitous state.150 It was already a familiar topos that Americans projected an image of unchanged peasant culture onto modern Soviet people, denying the development achieved under socialism. The satirical magazine Krokodil published a caricature of U.S. journalists who, supposedly reporting on the USSR, superimpose stereotypical images they have brought with them over the reality of modern metropolitan Moscow to mask the evident indicators of progress and to depict contemporary Russia as if still mired in the horse-drawn past (fig. 10.1). Party activists who kept vigil in Sokol´niki Park reported on popular anger at this kind of projection of backwardness. They had observed a group of Soviet citizens in conversation with two American women, one of whom said she had longed to come to the USSR and see Russians in red shirts with harmonicas in their hands. One of the listeners angrily completed her sentence for her, “. . . and in bast shoes.”151 This orientalist condescension was dealt with in complementary ways: by contesting the mold in which the exhibition cast the Soviet people, and by turning the orientalizing mirror back onto the Americans. Both strategies for reclaiming the advantage hinged at least in part on a rejection of consumer goods as the main measure of progress. Many comment-writers resisted the unrecognizable and unflattering subject position the exhibition assigned to them. Hailed as backward bumpkins or covetous consumers, they voluntarily espoused the more noble image of the ideal Soviet person that was projected by party ideology: as citizens of a modern industrial power that had won the war and launched Sputnik; as heroic producers rather than consumers; and as rational, disciplined people dedicated to the greater good of all.152 Viewers wrote, “The exhibition shows how little the American organizers know about Soviet people. They wanted to astound us with trinkets rather than with technical innovations.” “Is it possible that you think our mental outlook is restricted to everyday living only?” “The

230 susan e. reid

Figure 10.1. Boris Leo, “An Objective View.” Source: Krokodil 22 (10 August 1959), back cover.



who will beat whom? 231

exhibition is only an advertisement for certain automobile companies. . . . [It] does not satisfy because it is designed for people with narrow horizons.” “The exhibition is designed for bourgeois tastes. The main pavilion is a show for the petit bourgeoisie. It is obvious that the organizers of the exhibition apparently think worse of the American people than do the Soviet people.” “Excuse us, but frankly speaking your American way of life which you demonstrate at the exhibition does not appeal to us. Your exhibition shows that its organizers do not know our people and apparently they have a pre-revolutionary notion about us. . . . [Before 1917,] your exhibition would have charmed us, but now it only disappointed us. . . . Good luck that your American way of life may improve.” Soviet viewers’ minds were on higher things; they were dedicated to enlightenment not entertainment, self-development rather than self-gratification. They expected exhibitions to enhance knowledge and culture rather than to provide an entertaining spectacle. A Russian-Jewish man told one of the American staff that the exhibition was a failure: “You must understand our psychology. Russians come to an exhibition to learn, to extract from somebody else’s experience what might be useful for their own.”153 A U.S. diplomat visiting acquaintances in their home was apprised of reasons for the exhibition’s failure: “Friendly and polite advice was offered with regard to possible future U.S. exhibitions in the USSR. The gist . . . was that we should become more conscious of Soviet tastes, interests and habits (with regard to exhibitions).”154 The first deputy RSFSR minister of education told one of the U.S. staff informally that it had been a mistake not to “accent more heavily the cultural and intellectual sides of life in America.”155 The complementary way to deal with the exhibition’s condescending premises was to turn the orientalizing mirror back onto the Americans and cast them instead as the backward and provincial foil for Soviet people’s modernity. Larry Wolff has argued that Enlightenment thought produced a concept of the “underdeveloped East”—vividly expressed in Hegel’s heliotropic metaphor, whereby the history of the world progresses from East to West— which served as the constitutive other of the “civilized and developed West.” The superiority of the West was affirmed by contrast with the barbarism and backwardness that were ascribed to the East.156 The binary structure of Cold War epistemology perpetuated this Enlightenment legacy, although the center of progress was no longer Europe but had moved further west, to America. Projections by the United States, including ANEM, were received in the Soviet Union as a form of ascription of backwardness to the “East.” (Although the postcolonialist critical terms for this analysis were not yet available, the

232 susan e. reid

idea that America had imperialist intentions was axiomatic.) Soviet discourse around the exhibition, official and popular, not only rejected the subject position the exhibition assigned to Soviet viewers, but it also reversed the heliotropic developmental hierarchy. Constructing America as the backward, regressive term, it affirmed by antithesis the civilized and advanced status of the Soviet socialist East, its prerogative to define modernity. Many comments are structured by value-laden binary oppositions of progress and backwardness, civilization and barbarism, high-mindedness and triviality, spiritual values versus materialism, the life of the mind as opposed to the gratification of the body, positioning the Soviet “self” as older and wiser, and the American “other” as a vulgar parvenu.157 The writers sought to counter the U.S. consumer-goods offensive at ANEM by claims that Soviet people possessed something more precious which Americans lacked: culture. While acknowledging that in some areas the United States was temporarily in the lead, they questioned whether these were true measures of “advance”: “Is it possible to consider kitchens and cosmetics as a cult of man?” “We have to catch up with you in the technical field; however, with regard to worldly wisdom we have left you far behind.” The consumer culture, which it presented as the core values of American life, was at the cost of, and a poor ersatz for, “genuine culture” or “spiritual values.” “The impression is created that America is more looking after comforts and amusements than after education and spiritual enrichment.” “The American standard of living is very high but the culture is on a low level. The Americans pay great attention to styles, kitchens, hair-dos, etc., as if that were all of life.” “You are wealthier than we are but we are more cultured people. . . . Our victory will be that of culture and ideals.” Key emblems of culturedness in Soviet discourse were books and pianos. In the comments books a Moscow music specialist complained that the best American pianos were not exhibited. The book exhibition may have gone some way toward redressing the perception of lack of culture, but viewers were struck by the lack of books in the model home, despite its emphasis on a leisured lifestyle.158 Two years later, at an exhibition of Soviet model interiors and furniture design, Iskusstvo v byt (Art into Life), the American domestic interiors seen at ANEM were still recalled by viewers as a negative example of an uncultured home, against which Soviet aspirations to cultured living and commitment to self-improvement could be measured. For, viewers noted in the comments book for Art into Life, they had no bookshelves or desks. This might be fine for Americans, but it would not do for Soviet citizens; they read a lot and in almost every household there was at least one person in education.159 The art exhibition at ANEM did nothing to mitigate the widespread prejudice that the United States was vulgar, lacking in taste and culture. The



who will beat whom? 233

inclusion of Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism, and various forms of modernism may have been intended to demonstrate that the United States had appropriated from Europe leadership in the world of art. This art did find some passionate advocates, prepared to come to its defense both in person and in the comments books.160 But for many it was conclusive proof that in the realm of culture the United States had regressed to a state of barbarism or infantilism. Agitators recorded spoken and written unfavorable remarks such as “painting worthy of madmen,” “savage!” “my three-year old daughter draws better,” and recommendations that the organizers go to the Tret´iakov Gallery to find out what real art was.161 Many similar comments are to be found in the comments books. Hostile remarks reproduced the terms of conservative art criticism—which, associating abstraction with the primitive, childish, sick, or degenerate, denied it any relation to art, which was associated with reason, enlightenment, and beauty. “Dear Americans, you seem to think that we are so benighted that we do not understand art nor beauty. Your exhibition does not amaze us!” “The abstract art arouses indignation—it is the fruit of a sick imagination. And its originators should no doubt be treated in psychiatric institutions. And this in civilized modern America!” A lawyer wrote, “your art is good for the devils and not even for all of those.” American art, with which the organizers tried to seal the United States’ vanguard position in world civilization, not only failed to advance world culture and civilization but turned the clock back. “The abstract art . . . testifies to the poverty of Americans’ spiritual life and allows the young generation to forget the beautiful art created by human genius in the course of centuries and might lead to the destruction of historic monuments.” Thank goodness, in the Soviet Union, the party protected civilization from this regression that afflicted the West. “We thank the CPSU for the fact that they have saved us from modernism and abstractionism.” “I am very glad for my country that abstractionism has not developed here.” “A look at the exhibition of modern American art has convinced us that in this field we shall not catch up with America, as we shall never get the foolish desire to create anything similar.” Thus the Soviet Union was left carrying the torch of world civilization into the future. QUESTIONING THE MODERNIT Y ANEM PRESENTED

The charge that what was shown was “not culture,” like the “not enough technology” complaint, was often coupled with the widespread charge that there was too much emphasis on things for individual consumption. Taken together with its “primitive” art, the exhibition’s emphasis on creature comforts provided viewers with a way to reclaim superiority and deflect the ascription

234 susan e. reid

of backwardness back onto the perpetrators. While some followed Khrushchev in bragging that the Soviet Union would soon “catch up and overtake America,” others questioned whether America was “ahead” in the first place, or whether it was a model they wanted to follow. Welfare, benefits, and services played an important role here. A young doctor was stunned to learn that in the United States he might make ten times as much as he could in the USSR, but in a lively discussion with an American concerning the relative merits of socialized medical care versus the U.S. system of private practice and voluntary medical insurance, “the doctor remained convinced that the Soviet system is the best, although he conceded, ‘Every chicken thinks its own roost is the best.’”162 Social injustice—unemployment, slums, racial discrimination, and lack of access to educational opportunities or health care—were key themes used in the press to indict the exhibition and the America it was supposed to represent. These themes also appeared in the comments books; and although one example, cited above, was written by agitators, there is no evidence that all such remarks were. The American model of freedom, progress, and prosperity, based on individual wealth and consumption, was not desirable for Soviet people if not accompanied by the core benefits and safety nets of socialism.163 For many, human welfare represented its chief weakness. One writer complained that ANEM neglected to show how the elderly were cared for in the United States, yet provision of old age was a measure of a nation’s level of civilization. Another wrote, “the Soviet people, regardless of status, enjoy not only free medical assistance but also use of sanitoriums and medical treatment. Why such a great country as America cannot provide free medical treatment and medical care surprises us no end.” Some questioned whether human emancipation and happiness could be achieved through commodities. Such doubts focused, in particular, on the supreme symbol of the American way of life, the spacious fitted kitchen with its numerous appliances, and on its promise, emphasized by Nixon in the Kitchen Debate, to liberate women. Soviet counterpropaganda had taken up the challenge by promoting Soviet fitted kitchens, already under development for the new standard apartments, in the competing Soviet exhibition outside ANEM and in the press, with claims that they were “just as good.”164 But from the Soviet perspective, “to catch up and overtake” the American kitchen did not necessarily mean to replicate it directly on Soviet soil. Khrushchev had countered Nixon’s claim with the riposte that in the United States the dream home was available only to the few, whereas in the Soviet Union housing was a birthright for all.165 Moreover, the only way truly to liberate women from the



who will beat whom? 235

kitchen and enable them to achieve full self-actualization was to abolish the private kitchen altogether, along with the isolated individual labor on which it was premised, and to replace it with communal socialized servicing of everyday needs. Indeed, reviving arguments put by Lenin in the 1920s, this line underpinned some aspects of the Khrushchev regime’s mixed and contradictory approach to raising living standards and to freeing up women for productive labor, social activism, and self-development. Writing in Izvestiia, Marietta Shaginian elaborated the antithesis between the socialist and the bourgeois capitalist approach to the shared pursuit of universal prosperity, happiness, and liberty. Far from freeing women from stultifying domestic drudgery, she argued, the American kitchen represented a new form of bondage for them. “But we love innovations that actually emancipate women—new types of houses with public kitchens with their canteens for everyone living in the house; with laundries where vast machines wash clothes not just for one family alone.” “Yet the organizers of the exhibition naively think that our Soviet viewer will be consumed by a thirst to possess ‘property.’”166 Many viewers’ comments cited above were enthusiastic about the prospect of having domestic conveniences similar to the American ones shown. Others, however, expressed skepticism that such possessions represented the path to true emancipation, along lines similar to Shaginian’s. One wrote, “The ‘Miracle kitchen’ was brought here unnecessarily. We don’t need it because we are striving to free our women from kitchen work entirely.” An engineer consigned the “kitchen of the future” to the dustbin of the bourgeois past: I am convinced that in the minds of more and more people, the concept “kitchen” has become equivalent to the idea “cage,” with the only exception that kitchens are inhabited by women and cages by birds. In the Miracle kitchen a woman is just as free as a bird in a miracle cage. The Miracle kitchen shown at the exhibition demonstrates America’s last word in the field of perfecting obsolete forms of everyday living which stultify women. Greetings to the American people and sincere wishes to live in peace.

“Who will beat whom? That’s clear.” With the hindsight of the 1990s, it was indeed clear . . . and the outcome turned out contrary to what the Soviet patriot who wrote these words had in mind: state socialism had collapsed. That the Soviet decision to compete with the United States in consumerism was a fatal nail in its coffin is now orthodoxy: the party-state’s inability to fulfill the resulting growth in consumer desire increasingly stripped it and the alternative model of socialist modernity of any popular legitimacy. There is

236 susan e. reid

little question that the USSR became a mass consumer society in its last decades, and the late 1950s and 1960s were decisive years in the process by which Soviet citizens developed a sense of entitlement to consume.167 But the role played in that process by the U.S. model should not be assumed without further research. In 1959, the global conquest of the American-style kitchen was not a foregone conclusion, even in people’s desires and dreams.168 The effects of ANEM were not simply to discredit the communist project and trigger a stampede of frustrated would-be consumers: the reception of America in Moscow was more complex and contradictory. Although some viewers took up the subject position offered them by the exhibition as consumers manqués, captured by the allure of America, this was not a universal or even dominant response. Many sought ways to define their difference from it, in terms and personae borrowed from Soviet public discourse. “Having viewed the exhibition, I feel greater pride in my own country,” wrote one viewer. Another concluded that ANEM had “scored an own goal.” The widely expressed ambivalence toward the American dream cannot simply be explained away as the effect of agitators’ interventions and intimidation.169 As Yurchak argues, Cold War binary accounts have been based on the assumption that socialism was experienced as “bad” by Soviet people. What gets lost as a result is “the crucial and seemingly paradoxical fact that, for great numbers of Soviet citizens, many of the fundamental values, ideals, and realities of socialist life (such as equality, community, selflessness . . . education, work, creativity, and concern for the future) were of genuine importance.”170 Many of those who elected to write in the comments books used the occasion to express commitment to just those ideals. At least at the moment of encounter, the confrontation with ANEM strengthened their pride and identification with these values. While wishing for the benefits peaceful coexistence might bring to their living standards, they did not accept the acquisitive consumerist domesticity represented by the exhibition as the measure of modernity and freedom. Still very much alive in many of their comments is a sense that socialism involved a different way of life—different relations between individual and common weal, and a different model of consumer society that included collective consumption, welfare, and social justice—and that these were still meaningful goals.

CHAPTER  11

MOSCOW HUMAN RIGHTS DEFENDERS LOOK WEST AT TITUDES TOWARD U.S. JOURNALISTS IN THE 1960s AND 1970s

Barbara Walker Looking around the courtyard I spotted . . . a dozen foreign reporters. Foreigners were easy to spot on a Moscow street. —Liudmila Alekseyeva

Key to the attitudes of Moscow human rights defenders toward the U.S. journalists who reported on their activities was the profound isolation of Soviet citizens from the West, indeed from the rest of the world, which was a major component of Stalinism and post-Stalinism. It made those comparatively few foreigners who came to the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s stand out vividly among the Soviets even in cosmopolitan Moscow. For reasons closely associated with that isolation, dissident attitudes toward the journalists were distinguished by a peculiar intensity, whatever direction they might take. Some dissident-journalist associations triggered great enthusiasm; some involved a kind of self-conscious and self-interested exchange of professional favors or were straightforwardly instrumental in nature; while yet others led to a distinct personal hostility on the part of certain human rights activists. Such hostility challenges any simple notion of how those associations worked. This chapter traces the emergence and meaning of such attitudes, placing them in the context of Soviet history and culture more broadly. For us to attempt an understanding of dissident views of Western reporters, we need first to explore the ways in which dissenters saw themselves and 237

238 barbara walker

one another in relation to Soviet culture and society. For their attitudes toward foreign correspondents were rooted in a highly complex sense of what it meant to be Soviet and what it meant to be part of the dissident movement, of who were insiders and who outsiders in relation to both identities. For the identities of Soviet dissenters as both Soviets and as dissenters were in rapid flux during this period, and visiting Westerners, including U.S. journalists, who were not fully aware of the cultural dynamics with which they were engaging, could become caught up in that flux as the boundaries between inside and outside both the dissent movement and Soviet society were complicated and blurred. INSIDE AND OUTSIDE SOVIE T IDENTIT Y AND THE EMERGENCE OF DISSENT

The historical origins of Soviet isolation are complex, going back at least to the 1920s, both building on and contributing to a many-layered sense of what it meant to be Soviet in relation with the outside world—fascinated by the outside yet defensive, enthusiastic yet suspicious, imbued with a sense of uneasy backwardness and weakness combined with a powerful desire for selfassurance and pride.1 This was a peculiarly Soviet phenomenon, as opposed to Russian imperial; whereas Russians in the empire had traditionally been wary of attack by outsiders for centuries and had long debated the pros and cons of Western influence, concerns about relations with the West were greatly sharpened with the Bolshevik takeover. No longer was Russia ruled by a dynasty with strong royal Western ties. Instead, it was ruled by a revolutionary group that seemed to pose a considerable threat to Western governments and therefore invited their hostility, including invasion by several Western powers during the Civil War. The Bolshevik response was a kind of drawing in, a voluntary isolation on the part of the state that became involuntary isolation for Soviet citizens. Soon after the Bolshevik coup in 1917, it became increasingly difficult for most Soviet citizens to travel abroad freely. By the same token, the entry of foreigners into the Soviet Union was increasingly controlled, as were relations between Soviets and foreigners who were in the country. This simple fact of physical separation had an impact all its own. Increasing the self-conscious intensity of Soviet reactions to foreigners was a complex sense of insider- and outsiderhood that had been shaped by the difficult and painful permutations in the development of Soviet identity especially under Iosif Stalin. Stalin encouraged a highly defensive sense of Soviet identity in the 1930s and 1940s, as he sought to establish the principle of “Socialism in One Country”: that the Soviet Union could achieve modernity and socialism despite the absence of world revolution, and that this was necessary in the face of outside hostility not just toward the socialist Soviet Union but



moscow human rights defenders look west 239

toward Russia traditionally. “One feature of the history of old Russia was the continual beatings she suffered because of her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal rulers. She was beaten by the Polish and Lithuanian gentry. She was beaten by French and British capitalists. She was beaten by Japanese barons. All beat her,” he raged in 1931.2 Though he had no doubt momentarily forgotten that Russia had also eventually beaten the Mongols, the Swedes, and others, not to mention Napoleon, he thus offered an emotionally potent argument for Soviet wariness of a hostile outside world. Stalin’s purges in the later 1930s further deepened the question of insiders and outsiders, of who was a loyal Soviet citizen and who a traitor.3 The repeated and highly publicized searches for saboteurs, for “enemies of the people,” helped create a vast new category of supposedly deceptive outsiders who looked like insiders. The question of insiders and outsiders grew even more dangerous before, during, and after World War II, as Stalin’s deep anxiety about a fifth column among the many ethnic groups with (or without) cause to resent his power led him brutally to transport across the Eurasian continent whole national categories of people such as the Balts, the Volga Germans, and the Crimean Tatars. The state-supported “anticosmopolitan” movement following the war heightened the tension for a Soviet ethnic group that was to provide a large corps of participants to the dissent movement, as well as the refusenik movement, in later years: Soviet Jews. The educated Jewish community, whose members had generally seen themselves as full and loyal citizens of the Soviet state due to the Bolshevik rejection of the anti-Semitism and the pogroms of the tsarist era, experienced considerable shock in the face of growing antiSemitism following World War II. For Jews now came to be seen as outsiders on the basis of potential conflicting national loyalties. Dina Kaminskaya, later a lawyer for dissidents until she was exiled from the Soviet Union, eloquently describes the trauma of the so-called “Doctors’ Plot” (Stalin falsely accused his medical doctors, most of them Jewish by ethnicity, of seeking his assassination), and the extent to which it set her apart from her non-Jewish compatriots in a lasting way.4 Ida Nudel wrote of the same period: “Suddenly, everything changed. On one terrible day, January 13, 1953, the press labeled us ‘murderers in white robes.’ Stalin tried to annihilate the Jewish community and concocted a terrible tale about Jewish doctors murdering Soviet people. Thus we were declared guilty. . . . No one smiled at me.”5 Some non-Jews among the dissidents-to-be were affected in similar ways; Yuri Orlov describes how he was frequently taken for Jewish due to his physical appearance, and how he refused to deny Jewish identity when he was asked about it.6 The place-

240 barbara walker

ment of Jewish Soviet citizens outside the Soviet body politic had a significant impact on future dissidents’ sense of insider- and outsiderhood. Yet these painful questions about what it meant to be loyal Soviets did not lead to an embrace of the Western world among emerging human rights defenders. Due perhaps in part precisely to the isolation of the Soviet Union from Westerners and Western ideas, the early Moscow human rights movement was distinctly indigenous and inward-looking in nature. The movement arose without notable Western involvement among the kompanii, the liberal intelligentsia networks and circles of the 1950s.7 The kompaniia phenomenon, which began to take shape in the years following Stalin’s death in 1953, led to increasing social and national self-examination among its participants, beginning with readings not of Western human rights documents such as, say, the works of John Locke, but rather of internally more pertinent materials such as the works of Lenin and Marx by some, and nineteenth-century Russian literature and philosophy by others.8 Growing discontent, fed by Khrushchev’s Secret Speech in 1956, led to the emergence of the samizdat movement of underground publication, which made accessible to a certain range of urban intellectuals much written material that could not be published officially. Here too the early focus was more on materials that were internally pertinent— such as memoirs and poetry of the Stalin era, oppositional political documents, and Soviet literature that could not be published due to censorship— than on Western materials on human rights.9 At the same time, against the background of the broader system of social webs that was the Moscow liberal intelligentsia, certain of these circles began to develop their own sense of dissenting insider identity, as their participants found themselves increasingly tightly bound and dependent on one another for the comfort of open political communication. This was a kind of ghetto insiderhood, insofar as participants found themselves increasingly at odds with their society, though their self-understanding was inevitably influenced by the political and historical context of that society. A more positive community identity began to emerge in the mid- to late 1960s through the expression of a group ethos and narrative of (samo)zhertvovanie—(self-)giving and/ or (self-)sacrifice. This ethos motivated many dissenters to give of themselves in one way or another for the human rights cause, from donating clothing for political prisoners to submitting themselves to the dangers to health and life that were part of arrest by the state. Or if they did not do so, they thought they should—or that others should. It became a vital feature of the movement even insofar as a kind of counternarrative of the selfish, self-interested dissident also achieved currency, as I have argued elsewhere.10 The close attention paid in the community to the presence or absence of (samo)zhertvovanie among its



moscow human rights defenders look west 241

members in itself signaled the great importance of the theme among those seeking to form community in dissent. This central theme of identity in (samo)zhertvovanie both reflected and contradicted aspects of Soviet society more broadly. It reflected the official Soviet doctrine of selfless altruism in the common socialist cause, but it also contradicted the natural reality of self-interest that governed relations all around the human rights activists, from the culture of barter and material exchange of the second economy to the ambitions and career goals of many of their more conforming fellow intellectuals. Most dissenters believed themselves to be deeply loyal Soviet citizens, in many ways more loyal and committed than some of their ambitious or even greedy compatriots. Yet they would soon come to be regarded as traitors in the Soviet media and by many Soviet citizens. Though a few may have experienced the transition to dissenter insiderhood as a natural and seamless process, it was in many ways a challenging and inherently unsettling development from the standpoint of Soviet identity. DISSIDENT IMPRESSIONS OF WESTERNERS IN GENER AL: FREEDOM, GENEROSIT Y, AND PARTISANSHIP

Memoirs and recent interviews with former Moscow human rights defenders indicate that the alienness cited by Alexeyeva in her comment quoted at the beginning of this essay was the first impression that most Westerners made on most Soviets during the early formative years of dissident consciousness. Through appearance and behavior, Westerners signaled themselves as being distinctly outside the Soviet community. The dissident Pavel Litvinov began to encounter and think about Westerners for the first time in college, at Moscow University. “When I was at the university I knew some foreigners. I was about 18, I could always tell them apart,” he said in an interview in 2005. This sense of apartness led directly to the question of exactly how they were so different—which led in turn to the question of what kind of people exactly the Russians themselves were. How were foreigners in fact different? “A kind of style, a naturalness and freedom. They talked louder than we did; they weren’t embarrassed by certain things. I remember there was one well-known American and he came barefoot out of his room and walked barefoot down the corridor. Nobody did that in a Moscow University dormitory—but he just walked out freely.”11 This sense of freedom was a vital component of Soviet impressions of Westerners. It caused Litvinov to think about how Russians did not seem to him to demonstrate that quality: “In the subway I would notice how foreigners talked louder, but Russians more quietly . . . I mean naturalness of behavior. Russian people often withhold their reactions. . . . We are shy, but the foreigner

242 barbara walker

ups and says what he is thinking.”12 To Litvinov and to others, this sense of freedom was an attractive quality. Ludmilla Alexeyeva expressed a similar impression but analyzed it more closely in her memoir The Thaw Generation. The quotation placed at the beginning of this chapter continues: “Foreigners were easy to spot on a Moscow street, and not just because they were better dressed than the Russians. The distinction was in the faces. The foreigners’ faces were not marred by fear, concern, and suspicion.”13 For her, it was an issue of political culture. Russians contrasted so sharply with foreigners because “foreigners” had not experienced the same repressive political system. They were more free in a political sense, and this had a beneficial influence on their demeanor. The physical appearance of freedom could be powerfully attractive to those Soviets questioning Soviet social and political control and seeking new identities in the context of that control. Yet it is worth noting that among some there was also a sense that the Western experience of freedom was not entirely deserved. This has come out in discussions of Western literature, for example, as when one interviewee commented that she and her friends had felt that American readers of J. D. Salinger were unable fully to understand and appreciate him in the way that Russians in their repressive social and political system could. In this case there was a sense of superiority combined with a sense of injustice: U.S. citizens did not fully grasp the worth of or take full advantage of their own freedom.14 One encounters a similar notion in the Czech author Milan Kundera’s commentary on Western culture as compared with Central European. In his “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” he conveys the sense that Westerners have squandered their easy freedom on consumer indulgences and have lost their dedication to culture: When all the reviews [literary journals] in Czechoslovakia were liquidated, the entire nation knew it, and was in a state of anguish because of the immense impact of the event. If all the reviews in England or France disappeared, no one would notice it, not even their editors. In Paris, even in a completely cultivated milieu, during dinner parties people discuss television programs, not reviews. For culture has already bowed out. Its disappearance, which we experienced in Prague as a catastrophe, a shock, a tragedy, is perceived in Paris as something banal and insignificant, scarcely visible, a non-event.15

Although it should be noted that for Kundera the Soviet Union was itself a kind of bastion of barbarism, that impression of Western freedom and its Western abuse could give rise to a sense of resentment among educated Soviets as well as among educated Eastern bloc citizens.



moscow human rights defenders look west 243

Yet there were permutations to that impression of Western freedom that could lead to a curious and contradictory development: an unexpected and significant mitigation of the perceived alienness and outsider status of at least some Westerners, and at least honorary integration into dissenter insider status as perceived by some dissenters. This was because Western foreigners also represented to many Soviets who met them a kind of freedom of generosity that stemmed from their access to the outside world and to greater wealth. They offered information about the outside world, for one thing: “Foreigners became for us more than anything sources of information,” as they offered much-desired glimpses of an unknown and much-speculated-upon outside world.16 Some Westerners became sources of material goods unavailable to common Soviet citizens as well, not just of the odd bottle of alcohol from the beriozka (state-run shop selling Western consumer products for Western currency), but of books, clothing (especially jeans, of course), and technology. Some of these gifts were mailed or brought for personal use, but some were donated for the purpose of sale in the Soviet unofficial economy to support impoverished Soviets, usually intellectuals who were having trouble with the state and therefore with employment. One fascinating example was the gift of Western glossy coffee table books on art, design, and so on, which could be purchased in Western Europe, shipped relatively cheaply and safely, and easily sold on the Soviet black market.17 These acts of generosity might have seemed on the surface to have been simple acts of free charity (if there is such a thing), yet they could draw foreigners living in Moscow into complex and powerful relationships of Soviet-style gift and barter, as foreigners gained social access and emotional engagement through such gifts. Thus such foreigners could come to be perceived as insiders, as allies or partisans of a sort by virtue of their outsider generosity and wealth. Yet another path to perceived insider status for some Westerners that would become especially important to human rights activity throughout the late 1960s was aid in overcoming the barriers to discourse and other interaction with the outside world. Such support included carrying letters and manuscripts across the Soviet border to the West, as well as money and information that might be politically touchy. This could be dangerous for Westerners and the willingness of some of them, especially those in the diplomatic corps, to risk jobs and physical safety and emotional peace of mind made a deep impression on some dissenters.18 As generous expressions of Western freedom, such supportive activities helped to create a sense of what might be described as a kind of communality between some Westerners and some dissenters. As the human rights activist Aleksandr Podrabinek put it in an interview, “those

244 barbara walker

mutual goals, that general atmosphere, it’s very hard to convey in words. . . . It was an astonishing atmosphere that Western people fell into. People with responsive [otzyvchivye] hearts, they were drawn into it, they became a part of that atmosphere, part of that dissident culture, they were even participants, to a greater or lesser degree.”19 That most of the encounters between Westerners and Soviets took place in the domestic sphere (that is, people’s homes) also helped to integrate some Westerners into perceived insider status. The domestic sphere was a traditional site in Russian intelligentsia culture for alliance-building of both a personal and more professional or public nature, though many Westerners may not have understood this.20 Although it was more usual for Westerners to immerse themselves in the social life of certain Soviet circles (Dutch visitors became particularly famous for purchasing tourist visas and paying for the required official hotel stays but actually moving into the homes of Soviet friends for weeks at a time), the reverse took place as well. Some Westerners invited Soviets, especially Moscow intellectuals, to their elite Western accommodations for dinners and other domestic events and celebrations. The domestic localities of these encounters also contributed to a sense, whether real or imaginary, of communality between certain Westerners and certain members of the Moscow liberal elite. Yet coming to be perceived as insiders and thus partisans of a sort could subject Westerners to certain expectations. Through their supportive activities, such Westerners perhaps created a sense of entitlement on the Soviet side. Given Westerners’ freedom, wealth, and access to the outside world, to some inside the Soviet Union they appeared actually to owe a degree of personal partisan commitment. Intensifying that feeling among some in the dissent milieu was the internal transformation in the human rights movement itself with the emergence and strengthening of the ethos of (samo)zhertvovanie that is described above. In their free generosity some Westerners appeared to commit themselves to that ethos of self-giving or self-sacrifice in the pursuit of Soviet human rights—as indeed some most wholeheartedly did. Yet Soviets may at times have overestimated the degree of Westerner engagement with the dissident cause because, given their ignorance of the original context of Western wealth and freedom, it was difficult for them to calculate the meaning of Western material and other contributions. It was against this complex background of relations between human rights activists and Westerners more generally that relations between the activists and U.S. journalists, whose associations with the Soviets were more directly determined by professional obligations than those of many other Westerners, would develop.



moscow human rights defenders look west 245

GROWING REL ATIONS WITH U.S. JOURNALISTS

While the human rights movement in Moscow began as an indigenous one, the crucial historical moment of internal transformation from groups of friends to a political movement of human rights defenders was also more or less the moment at which politically significant contacts with Western journalists began to develop. This was during the Yuli Daniel–Andrei Siniavskii trial in 1966. Daniel and Siniavskii, Soviet authors, had both sent literary work critical of the Soviet system to be published abroad under pseudonyms and were sentenced to prison-camp terms as a result of what was described by the Soviet state and the Soviet press as their traitorous actions. (“The enemies of Communism have found what they wanted: two outcasts motivated by shamelessness and hypocrisy,” ran a typically outraged commentary in Izvestiia, proclaiming the outsiderhood of dissenters to Soviet power. “Under the guise of the pen names Abraham Tertz and Nikolai Arzhak, for several years they covertly supplied foreign publishers with filthy pasquils on their country, the party and the Soviet system.”)21 It was the trial itself that first led to extensive contact with Western reporters. While Western reporters had been at an earlier demonstration at Pushkin Square in support of the two authors, events had transpired too quickly there for dissidents and U.S. journalists to make contact. But at the trial, into which no witnesses were allowed other than family members, along with “select” members of the Soviet citizenry to pack the remaining benches, a few kompaniia members began to stand vigil outside the courthouse. Nearby stood an array of Western journalists covering the trial. Although at first the two groups merely eyed each other, kompaniia members evidently liked what they saw in part because the journalists gave a strong impression of commitment to the cause of covering, or publicizing, dissent. As Alexeyeva described it in a 2005 interview, “The first time I saw Western journalists was at the trial of Daniel and Siniavskii, and I have to say that they made a good impression on me. First of all because it was very cold; we came wrapped up just like cabbages, while they were in light coats and the kind of little shoes that you should wear in the fall and not in the winter. And they were downright blue with cold, but there they stood; they came in the morning just like us and left at the end of the day.” The Russians soon took action in response to this indication of commitment, and therefore potential support: “We asked them to come to a pel´meni shop for some food.”22 This encounter contributed to a type of dissident-journalist relationship of increasing importance to the Moscow human rights movement as well as to the emerging Soviet dissent movement as a whole. As dissenters gradually established contacts and relationships among growing numbers of like-minded

246 barbara walker

citizens across the Soviet empire in the next few years, Moscow lay nevertheless at the heart of the movement. This was because as the capital of the vast country, it was the primary area to which the Soviet state permitted Western reporters to be posted. These journalists had considerable importance in conveying the ideas and dreams of the dissidents to the outside world, thereby awakening Western interest in the dissident movement that would prove essential not only to publicizing the dissenters’ cause but indeed to the physical survival of many of the group’s members. Their cause was publicized not only in the outside world; through such media organs as Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, the BBC, and the Deutsche Welle, materials offered to and published by Western correspondents could be further publicized within hours, thus becoming available to vast segments of the Soviet population who had no other means of learning about the dissent movement. The dissident connection with Western journalists also had an ideological and intellectual logic, arising directly from a central tenet of the human rights movement: the right to openness, to freedom of discourse. Perhaps the most significant figure in developing this vibrant principle of the human rights movement was, as many writing about the movement have reported, Alexander Esenin-Vol´pin—mathematician, long-time dissenter (he had been imprisoned in the 1940s), and lively participant in the doings of the 1960s generation. More than anyone else, according to such memoirists as Vladimir Bukovsky and Ludmilla Alekseyeva, Esenin-Vol´pin expounded repeatedly and forcefully on the radical idea that the Soviet Constitution of 1936 guaranteed Soviet citizens certain rights, including freedom of speech and association.23 Furthermore, he argued for what he called, long before Mikhail Gorbachev used the word, glasnost´, or transparency and openness in the Soviet state. Arguments for this principle of openness were developed in a variety of ways— from Sakharov, for whom it was the path to successful and peaceful internal and foreign relations, to Boris Shragin, for whom it was an essential expression of human dignity and conscience.24 In Eastern Europe, these principles were articulated by Vaclav Havel, who argued for an escape from the ritualistic and hypocritical ideology of the Soviet bloc through “living in truth.”25 For many Soviet dissenters, their relations with Western journalists were in a sense an extension of that principle of openness. The initial reaction of many Moscow human rights defenders to Western journalists, including to U.S. journalists, was generally positive. Journalists from the United States and the Netherlands apparently stood out as particularly helpful to the dissident cause and to the dissidents themselves. Ludmilla Alexeyeva, describing the aid given her by one U.S. journalist (Anatole Shub



moscow human rights defenders look west 247

of the Washington Post) in obtaining health treatment for an ailing political prisoner (Larisa Bogoraz) through publicity, went on to say: I believe that he simply saved Larisa’s life. . . . I can say that in general such humane relations, not just as sources of information, [were very valuable] . . . there we were, people for whom it was hard. It was precisely the American journalists, I don’t know why. You understand: if you talk about understanding our problems, the Europeans understood them better than the Americans did, but the Europeans related to us as sources of information, they were very careful . . . maybe it was because of the circumstances of their publishers. I don’t know, but none of them [helped], other than the Dutch. . . . [But] all the Americans took the exact same route. . . . When they arrived, they didn’t understand a thing. You had to explain everything to them. They didn’t understand anything, in contrast with the Europeans, who arrived already understanding. But once they began to understand, at that very moment arose the question “How may I help you?” and from then on they helped, helped, helped.26

Detailing the differences between U.S. and West European journalists other than the Dutch, she went on: “I think that those are qualities of the American character. You know . . . the Americans helped; the French to this day don’t take any interest in human rights defenders; now the Germans, say, do take an interest. Now the Germans help us, but not back then. I simply came to my own conclusion that Americans help, and not only journalists, but diplomats, lawyers, tourists. Americans expressed greater interest in us and sympathy than the Europeans.”27 These impressions were, of course, specifically her own, influenced also by her later experiences of life in exile in the United States. Other former dissidents interviewed have spoken more generally of support from Westerners including citizens from most West European nations. Even so, that dissenters saw variations among the attitudes of journalists to their situation according to national origin is borne out by Padraic Kenney in his book Carnival of Revolution on the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe: To the average politically conscious American in the late Cold War, those who resisted communism in Central Europe were heroes. The workers and intellectuals of Solidarity, the lonely Soviet refuseniks, writers in exile like Milan Kundera all somehow represented the best of the American spirit. They longed for freedom, and they spoke without fear. . . . How could one not celebrate their struggles and welcome them with open arms? Western Europeans saw their neighbors differently. While there were those who traveled to Central Europe, and supported dissenters, all throughout the communist era, the general attitude seemed to be, in the words of Vaclav Havel, “reticence if not outright distrust and uneasiness.”28

248 barbara walker

While Kenney’s focus was not on the Soviet Union, it is noteworthy that he recognized a similar phenomenon elsewhere in the East Bloc. During the interview cited above there was an emotional intensity to Alexeyeva’s descriptions of her relations with U.S. journalists that is not uncommon. Several interviews revealed this sort of enthusiasm, often with reference to specific Western correspondents.29 It is hard to know exactly how to interpret this: Is it simple nostalgia? A tendency toward hagiography and glorification of past associations that is not unknown to the Russian intelligentsia?30 No doubt there is something of this in their responses. The former and contemporary human rights defenders are not much praised in the Russian press even today, and there is a tendency among some of them to glorify the past and past associations. But it is also possible that the positive impressions of U.S. and other Western journalists expressed by several dissenters interviewed stem at least in part from what some dissidents interpreted (not necessarily in error) as individual partisanship and commitment to the dissident cause and community. Although the materials gathered for this article focus primarily on the Soviet dissident perspective, even cursory examination of the experiences of journalists indicates that taking the Moscow posting was indeed a kind of pilgrimage for some of those engaged in foreign correspondence in the 1960s and 1970s. The very list of journalists posted to Moscow gives a sense of the prestige and professional potential of the position of Moscow correspondent: Walter Cronkite, Hedrick Smith, Peter Osnos, Strobe Talbott, Kevin Close, Robert Kaiser, and many others who went on to build powerful careers following their Soviet experience. In part this was because of the status of the Soviet Union as superpower and predominant challenger to U.S. might. But it also had something to do with the increasing journalistic fascination during this period with more personal, social coverage of the Soviet Union. There was a notable interest among both journalists and U.S. readers in penetrating that seemingly impermeable Iron Curtain for glimpses of real life. There was also a strong interest in the dissent movement in and for itself. That U.S. journalists were also coming from a national context in which dissent had been raised in status through the civil rights movement, the emergence of the baby boomer generation, and protest against the Vietnam War was also significant. It was very exciting for many reporters to have contact with brave people challenging an authoritarian regime that was the enemy of the United States. Like other visiting Westerners, U.S. journalists also engaged in some of the activities that could blur the lines between insider and outsider status as perceived in the dissent community, not only through such professional actions as that of Anatole Shub, who aided a political prisoner in dangerously ill



moscow human rights defenders look west 249

health by publicizing her situation, but also through nonjournalistic forms of aid including gift-giving and letter-carrying in which many other Westerners engaged. For example, the U.S. journalist Hedrick Smith, although his ties were not to the dissent movement alone, did a great deal to help out his Soviet associates with a variety of gifts such as food and medicine.31 Peter Osnos and his wife, the Human Rights Watch worker Susan Osnos, also contributed substantially.32 Equally significant was the growing social involvement of some U.S. journalists in intelligentsia and dissident networks. Paying social calls and inviting Moscow intellectuals to enter the elite homes of Westerners in Moscow also became comparatively common. The U.S. journalist Anne Garrels, for example, was well-known among Soviet dissenters and other intellectuals for her contribution to the warm and intimate sphere of Moscow intelligentsia social life, holding parties at her home and thereby introducing some Soviets to a wider range of Western goods, ideas, and personal ties.33 Other journalists did much the same, though perhaps to a lesser degree. It appears that this kind of engagement gave a significant degree of satisfaction to such journalists. As one journalist has put it, “Everybody, when they left, took a piece of Russia with them and left a piece of themselves behind.”34 Yet such relations could also contribute to a certain degree of confusion with regard to the insider/outsider status of U.S. journalists as perceived by dissidents, especially given the internal transformation of the human rights movement as the theme of (samo)zhertvovanie gained increasing significance. By aiding and entertaining dissidents, such journalists were participating in what could appear to be partisan or insider activities and, like generous and involved Westerners more generally, subjecting themselves to certain partisan or insider expectations.35 DISSIDENT CRITIQUE OF WESTERN, INCLUDING U.S., CORRESPONDENTS

The experience of willing generosity across social, cultural, and political boundaries that developed between some human rights defenders and some of the journalists who covered them was by no means universal. For some human rights activists, association with Western journalists involved a more self-conscious cultivation of relations with journalists. This was the case, for example, with Natan Sharansky, the dissident-refusenik. Sharansky, unlike many dissenters, had been trained in the English language, and he soon sought out opportunities to work more closely with English-speaking journalists despite the risks of associating with them.36 Sharansky positively cultivated the exchange of favors with reporters. He offered Russian lessons, sought out nondissent stories for journalists who after all had a far broader field to cover than

250 barbara walker

just dissent, interpreted, and generally made life easier for some U.S. journalists. This does not mean that he did not enjoy warm personal relations with U.S. journalists; his association with the Los Angeles Times science journalist Robert Toth and his family was clearly a source of great pleasure. It also gave Sharansky a deeper understanding of journalist professional obligations than some human rights defenders had, as Toth did a great deal to explain them to him.37 But these were also consciously political and strategic relationships that this astute future Israeli politician developed; in return, he gained a degree of support and personal interest that not only brought greater support and publicity for his cause but would prove vital to his safety later when he was arrested and imprisoned. Yet other human rights defenders evidently viewed their relationships with Western reporters as purely professional, or perhaps instrumental, rather than personal in any way; they expected the journalists to do their own jobs as professionals and in the process to serve the human rights cause. One such individual was Yuri Orlov, for whom Western journalists were important in publicizing his human rights activities and associations to the West.38 Another was Sergei Kovalev, who was deeply aware of Western correspondents’ importance in conveying information from the underground prisoner-information leaflet Chronicle of Current Events to the West, either through reporting or through direct transport of copies of the Chronicle to the West, often through the U.S. Embassy and its diplomatic pouches.39 Vladimir Bukovsky expresses a similar neutral instrumentality in describing his efforts to bring the plight of those dissenters placed in the Soviet system of psychiatric hospitals to the attention of the West through engagement with U.S. journalists, though he does call CBS correspondent William Cole “our friend.”40 Other dissenters to have a more instrumental view of Western correspondents included the more prominent Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, both of whom relied heavily on the foreign press to publicize their human rights messages. Given that inaccurate representation of their communications could be discomfiting or even physically dangerous to them, both men could be deeply frustrated by their inability to control those portrayals in the Western press as they would have wished. Thus, for example, Andrei Sakahrov expresses a considerable degree of dissatisfaction with the professional work of Western journalists, U.S. journalists among them. “The poor use Western journalists make of their archives and reference works, and the lack of interest they show in new names still amazes me,” Sakharov writes in his memoirs, and, “I don’t understand the Western media’s love affair with Soviet citizens who defect while abroad, jeopardizing efforts to establish a firm legal footing for the right to move freely.”41



moscow human rights defenders look west 251

What he viewed as gratuitous Western commentary on dissident affairs particularly infuriated him. For example, he expressed dismay when observations on human rights made at a press conference by his wife, Elena Bonner, were watered down by an unfounded journalist’s comment that Bonner was believed to wish to leave the Soviet Union.42 A report on Voice of America during Sakharov’s and Bonner’s hunger strike that Sakharov was ill was also disturbing to him: “We were infuriated; we felt fine and we feared the backlash that such exaggeration could provoke.”43 Equally critical in a more complex fashion was Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn is renowned for his denunciation of Western values in his Harvard commencement address, among them the values of the Western press. He saw it as guided by popular opinion and faddishness rather than by what people really needed (according to his own judgment) to know: “Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.”44 In this he may be seen as reflecting not only the views of the Soviet state with regard to the educational purpose of the press but also his own notion of how readers should be educated. This perspective, too, reveals an instrumental understanding of his relationship with foreign correspondents. Solzhenitsyn’s sense of journalists as serving a controlled educational purpose is further illuminated in Michael Scammell’s biography of his life. There Scammell tells the tale of Solzhenitsyn’s famous interview with the U.S. Moscow correspondents Hedrick Smith of the New York Times and Robert Kaiser of the Washington Post. Seeking to exert complete control of his own exposure in the Western press, Solzhenitsyn offered the two U.S. journalists a list of possible questions to ask, as well as a set of answers that he wished to have published in full. As the two U.S. journalists were unable to promise publication of this document, he arranged with them to have a Swedish journalist, serendipitously in the apartment simultaneously with Smith and Kaiser, to publish his remarks in full in Sweden one day after the news story based on this encounter was published in the United States. These arrangements did not in fact work out as Solzhenitsyn had hoped, leading to his displeasure. To some extent, such a desire for control on Solzhenitsyn’s part reflected a desire to manage the quality of his language (he was much disappointed in what he felt was his lack of eloquence in a unscripted portion of the interview), as well as to manage his exposure not only to the West but also to the threatening Soviet state.45 Yet there was also a further dimension to his evaluation of Western and U.S. journalists that may be more difficult to understand, at least from a Western perspective. This is to be found in his book Invisible Allies, which was

252 barbara walker

written simultaneously with his literary memoir The Oak and the Calf (completed in 1974) but not published until the second half of 1991, close to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Invisible Allies is largely an expression of gratitude for the commitment of those who aided Solzhenitsyn in reproducing, protecting, and transporting his manuscripts and other communications, in secret and against many odds. Although most of it is devoted to the supportive activities of Soviets, one chapter covers the contributions of Westerners, including foreign correspondents. Here, Solzhenitsyn is not as gracious: It is not an inherent quality of people in the West that they should be calculating to the point of pettiness or that the more amiable they appear on the surface, the more hardhearted they are in reality. It is all a question of which “force-field” they are drawn to. In Russia, despite Soviet oppression, there has long been a field tugging us in the direction of generosity and self-sacrifice, and it is this force that is communicated to certain Westerners and takes hold of them—perhaps not for all time but at least while they are among us.46

These words, along with a comment to the effect that Western journalists and others educated in the West were willing to “leave their mercenary habits behind and risk their necks” upon encountering the dissent movement, reveal a harsh critique of and hostility toward the West and its representatives, including foreign correspondents.47 Solzhenitsyn is describing them as fundamentally selfish, apparently capable of giving up that negative quality only through contact with (Russian) Soviet dissenters. These could be dismissed as the words of a self-righteous or merely cranky individual. Yet they make a great deal more sense if placed into the cultural context of the dissident struggle with insider versus outsider identity for themselves and for foreign correspondents, as well as the narrative of (samo)zhertvovanie. Solzhenitsyn’s words may reflect at least as much an effort to assert internal dissenter community identity and the relations of such outsiders as Western journalists to that identity, and at least as much confusion about how to evaluate the behavior of those Westerners with insufficient contextual data, as it does simple hostility. To better understand the nature of such dissident anger or even contempt toward Western journalists, it is worth examining another and more detailed example of such hostility: that of the dissenter Andrei Amalrik. Amalrik, together with Aleksandr Esenin-Vol´pin, was one of the earliest of the activists to recognize the potential value of cultivating professional and personal ties with Western journalists and was very active in the mid- to late 1960s in cultivating such ties.48 Yet several years later, in an article translated into English and published in the New York Review of Books in 1971, he scolded



moscow human rights defenders look west 253

Western journalists vigorously for cowardice and a lack of professionalism that in his view resulted in insufficient and inadequate coverage of the dissent movement. He further developed this theme in his memoir, published in 1982, also translated into English. Western journalists were fearful and unwilling to challenge the Soviet state effort to prevent encounters between Soviet citizens and themselves, he argued, and all too willing to toe the political line imposed by Soviet control. The reporters’ unwillingness to challenge state control of foreign coverage of Soviet affairs was in part due to what Amalrik described as the attraction of their fortuitous circumstances in the Soviet Union and their fear of losing certain luxuries associated with the Moscow posting: “The very fact of living in Moscow—with a good salary, a housemaid, a secretary, and a chauffeur—is a privilege for some journalists. For them, returning home would mean reverting to a more modest scale of living.” Their cowardice was also due to punishments threatened by the Soviet state for coverage not to its liking, from limiting access to information to police warnings, expulsion, actual trials, and imprisonment. In Amalrik’s 1971 article, he told the story of Western journalists who lacked the courage to attend a dissident press conference that was shut down by the KGB. He was especially irate at the response of a group of Swedish journalists who, when accosted by the police near the apartment where the press conference was to be held, stated that they were taking a walk: “They perhaps considered their reply exceptionally smart but, in my opinion, it was more the retort of a mischievous schoolboy than the reply of an adult journalist whose right and duty it was to attend that press conference which would be of interest to his readers.” Later in this article, Amalrik launched a particularly vituperative attack on one U.S. journalist who had been in the Soviet Union since Stalin’s day, Henry Shapiro, the head of UPS, for what Amalrik saw as his cowardice in refusing to cover dissent to the degree that Amalrik expected. The New York Review of Books put asterisks in the place of Shapiro’s name, but all familiar with the Moscow correspondent scene knew to whom he was referring (the more so as this article had circulated uncensored among Western correspondents samizdat style for a time before publication).49 Journalists could make a variety of responses to Amalrik’s accusations, such as that Western readership interest in the dissent movement, especially as conveyed to them by their newspaper editors, was not as great as Amalrik seemed to think; that Moscow was far from a luxury posting (though what Amalrik missed was that it was a prestige posting); that it was not worth expulsion to cover a single dissident event, and so on. But my aim here is to understand not the journalist point of view but the dissident point of view. Where

254 barbara walker

did this bitter attack come from, given Amalrik’s original enthusiasm about Western coverage, and given the many successful relationships with Western journalists built up by other dissenters? Some human rights defenders when interviewed (it was not possible to interview Amalrik, as he died in 1980 in an auto accident in Spain) on this question of Amalrik’s attitude put the issue in terms of personality: Amalrik was a difficult, somewhat “eccentric” man, some said, and that is why he adopted the critical stance that he did.50 This perception of Amalrik’s difficult personality is corroborated by at least one Western journalist who knew him.51 Yet it is the argument of this article that Amalrik’s commentary on Western journalists was not only a matter of personality but also, and more interestingly, of culture, in this case of Soviet dissident culture in the context of Soviet culture more broadly, and that his response was one of a continuum of possible cultural responses ranging from the enthusiasm among such human rights activists as Alexeyeva and Podrabinek described above to his own bitter critique. Just like the more positive relationships and attitudes, it was shaped in part by that blurring of insider and outsider boundaries. If the relationships between U.S. journalists and human rights defenders were due in part to a strong dissident sense of what might be described as insider commitment of gifts, aid, and domestic association from journalists, this negative reaction was to some extent founded on the notion that as insiders, U.S. and other Western journalists had certain insider moral obligations—and that failure to live up to those obligations was indeed a betrayal of sorts. Primary among those obligations was that of freedom of speech, which was also the primary intellectual bond that brought dissidents and journalists together, from the point of view of such dissenters as Amalrik. He believed that journalists should report the truth—thereby covering the dissent movement—at any cost. Integrally connected to the question of freedom of speech as he saw it was freedom of association: and that was for Amalrik a question of the domestic connection, that is, meetings in the domestic sphere. From Amalrik’s perspective, journalists had not just the right to domestic encounters but, in fact, the obligation to pursue and participate in such encounters as well. Thus he began his 1971 New York Review of Books article with the story of a U.S. correspondent’s wife who attempted to bring a young Russian friend into her home; a Soviet policeman allowed the correspondent’s wife to enter her building but not the Russian. Amalrik felt that the American woman should have put up a bigger struggle to maintain her right to invite Russians into her home: “‘Why didn’t you lodge a complaint against this policeman?’ I asked the correspondent’s wife after she recounted the incident.”52 From his point of view, by failing to protest this prevention of domestic involvement, the U.S.



moscow human rights defenders look west 255

correspondent (or his wife) was virtually collaborating with the state in its desire to isolate them from the real Soviet public. After all, from his perspective, Western journalists, and the more so U.S. journalists, had the right to meet with Soviets as well as the freedom to meet with them. Journalists who did not make use of their rights and their freedom were in a sense abusing those things. Discussing more extensively what he saw as the obligation of journalists to pursue the domestic encounter in the Soviet context, Amalrik continues later in the article: “Thus, some feel they are able to visit the Russians, but that they themselves ought not to invite the Russians into their homes; others, on the contrary, feel that they can invite Russians into their apartments while they ought not to visit them. . . . The basic tendency, i.e., the less one does, the better one lives, somewhat contradicts the journalists’ professional obligations.” For Amalrik, the importance of the domestic connection and journalists’ failure to protect their right to it led directly to the issue of professionalism. He continued: As I gathered from my talks with the journalists, many of them are themselves aware of the abnormality of their position in Moscow. Nevertheless, almost none of them wished to defend his rights. . . . Foreign correspondents in Moscow to this day still do not possess a union or club of their own, and completely lack all sense of professional association. . . . I do not wish people to feel that I am calling upon Western journalists to struggle against the Soviet regime, for I have simply in mind their united struggle for their own professional rights within the limits of present Soviet law.

Amalrik added ironically: “By the way, in order to remain objective, I ought to mention a case where the correspondents did in fact come out in corpore in defense of their own rights. This took place at the time when the correspondents were refused permission to order goods from abroad.”53 The preceding quotation reveals a variety of ways in which Amalrik perceived foreign correspondents as failing to live up to what may be described as insider expectations—that is, the expectations that they as participants in a given cause and community were expected to fulfill—despite his claims that he was not calling upon Western journalists to struggle against the Soviet regime, and that he was merely interested in the professionalism of the journalists. Freedom of speech lay at the core of the cause; Amalrik believed that freedom of speech must be defended at all cost. The correspondents’ view that such freedoms have limitations that must be calculated seemed to Amalrik to be laziness, cowardice, and careerism. For him the freedom of association

256 barbara walker

was much the same thing: it had to be defended at all cost. These were matters of rights; given the dissident focus on such rights as he and others argued that they were supported in the Soviet constitution, it made sense to Amalrik that foreign correspondents, committed to the same cause, should also defend their rights at any cost. Failure to do so seemed from his perspective to be not just weakness but indeed a form of corruption by self-interest and greed. The ethos or narrative of selflessness so important to the human rights community also seemed sacrosanct to him. His somewhat bitter comment on the willingness of correspondents to join together only for the sake of material gain (to order goods from abroad) was an accusation of betrayal in the sense of pursuing self-interest that was counter to the dissenting narrative of (samo)zhertvovanie, and thus also corrupt. That the problem of the domestic sphere, so central to the experience (real or imagined) of communality between dissenters and journalists, nagged at Amalrik is indicated not only by the repeated return to the topic in the materials cited above but also in a complaint in his memoir about not being invited for dinner to the home of one particular U.S. correspondent, Peter Osnos. Again, this seemed to Amalrik to be a demonstration of cowardice, not merely a negative social experience, as it seemed to Peter and Susan Osnos themselves.54 He followed this complaint in his memoir with a detailed description of Osnos as an “anti-dissident,” which does not reflect the reality of Osnos’s work in the Soviet Union.55 To him, if Osnos was not willing to participate in the traditional alliance-building activity of the domestic arena, then he must be an enemy. Amalrik’s commentary on Western, especially certain U.S., journalists, was not simply an objective analysis of their professionalism or lack thereof. Its angry overtones reveal the sense of a cause and a community betrayed, in ways that oddly enough (or not so oddly) echo the overtones of the far more dangerous Soviet anger and anxiety over internal betrayal, particularly under Stalin, and later as well: for example, in the official attacks of the Soviet state and official press on human rights defenders such as Amalrik himself. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s words of moral condemnation, too, which could be dismissed as those of an ungrateful crank, are also revealed as having deeper roots in a sense of community betrayal; if you are not with us then you are against us, and to be against us is to lack a moral foundation. Like the expressions of enthusiasm about the contributions of foreign correspondents, expressions of hostility such as those of Amalrik and Solzhenitsyn reflect the complexity for dissenters of evaluating the behavior of such alien figures to engage with their own rapidly shifting and evolving identity and culture. To a certain extent, some U.S. journalists had unwittingly opened themselves up to such a response as Amalrik’s by following in the footsteps of other



moscow human rights defenders look west 257

Westerners in the Soviet Union and engaging in gift-giving, aid, and domestically based social interaction that seemed to draw them into the human rights cause. They thereby became caught up in insider identity, status, and expectations, just as human rights defenders themselves struggled with their own shifting identities. Above all, they became caught up in the emergence of that powerful narrative of (samo)zhertvovanie that swept the human rights community in the mid- to late 1960s and early 1970s. Yet had it not been worth it? For that honorary insiderhood of some U.S. journalists had also given many individuals on both sides great personal pleasure as well as triggering such negative responses as Amalrik’s. That enthusiasm surely contributed to warmer and more extensive U.S. coverage of both the Soviet Union and dissent (such as Hedrick Smith’s immensely popular book The Russians). Amalrik’s response (as Alexeyeva and Ginzburg believed and have said) was really the exception, the contradiction that helps us grasp the complex dimensions of the whole phenomenon. Caught in the dissident stew of changing identities, U.S. journalists, who were themselves experiencing the challenge to identity that is a part of travel abroad and life in a foreign culture, engaged in an emotionally powerful transnational encounter of real historical significance. While it is difficult to quantify, there is little doubt but that this encounter had a significant impact on the outcome of the Cold War.

CHAPTER  12

CONCLUSION TR ANSNATIONAL HISTORY AND THE E AST-WEST DIVIDE

Michael David-Fox

This volume has presented ten chapters on the cultural and transnational history of Russia/USSR and East Central Europe. Four of them centered on the USSR, two on East Germany, two on the Czech lands or Czechoslovakia, one on Hungary, and one on Poland. Long gone are the days when Russia and Eastern Europe were regularly studied in tandem and formed part of a more or less coherent area studies field. Since the breakup of the communist bloc in 1989, geopolitical, institutional, and academic imperatives have pushed the Russian and East European fields apart. The direct cross-fertilization present in this collection is now something of a rarity. To be sure, geopolitics was an even worse academic organizer during the Cold War than it is now, and it made little sense then for East European studies to be so exclusively linked to the Russian field. At the same time, current politics and the configuration of academic fields should not be allowed to handicap the study of the past. It is now far less likely for Russianists to be versed in East European historiography and vice versa; the dislocation is particularly meaningful for the communist period, when the histories of the two regions were most closely intertwined. Even in Germany, where the institutionalized field of “Osteuropa” incorporates Russia into the concept of Eastern Europe, the history of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) is commonly 258

conclusion 259

studied either within a German-German framework or with surprisingly insufficient reference to directly related Soviet historiography. This book represents an attempt at fruitful reintegration.1 Only two of the ten chapters deal with the precommunist period, but each plays a crucial role in the volume, either by raising important issues and patterns in East European and Russian relationships with the “West” or suggesting how they were inherited or reconfigured by communist regimes and societies. Karen Gammelgaard’s study of Czech travelogues demonstrates some of the complexities of grappling with travel accounts and mental mapping, as in the course of her chapter she engages questions of genre, biography, audience, text, context, publication history, and, last but not least, the travelers’ experiences. Most interesting here is that Gammelgaard engages the “West” not, say, in regard to Britain or France but in terms of disillusioned Czech intellectuals’ views of Russia, which they explicitly or implicitly portrayed as non-European. By reversing the positive view of Russia conditioned by the Slavic solidarity prevalent in the Czech lands in the nineteenth century, the Czech travelers positioned their own country as part of Europe or the West. This first chapter suggests right away that the West not merely held the status of an external “other” in the countries of Eastern Europe but was readily accessible as an internal self-identification as well. Even in Russia, where variations of the classic split between Slavophiles and Westernizers were repeated for over a century and a half after the two groups appeared in the 1840s, Russians routinely portrayed themselves as European when it came, for example, to the non-Russian nationalities of the empire. In the communist period, in the words of Péteri, “the Occident was also part of the self; it asserted itself within, and appeared to be ahead rather than behind.” Second, Gamelgaard’s disillusioned Czechs inevitably portrayed Russia with another national group centrally in mind: the Germans, the familiar and traditional object of the Czech national struggle within the Habsburg monarchy. These kinds of triangles, and even more many-sided geometric figures, have been quite common in East-West imaginaries too frequently treated in terms of binary oppositions. Finally, Gammelgaard demonstrates, no matter how some tried, it was difficult if not impossible to disaggregate discussions of culture and identity, on the one hand, from the struggles of politics and foreign policy, on the other. All these insights that emerge from Gammelgaard’s treatment of the Czech travelogues are relevant and applicable to later periods, including the communist era. Incidentally, in the 1920s and 1930s, it was common knowledge among Soviet diplomats and cultural officials that the views of Sovietophilic Czechs were conditioned by the long-standing tradition of

260 michael david-fox

Russophilia. Circa 1948, it became a central communist strategy to promote Slavism and portray Czechoslovakia not as part of the West but as betrayed by it.2 Erik Ingebrigtsen interprets the domestication of a Rockefeller Foundation–inspired American reform of public health in interwar Hungary: imported as an American advance in the early 1920s, it was transformed into a Hungarian national model by the 1930s. His study is revealing of a number of patterns that had become part of the East European and Russian relationship with the West before the communist period. First, Ingebrigsten shows how Western models were invoked and promoted as models for modernization and civilization. Even by the end of his story, when they were disguised as a national or non-Western product, they still were used to promote Hungary’s own status as part of the West. But the West meant many things both historically and to various actors. In this case, the health-care model was not just Western but American; and the United States, particularly in the interwar period, was a very particular subset of the West. As Mary Nolan has observed, for many in interwar Europe Americanism and Bolshevism competed as two models of modernization.3 Yet even the revolutionary Soviets, with their own fascination with amerikanizm in the 1920s, shared something in common with counterrevolutionary Hungary. As Ingebrigtsen describes it, the American health-care import was particularly prestigious as a foreign model in the early 1920s, but in the course of a decade it lost that prestige as “foreignness” became a major drawback. It was thus reconfigured as a national model, serving now as a sign of cultural and scientific superiority. As this statement suggests, nationalism as well as communism was caught up in this contest of superiority and inferiority with the imagined West. The zigzags by which Western models were in certain contexts coveted and prestigious and at other times shunned were not peculiar to the history of communism—even though they were intensified by the competition to create an alternative modernity to that of capitalism and by the intense rivalry of the Cold War. Ingebrigtsen’s chapter vividly conveys how a complex issue of health policy—shaped most immediately by domestic professional debates and the agendas of the Rockefeller Foundation’s international philanthropy—was in a broader sense subject to a sea change in the status of the West itself as it became a touchstone for nationalist ideology and politics. Under communism as well, the history of the transnational circulation of models is filled with such ironies and disguised genealogies.4 As this discussion already illustrates, a notable feature of this book is that it reflects and also furthers what has sometimes been called the transnational turn. Much as this rather awkward buzzword (and the declaration of yet

conclusion 261

another “turn”) can serve to obscure historiographical continuities and the interconnections among various approaches, the case can be made that the mode of historical inquiry represented in this volume is distinguishable and significant. Transnational history crosses over national borders to address phenomena potentially different from those conventionally brought out in the study of international organizations, relations between states, and comparative history. The transnational is frequently understood to signify the movement of groups, goods, technology, or people across national borders, and in this definition the accent is on movement transcending the borders of the nationstate.5 Yet in the study of communism, the received boundaries that need to be transcended are not necessarily those of the nation-state but those of the Iron Curtain, as well as the often relentlessly internalist narratives that arose to study Stalinism. The study of communist societies in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, whose competition with capitalism intensified the region’s traditional preoccupation with Western Europe, thus offers something distinctive to transnational history. In this book, the emphasis falls not so much on movement itself (which was often restricted). Rather, it is on grasping the many dimensions of particular types of interaction with the outside world— those with the “West,” at once the gold standard for advanced development and a hostile order soon to be, if not in many ways already, surpassed. The communist competition with the countries of advanced industrialized capitalism, intensifying precommunist divisions between East and West, was ideologically fraught as perhaps no other and informed in one way or another all the most important initiatives of Soviet and East European communist regimes. With no other part of the world could sentiments of inferiority and superiority, admiration and enmity, emulation and rejection become so intertwined. Most important (as Péteri suggests in his introduction), the relationship lay at the core of identity and self-understanding under communism, given the fundamental communist claim to be constructing a superior, alternative modernity. In this context, then, transnational takes on the added import of transsystemic. The chapters here, as a result, reach across borders to key “external” contexts to suggest how they were intertwined with the internal, domestic histories of communist countries. While the historiography of East European countries has its own specificities, for decades Soviet “socialist construction” was studied as an almost exclusively internal process, with the exception of a largely separate subfield of foreign policy.6 In recent years, valuable bodies of scholarship have grown up in both Russian and European languages that examine either bilateral cultural relations between the Soviet Union and other countries, the images of the outside world propagated under communism, or

262 michael david-fox

perceptions and knowledge of Russia and the Soviet Union within a specific national context.7 The mode of historical inquiry represented here is different in that it sets out to disentangle the many layers involved in engagement with the West in order to probe its impact on identities and practices within the communist world. This type of inquiry has the potential to affect grand narratives about the trajectory from the construction of socialism to its reform and demise, for these will have to be rewritten with the international dimension and the illuminating lens of such border-crossings centrally in view. The West was such a powerful referent for the communist world not merely because of the intense preoccupation of Russia and other parts of Europe’s periphery (which did not, notably, include Czechoslovakia or Germany) with the Western part of the continent, nor only because the goal of “catching up and overtaking” implicitly adopted what were ultimately Western yardsticks to measure industry, technology, or consumer goods. Nor was it solely because of the often extreme isolation of communist societies under Stalinism, which, as Barbara Walker discusses in her chapter, did have a lot to do with the particular intensity with which foreigners from the West were engaged. Rather, the relationship was so central ultimately because the West represented, in Paulina Bren’s evocative title, a “mirror, mirror, on the wall.” In the fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, the jealous stepmother queen—mutatis mutandis, the party?—asks the magic mirror to tell her who is the fairest of them all. She is horrified to find out that it is not she but Snow White, whom she has unsuccessfully tried to kill off several times. But the metaphor is evocative also because a mirror is a place in which one looks at and judges oneself. The West was not only an attractive rival but, in other ways, an inextricable part of the fabric of those societies. Even under the height of Stalinist anticosmopolitanism, Western musical instruments could never have been smashed as they were during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, for the Stalinist Soviet Union and its Sovietized East Central European allies each inherited and celebrated its own “Western,” precommunist high culture. Further, Stalinism was at least in part a Westernizing phenomenon, not just because of its program of forced modernization but because it claimed the mantle of all progressive and hence Western civilization. Therefore, as Greg Castillo so incisively observes, communism claimed to be the true West as well as the West’s “cultural savior.” The title of the book, “Imagining the West,” captures this special relationship and special construct. But it should not be taken to imply that ideas or mental constructs alone—whether in the form of ideology or images, cultural geography or discourse, perceptions or propaganda—are at stake. The chapters in this book balance the attempt to capture those dimensions with concrete instances of interaction with the “West.” In the ten chapters, one can

conclusion 263

distinguish five types of East-West interaction that are analyzed. These are those involving (1) cultural policy and cultural diplomacy across borders (Catriona Kelly and Elaine Kelly); (2) professional and cultural fields (Erik Ingebrigtsen, Greg Castillo, and David Crowley); (3) East-West confrontations over consumer goods and lifestyle (Susan Reid and Paulina Bren); (4) travel and cross-cultural encounters (Karen Gammelgaard and Barbara Walker); and (5) images and filmic representations (Anne Gorsuch). There are, of course, many differences in approach among the chapters, dictated in part by the subject matter and proclivities of the authors. But all of them explore a discernible and concrete form of engagement with the West and attempt to relate this to the broader, multidimensional context of the West within Russian/Soviet or East European politics and culture. Pinpointing the forms this interaction takes helps us to discern the chapters’ broader contribution. For Catriona Kelly, the most direct interaction takes the form of Soviet participation in the United Nations’ discussions of children’s rights, but this itself is shown to be rooted in long-standing attempts to reach Western audiences through cultural diplomacy. One of the most interesting conclusions she draws is that Soviet architects of cultural diplomacy revealed their “distorted view” of Western countries, in particular an outdated view of Western welfare institutions after World War II. Kelly’s chapter is notable for its longterm perspective on children in Soviet cultural diplomacy across the entire Soviet period. One of the benefits of breadth in this case is that it shows how many of the forms of Soviet international propaganda on children remained constant over the decades even as significant shifts in substance and emphasis occurred, such as that from early Soviet youth activism to the marked paternalism of the postwar peace campaign. The interaction Greg Castillo presents, by contrast, occurs on both sides of the Iron Curtain, between the promoters of the “Atlantic world’s” internationalstyle modernism and the exhibition organizers of socialist realist design, particularly those at the Deutsche Bauakademie. Germany in his chapter appears as the battleground for the competing cultural claims of the two super­ powers—both of which tried to overcome presumptions of cultural inferiority and constructed parallel models of the “barbarian” threat. They thus both “engaged in campaigns to annex the West’s aesthetic heritage, which were subsequently waged by proxy in client states.” Given the remarkable parallelism he observes, it would be interesting to learn just how consciously responsive the two competing sides were when they planned exhibitions. But in any case, within this broad framework Castillo is careful to delineate East German specificities, for example in suggesting links between Nazi-era and East German condemnations of Degenerate Art or, more significantly, in the

264 michael david-fox

particularities of the Bauhaus revival, which inverted “Stalin-era aesthetic evaluations of modernism” yet left “intact the socialist realist strategy of reclaiming Western cultural achievements.” Yet another form of border-crossing takes place in David Crowley’s chapter about Warsaw architects “between Paris and Moscow.” Key figures traveled to both symbolic urban poles in the 1950s, during the post-1949 period when Western modernism was being depicted as part of the past and again after 1956, when a new enthusiasm for Western technology and design helped turn Poland into a metaphorical Occident of the Soviet bloc. This allows Crowley to argue that the mobile Polish architects “engaged in debates and practices shaping modern architecture in the West and the East,” thus developing a “rare dual perspective on two worlds.” Elaine Kelly’s chapter, in turn, compares the reception of Wagner in East and West Germany by tracing the many ways the East German Wagner festival in Dessau responded to the new Bayreuth festival in the West. The direct observation and competition involved in this attempt to create an antithetical “socialist” Wagner was deeply embedded in GDR cultural policy and cultural politics, not to mention the complex ideological debates over the reception of a problematic national cultural symbol. As in both Castillo’s and Crowley’s chapters, the de-Stalinization of the Thaw becomes a key turning point, when hostility to Bayreuth gave way to a sudden surge of admiration. At the same time, a fissure in the East German debate over Wagner opened up as the composer’s place in the East German canon came under attack, a position made possible only by the now diminished possibility of German reunification. One could easily imagine a study of Thaw-era cinema and imagining the West that would revolve around representations rather than interactions. In fact, Anne Gorsuch’s chapter is as much about the post-Stalin Soviet opening to the outside world through travel and tourism to and from the USSR— one of the most momentous events in postwar Soviet history—as it is about celluloid.8 Indeed, the chapter is predicated on an analogy between film and tourism: both create the illusion of authenticity, but the messages in film were less subject to spontaneity and thus “it was easier in film than in real life to imagine one’s communist self as equivalent to that of people in the capitalist West; by domesticating capitalist culture, Soviet films removed the danger of uncomfortable firsthand comparisons.” Gorsuch ably puts filmic images of the West in such works as Inostrantsy, Ia Kuba, and Russkii suvenir in the context of the impact of the historical Thaw-era border-crossings. She shows Thaw-era attitudes toward the West as expressed in cinema to be an unstable amalgam of newly positive imagery of foreigners stemming from the doctrine of “peaceful coexistence”; ideological warnings that nonetheless could play on

conclusion 265

the seductive allure of the bourgeois world; and images of Soviet modernity and civilized consumption that were, strikingly, derived from a “Western, specifically European, model.” Even as Thaw-era culture attempted to escape the rigid dogmas of the socialist realist tradition, Gorsuch concludes that the “sunny, romantic, and dynamic Moscow” showcased in Georgii Danelia’s 1963 classic Ia shagaiu po Moskve was at least in part constructed out of reflections of the West and thus represented, in its own way, life in the capital city not as it was, but as it should be in an imagined future. Indeed, the uneasy combination of attitudes toward the West that Gorsuch analyzes can be seen as a recalibration of the superiority-inferiority calculus with the outside world that had become entrenched under Stalinism. Writing in his landmark Thaw-era memoirs, Ilya Ehrenburg pointed to the hidden side of the endless Stalin-era declarations of Soviet superiority in all things: “Unending talk about one’s superiority is linked with groveling before things foreign—they are but different aspects of an inferiority complex.”9 Despite the enforced enthusiasm of Stalinist culture, the extreme isolationism of late Stalinism was predicated on a pessimistic caution and extreme suspiciousness about the effects on Soviets of interaction with the outside world. Khrushchev-era optimism—reflected in sometimes recklessly overconfident gestures of cultural diplomacy that at key moments opened the country to Western visitors and displays, such as the 1957 World Festival of Youth and Students and the 1959 American National Exhibition at Sokol´niki Park in Moscow—was not only a product of reformism but to a certain extent predicated on almost two decades of Stalinist orthodoxy. But as Ehrenburg suggested, under the surface of that seemingly iron-clad Stalin-era orthodoxy about Soviet superiority lay numerous doubts, such as the unsettling experiences of Red Army soldiers in Europe at the end of World War II or elites’ secret and not-so-secret predilections for Western luxury goods. By the same token, under the surface of the Khrushchev-era optimism lay the old and sometimes well-founded fears of subversion through excess exposure to the West. The epicenter of East-West interaction in Susan Reid’s chapter is the famous Kitchen Debate, but in her hands the well-known formulations of Nixon and Khrushchev at the American National Exhibition in Moscow are reinterpreted in light of the comments of ordinary Soviet citizens about the American model kitchen, housing, and living standards. Soviet citizens’ responses to this Thaw-era “Nylon War” (Péteri’s phrase) reveal some admiring enthusiasm for the American display, but that was far from all. Interpreting the responses of the American organizers, party agitators, and Soviet citizens who recorded comments, Reid suggests that the triumph of the U.S. model

266 michael david-fox

kitchen and the technologically advanced good life it showcased were far from a foregone conclusion in 1959. Czechoslovakia under “normalization,” the subject of Paulina Bren’s chapter, was a period of crackdown after the Prague Spring, the antithesis of reform communism, but it was also a form of post-Stalinism in which, once again, not merely the availability of consumer goods but the delineation of a socialist way of life is shown to have played a central role. The border-crossings at the center of Bren’s piece are precisely that: largescale travel and emigration to the West during the extraordinary window when Czechoslovakia opened its borders during and after the Prague Spring. Amnestied returnees became the central figures of a media campaign—which Bren traces and analyzes in detail—that contrasted the possibilities for spiritual “self-realization” under communism with poverty, alienation, and the sheer necessity to work hard under capitalism. Bren distinguishes the Czechoslovak case from East Germany, where greater proximity to its Western counterpart made for a more direct competition with Western consumerism. The similarities between Reid’s and Bren’s depiction of an attempt to delineate socialist from capitalist consumption in two very different times and places are suggestive of a long-term and significant phenomenon in the post-Stalinist order of both the reformist and conservative varieties. Péteri’s introduction to the volume takes up this issue by counterposing Khrushchev-era attempts to define a socialist mode of consumption with later socialist consumerism. In his words, “collectivist institutional solutions in newly emerging areas of consumption . . . constituted a remarkably short-lived feature of the post-Stalin order of socialist societies.” In this light, Bren’s analysis of Czechoslovakia promoting itself as a better place for “self-realization” than the hard-working, acquisitive West only appears to have located “an answer to the vexing problem of combining the consumerist turn with sustained systemic exceptionalism.” Péteri argues that it was in the end not a solution, and his reasons are suggestive for the emergent debate over socialist consumerism and the collapse of communism. In his view, attempts to distinguish a meaningful socialist or collectivist form of consumption did not and could not “constitute an effective way to absorb all the insecurity caused by the advent of consumerism and the lack of collective (systemically correct) forms of appropriating (consuming) the goods that constituted the icons of modern everyday life.” Attempts to forge a distinctive form of communist consumerism came too late to alter the already “well-established practices of policy and everyday life” in which Western patterns of acquisitive consumerism had already been replicated, especially by elites. In any case, the contributions of Reid, Bren, and Péteri present a more complicated and consequential historical process than the

conclusion 267

simplistic assertion that the “second world” took on and then lost the battle of consumption to the first. The interactions with which Walker is centrally concerned are of a more intimate kind: the sustained personal relationships between Western journalists and Soviet dissidents, many of which were formed across not borders but kitchen tables. Walker uses the device of analyzing the distinction between insiders and outsiders among dissidents and in the broader Soviet culture. This allows her to draw out the broader significance of the cross-cultural encounter, as she suggests how the insider-outsider divide was blurred when Western journalists were drawn into dissident circles. Dissidents were attracted to the outsiders precisely because they were inverting official Soviet hostility to “bourgeois” foreigners, but at the same time Walker draws out the links between dissident and Soviet culture. The attack on Western selfish careerism and dependence on creature comforts that the dissidents appropriated had deep roots in the early Soviet reception of foreign visitors. But it also has a potentially even more suggestive genealogy. Walker at the outset of her chapter is hardly wrong to bracket off the special Soviet relationship with the West from the less isolated and extreme attitudes of imperial Russia. But the defensive juxtaposition of Russian morality and spirituality to Western rationality and economic advance was present already as an integral part of the formation of Russian national identity in the nineteenth century. In the words of Liah Greenfeld, “the qualities of the Russian soul were arrived at through the mental exercise of posing antitheses to those Western virtues in which Russia was particularly deficient.”10 The way dissidents recapitulated and recaptured certain features of the nineteenth-century intelligentsia has often been noted; more obscure is the manner in which the discourse of the “Russian soul” was succeeded in the early Soviet years by Marxist-Leninist excoriations of bourgeois addiction to luxury, as opposed to the Soviet elevation of “culture.” These intriguing lines of continuity, however, are not the subject of Walker’s chapter. More central and more notable is the manner in which Walker has used oral history to place the varied experiences of individual dissidents and journalists into the broader patterns of dissident subculture and Soviet life. As this volume establishes, East-West interactions under communism deserve to be recognized as transnational history of a distinctive kind: layered onto long-standing preoccupations preceding the communist era, buffeted by exceptionally intense political and ideological ambitions and constraints, and centrally caught up with the geopolitical and systemic confrontations triggered by the Bolshevik Revolution and the Cold War.

NOTES

Chapter 1. Introduction The authors and the editor would like to thank the Norwegian Research Council and the Program on East European Cultures and Societies (PEECS) of the Norwegian University for Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, for their financial and moral support for the project that yielded, among other results, the present book. 1. Endre Ady, “Morituri,” Figyelö (Budapest) 1, 2 (1905): 633–35, reprinted in Helyünk Európában. Nézetek és koncepciók a 20. századi Magyarországon, 2 vols., ed. Ivan T. Berend and Éva Ring, trans. György Péteri (Budapest: Magvetö Könyvkiadó, 1986), 1:45–47. 2. Interview by József A. Tillmann, Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, Budapest, n.d., www.c3.hu/~tillmann/konyvek/ezredvegi/esterhazy.html (J. A. Tillmann’s Web site), accessed 10 May 2010. Translated from Hungarian by György Péteri. 3. See, for example, Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). 4. In addition to referring the reader to the quoted excerpts in this chapter, I cannot resist citing here Péter Esterházy’s pun from the late 1970s on “Central Europe” (a sobering antidote to Milan Kundera’s greater-than-life image of Central Europe and Central European intellectuals): “We are Central European: our nervous system is worn down and our toilet paper is hard.” See Péter Esterházy, Termelési-regény (kissregény) (Production Novel) (Budapest: Magvető Kiadó, 1979), 8. 5. Examples of such accounts include A. L. Szidorov [Sidorov] and A. M. Pankratova, A Szovjetunió a szocializmus országa (The Soviet Union, the Country of Socialism) (Budapest: Szikra, 1949); and C. A. Sztyepanyan [Ts. A. Stepan´ian] et al., A szovjet szocialista társadalom (The Soviet Socialist Society) (Budapest: Szikra, 1950). 6. Suffice it at this time to add to Larry Wolff’s already mentioned work only a few important contributions: Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); José M. Faraldo, Paulina Gulinska-Jurgiel, and Christian Domnitz, eds., Europa im Ostblock: Vorstellungen und Diskurse (1945–1991) (Europe in the Eastern Bloc: Ideas and Discourses [1945–1991]) (Cologne: Böhlau, 2008); Wendy Bracewell and Alex Drace-Frances, eds., Under Eastern Eyes: A Comparative Introduction to East European Travel Writing (Budapest: CEU Press, 2008); and the special issue on “Symbolic Geographies,” East Central Europe 32, 1–2 (2005). 7. Due to periods of “peaceful coexistence” and relative openness—and to their profound interest in Western science, technology, and know-how—communist elites could seldom avoid

269

270 notes to pages 9–15 giving the impression of lagging behind capitalism in a number of areas. One discursive strategy to cope with this tension was to emphasize socialism’s advantages in terms of its potential and actual tempo of development (which seemed to work well during the 1950s and 1960s). “In the course of 45 years of Soviet power . . . barbarism has been replaced by modern life”—this statement is taken from a work typical for this developmental variant of the master narrative: Annelie and Andrew Thorndike’s documentary film (produced by the DEFA in 1958–60), Das russische Wunder (The Russian Miracle). In 1963, they published a book with the same title based on the research they did for the film (Berlin: Verlag Kultur und Fortschritt, 1963). The text quoted is from the Hungarian edition of the book: Annelie and Andrew Thorndike, Az orosz csoda, trans. Erzsébet F. Solti (Budapest: Kozmosz Könyvek, 1967), 181. 8. André Gorz, Socialism and Revolution, trans. Norman Denny (London: Allen Lane, 1975), 193. Original French publication: Le socialisme difficile (Paris: Seuil, 1967). Gorz’s argument was later echoed by Francois Fejtő (quoted in this book by David Crowley). 9. I am thinking of the “administrative measures” taken by the communist leadership of Hungary against critical Marxist social scientists, like Ágnes Heller, András Hegedüs, Mária and György Márkus, or Iván Szelényi, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. 10. For a discussion of state socialism as a project of “antimodernity,” see Ina Merkel, “Consumer Culture in the DDR, or How the Struggle for Antimodernity Was Lost on the Battleground of Consumer Culture,” in Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century, ed. Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern, and Matthias Judt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), esp. 288.

Chapter 2. Were the Czechs More Western Than Slavic? Epigraph: Karel Havlíček Borovský to Karel Vladislav Zap, Moscow, 30 April 1844, in K. Havlíček Borovský, Cesta na Rus, ed. M. Novotný (Prague: ELK, 1947), 197. 1. Quotations from Havlíček’s Sketches from Russia in this chapter are from the critical edition of his works: Karel Havlíček Borovský, “Obrazy z Rus,” in Dílo I, ed. Jiří Kořejčík and Libuše Fischerová (Prague: Československý spisovatel, 1986), 11–116. 2. Antal Stašek, “Vzpomínky na pobyt v Rusku,” in Vzpomínky (Prague: Fr. Borový, 1925), 378–450. 3. Mrštík’s essays are quoted from Vilém Mrštík, Cesta do Ruska (Prague: Arkýř, 1992). 4. Radko Pytlík, “Vilém Mrštík a F. X. Šalda—dvě koncepce literatury let devadesátých,” Česká literatura 35 (1987): 432–44. 5. Luboš Merhaut, “Vilém Mrštík,” in Lexicon české literatury, vol. 3, pt. 1, ed. Jiří Opelík (Prague: Academia, 2000), 349. 6. Jiří Korejčík, biographical note to Karel Havlíček Borovský, in Havlíček, Dílo I, 588–610. 7. Antal Stašek, Ruské básnictví a Turgeněv (Prague: Osvěta, 1873). 8. See Radegast Parolek, Vilém Mrštík a ruská literatura (Prague: Univerzita Karlova, 1964). 9. On the general category of “travel literature,” see Jan Borm, “Defining Travel: On the Travel Book, Travel Writing, and Terminology,” in Perspectives on Travel Writing, ed. Glenn Hooper and Tim Youngs (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004), 13–26. 10. On the process of marking out, see Maria Todorova, “Isn’t Central Europe Dead? A Response to Iver Neumann’s ‘Forgetting the Central Europe of the 1980s,’” in Central Europe: Core or Periphery? ed. Christopher Lord (Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School Press, 2000), 226. 11. Vladimír Novotný sums up the experiences of Mrštík and Stašek as follows: “Travel after the lure of the Russian eagle’s powerful wings and claws became a deadlock” (“Z literárních poutí na Rus,” Aluze 4, 3 [2000]: 55). In general, Czech travelogues from Russia in the second half of



notes to pages 16–18 271

the nineteenth century were characterized by sharp formulations of the travelers’ both positive and negative reactions. This was due to the travelers’ unusually high degree of expectation. See Martin Gáži, “Všední dny na nevšedních cestách do Ruska v druhé polovině 19. a na počátku 20. století,” Kuděj: Časopis pro kulturní dějiny 2, 1 (2001): 37–50. 12. František Palacký, Dějiny národu českého v Čechách a na Moravě (Prague: B. Kočí, 1848), 8. Quoted from Hugh LeCaine Agnew, The Czechs and the Lands of the Bohemian Crown (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2004), 113. 13. “Assuredly, if the Austrian state had not existed for ages, it would have been a behest for us in the interest of Europe and indeed of humanity to endeavor to create it as soon as possible. . . . Think of the Austrian Empire divided up into sundry republics, some considerable in size and others small—what a delightful basis for a universal Russian monarchy!” (František Palacký to the Committee of Fifty, c/o President Soiron, in Frankfurt, Prague, 11 April 1848, quoted in Slavonic and East European Review 26, 67 [1948]: 305–8). 14. For accounts of the role of language in the Czech revivalist movement, see Vladimír Macura, Znamení zrodu: Český národní obrození jako kulturní typ (Prague: H & H, 1995), 42–60; and Derek Sayer, The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 107–18. 15. Macura, Znamení zrodu, 157. See also Alexandr Stich, “Novinář Karel Havlíček očima následujících generací a očima dneška,” in Karel Havlíček Borovský, Dílo II, ed. Alexandr Stich (Prague: Československý spisovatel, 1986), 11–33. 16. Ján Kollár, Slávy dcera (Turčiansky Sv. Martin: Matica slovenská, 1924), “Předzpěv”; translation mine. As to the metaphorical language of Slávy dcera, see Felix Vodička, “Jan Kollár,” in Dějiny české literatury II, ed. Jan Mukařovský (Prague: Československá akademie věd, 1960), 255–81. Kollár never visited Russia. 17. Otto Urban, “Czech Society, 1848–1918,” in Bohemia in History, ed. Mikuláš Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 200. In Bohemia, the German-speaking population constituted 37 percent of the population, according to the 1880 and 1890 censuses. See Ottův naučný slovník (Prague: J. Otto, 1893), 6:122. 18. Gary B. Cohen, “The German Minority of Prague, 1850–1918,” in Ethnic Identity in Urban Europe, ed. M. Engman, F. W. Carter, A. C. Hepburn, and C. G. Pooley (Aldershot, UK: Dartmouth), 267–93. 19. Karel Havlíček Borovský to Josef Tadeáš Klejzar, Moscow, probably June 1843, in Havlíček, Cesta na Rus, 32. 20. Travelogues published as books from this period include Servác Heller, Život na Rusi (Prague: Spolek pro vydávání laciných kněh českých, 1868); Josef Holeček, Zájezd na Rus I–II (Prague: Nakladatelství vlasty, 1924); Václav Alois Jung, Půl roku v carské říši (Prague: Čas, 1903); Gabriela Preissová, Ideály: 6 kreseb ze slovenských luhů (Prague: Published by the author, 1880); and Jaromír Hrubý, Ze světa slovanského I–II (Prague: Bursík a Kohout, 1885–87). Magazines also published many accounts: for instance, František Táborský, “Týden na Všeruské výstavě,” Naše doba (1897); Gabriela Preissová, “Obrázky z ruské pouti,” Osvěta 26 (1896): 976–83, 1099–1118; František V. Jeřábek, “Z výletu do Petrohradu a do Moskvy,” Světozor 7 (1873): 195, 207, 280, 341, 366, 475, 495, and 522; and Karel Kadlec, “Dojmy z Ruska,” Lumír 25 (1896–97): 25, 40, 51, 67, 78, and 87. 21. For instance, Julius Zeyer’s historical novel Ondřej Černyšev (1876) and his short story “Darija” (1879) are set in Russia. The latter takes place in Zeyer’s contemporary Russia, but it is a variation on the theme of La dame aux Camélias rather than a story with Russia as its theme. See Anna Stejskalová, “Julius Zeyer a Rusko,” Sborník pedagogické fakulty Univerzity Karlovy:

272 notes to pages 18–23 Filologické studie. Literatura a výchova slovesným uměním 12 (1984): 7–43. On Jan Neruda’s Russian themes, see Karel Čejka, “Dopisy a cesty na Rus,” Kulturní měsíčník 5, 11 (1987): 65–67. 22. Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, Russland und Europa: Studien über die geistigen Strömungen in Russland (Jena: Eugen Diderichs, 1913). The work was translated into Czech only gradually, the first volume appearing in 1919. 23. Ibid., 1:7–8. Quoted from Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, The Spirit of Russia (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969), 1:5. 24. See Casey Blanton, Travel Writing: The Self and the World (New York: Routledge, 2002), 3; and Kristi Siegel, “Travel Writing and Travel Theory,” in Issues in Travel Writing: Empire, Spectacle, and Displacement, ed. Kristi Siegel (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 4. 25. Havlíček, “Obrazy z Rus,” 16. 26. Mrštík, Cesta do Ruska, 67. 27. The main economic trends of fin-de-siècle Bohemia are summed up in Agnew, The Czechs and the Lands of the Bohemian Crown, 155. In 1897, Mrštík authored the manifesto against the clearance of old Prague, Bestia triumphans (Prague: J. Pelcl, 1897). 28. Havlíček, “Obrazy z Rus,” 51. 29. Stašek, Vzpomínky, 445, 447. 30. Mrštík’s stay in St. Petersburg is best known from his letters. See Radegast Parolek, “Cesta Viléma Mrštíka do Ruska (1896) a její výsledky ve světle nových dokumentů,” Acta universitatis carolinae—Philologica 2 (1960): 129–37. In A Journey to Russia, a single comparison between St. Petersburg and Paris indirectly reveals his personal experience. 31. Mrštík, Cesta do Ruska, 21. 32. Havlíček’s omission of the people in the countryside is particularly remarkable in view of the popularity of the topic in contemporary Slavic romanticism. See Karel Krejčí, “Havlíčkův pohled na Rusko,” in Havlíček, Cesta na Rus, 207–21. 33. Mrštík, Cesta do Ruska, 137. 34. Havlíček, “Obrazy z Rus,” 45. 35. Mrštík, Cesta do Ruska, 68. 36. Havlíček, “Obrazy z Rus,” 73. 37. Stašek, Vzpomínky, 449–50. 38. Mrštík, Cesta do Ruska, 135. 39. Stašek, Vzpomínky, 418. 40. Mrštík, Cesta do Ruska, 108. 41. Stašek, Vzpomínky, 445. 42. Mrštík, Cesta do Ruska, 108. 43. Havlíček, “Obrazy z Rus,” 18. 44. Ibid., 73. 45. Ibid., 40. 46. Ibid., 53–54. 47. Mrštík, Cesta do Ruska, 7. 48. Ibid., 111. 49. Ibid., 58. 50. Stašek, Vzpomínky, 418. 51. Macura, Znamení zrodu, 166–67. 52. Karel Havlíček Borovský, “Slovan a Čech,” Pražské noviny, 15 February 1846, quoted in Havlíček, Dílo II, 78.



notes to pages 24–29 273

53. In the opposition between real Europe and “pseudo-Europe,” Mrštík also introduced America as an equal with “pseudo-Europe” (Cesta do Ruska, 122). 54. Ibid., 119, 123. 55. Havlíček, “Obrazy z Rus,” 48. 56. Ibid., 53. See also, e.g., Mrštík, Cesta do Ruska, 129. 57. Mrštík, Cesta do Ruska, 129. 58. Stašek, Vzpomínky, 406. 59. Mrštík, Cesta do Ruska, 98. Rozčarovanja is Mrštík’s rendering of the Russian word for “disillusionment.” The editors of Politik omitted this sequence. 60. Ibid., 97. Porjadky is Mrštík’s rendering of the Russian word for “order.” In the Czech original, the French word désillusion is more conspicous. 61. Havlíček, “Obrazy z Rus,” 30. Čelavěk is Havlíček’s transliteration of the Russian word. It is similar to the Czech word for “human being,” člověk. Vaše Prevoschoditělstvo is Havlíček’s rendering of the Russian form of address “Your Excellency.” Perun is the chief god in Slav mythology. 62. Alexandr Stich, “Přejaté a cizí prvky v lexiku Havlíčkovy novinářské prózy,” in Stylistické studie 1, ed. Alexandr Stich and Františka Havlová (Prague: Československá akademie ved, 1974), 95–135. 63. Cf. Karel Havlíček Borovský, Tyrolské elegie, in his Dílo I, 437–46. 64. Luboš Merhaut, “Vilém Mrštík,” 349. 65. Mrštík, Cesta do Ruska, 66. 66. See David Scott, Semiologies of Travel: From Gautier to Baudrillard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 212. 67. Stašek, Vzpomínky, 409. Verbatim translation: “A large part of them lived a period of time ‘za granícej’; and to be abroad meant the same as to study, usually in Germany.” Za granícej is Stašek’s rendering of the Russian expression for “abroad.” 68. Mrštík, Cesta do Ruska, 57. Verbatim translation: “The izvočiks camping in flocks out beneath the Nikolajev fokzál put their heads to slumber again.” Izvozčici and fokzálem are Mrštík’s representations of the Russian words for “cabmen” and “station,” respectively. 69. Ibid., 43. 70. Pavel Trost, “Jazyk ironie,” Slovo a slovesnost 58 (1997): 81–85. 71. Mrštík, Cesta do Ruska, 72. 72. Jurij Lotman, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (London: I. B. Tauris, 1990), 219; Amy J. Devitt, Writing Genres (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004). 73. Genre names are difficult to translate, since they grow out of specific cultural situations with specific genre traditions. See Carolyn Miller, “Genre as Social Action,” in Genre and the New Rhetoric, ed. Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway (London: Taylor and Francis, 1994), 27. The depiction of Czech genres in this chapter relies on Dagmar Mocná and others, Encyklopedie literárních žánrů (Prague: Paseka, 2004). 74. Karel Havlíček Borovský in his private notes, 1 October 1843; quoted from Strmé cesty, ed. Jaroslava Janáčková (Prague: Kruh, 1990), 82. Quite similarly, Mrštík was harsher and more direct in his critique of Russia in his letters than in the texts meant for publication. See Novotný, “Z literárních,” 52. 75. The epigram is dated 26 February 1844. Quoted from Havlíček, Cesta na Rus, 46; translation mine. 76. See Elizabeth A. Bohls, “Introduction,” in Travel Writing, 1700–1830: An Anthology, ed. Bohls and Ian Duncan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), xx–xxi.

274 notes to pages 29–33 77. Stašek, Vzpomínky, 449–50. 78. Ibid., 391. 79. Ibid., 418–19. 80. The poem is quoted in full in ibid., 431. 81. Karel Havlíček Borovský, Obrazy z Rus, ed. unknown (Prague: F. Šimáček, 1886). 82. See Kristi Siegel and Toni B. Wulff, “Travel as Spectacle: The Illusion of Knowledge and Sight,” in Siegel, Issues in Travel Writing, 109–22. 83. Havlíček, “Obrazy z Rus,” 33. On the basis of the olfactory sense alone, Havlíček even introduced a distinction of Russian social classes. 84. Mrštík, Cesta do Ruska, 42. 85. Ibid., 22. 86. Karel Havlíček Borovský to Karel Vladislav Zap, Moscow, 22 May 1844, in Havlíček, Cesta na Rus, 201. 87. Karel Havlíček Borovský, “První zkouška z Československého jazyka v Moskvě,” Květy, 26 July 1843; “Svátek pravoslavnosti,” Česká včela, 20 June and 24 June 1845; “Gulaňje,” Česká včela in the period 19 August–9 September 1845; “Kupéčestvo,” Česká včela, 14 October and 28 October 1845; and “Cizozemci v Rusích,” Časopis českého muzea (1846). 88. Karel Havlíček Borovský, “Slovan a Čech,” Pražské noviny, 15 February 1846 and 12 March 1846, in Havlíček, Dílo II, 55–81. 89. Karel Havlíček Borovský, “Rusové,” Slovan, 10 July 1850, in Havlíček, Dílo I, 121–34. 90. Antonín Měšťan, “Ruský komplex Karla Havlíčka Borovského,” Proměny 23 (1986): 16–17. 91. Karel Havlíček Borovský, Korrespondence Karla Havlíčka, ed. Ladislav Quis (Prague: Bursík a Kohout, 1903). Parts of Havlíček’s letters still remain unpublished; see Janáčková, editorial note to Strmé cesty, 273–74. 92. In Karel Havlíček Borovský, Sebrané spisy Karla Havlíčka: Sv. 1, ed. V. Zelený (Prague: Svatobor, 1870). 93. Karel Havlíček Borovský, Křest sv. Vladimíra: Legenda z ruské historie (Praha: Private publisher, 1876). See Vladimír Macura, “Sen o zdravém rozumu,” in Český sen (Prague: Lidové noviny, 1998), 107–18. 94. Stich, “Novinář Karel Havlíček,” 11–33. 95. Stašek, Vzpomínky, 384. 96. Ibid., 386. 97. Stašek also kept a diary, but he later burned it. See ibid., 391. 98. Ibid., 444–45. 99. Ivan Olbracht, Obrazy ze soudobého Ruska I–II (Prague: Fr. Borový, 1920). See Novotný, “Z literárních,” 53. 100. Stašek, Vzpomínky, 406. 101. Parolek, “Cesta Viléma Mrštíka do Ruska,” 130. 102. Publication took place as follows: 1896: 1 July, 2 July, and in nos. 179, 180, 186, 189, 195, 200, 203, 206, and 207. September: nos. 221, 233, and 235. November: nos. 335, 340, and 348. 1897: January: nos. 9, 16, and 27. Publication facts according to Jan Vladislav, editorial note to Mrštík, Cesta do Ruska, 154–57. 103. See Milena Honzíková, “Antal Stašek a Vilém Mrštík, dvě cesty na Rus,” Bulletin ruského jazyka a literatury 32 (1993): 139. 104. Danuše Kšicová, “Dávná cesta do Ruska,” Lidová demokracie, 1 August 1992, 4. 105. František Kautman, “Cesta do Ruska,” Nové knihy, no. 21 (27 May 1992): 1. 106. Vilém Mrštík, Moje sny—pia desideria, 1, 2 (Prague: Máj, 1902–3).



notes to pages 33–37 275

107. See Jan Vladislav, afterword to Mrštík, Cesta do Ruska, 145–53. Vladislav commented particularly on Nedosněné sny: Rodinná korespondence bratří Mrštíků, ed. Rudolf Havel and Ladislav Kuncíř (Prague: Odeon, 1978). 108. Parolek, “Cesta Viléma Mrštíka.” 109. See Jan Mukařovský, “Záměrnost a nezáměrnost v umění,” in Studie I, ed. Miroslav Červenka and Milan Jankovič (Brno: Host 2000), 353–88. 110. Stašek, Vzpomínky, 420. 111. Václav Doubek, Česká politika a Rusko (Prague: Academia, 2004), 290. 112. Vladimír Macura, Šťastný věk: Symboly, emblémy a mýty 1948–89 (Prague: Pražská imaginace, 1992), 62. 113. Milan Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” New York Review of Books, 26 April 1984, 33–38 (originally published as “Un Occident kidnappé ou la tragedie de l’Europe centrale,” Le Debat 27, 11 [1983]: 3–22). For Czech reactions to Kundera’s diatribe, see Milan Šimečka, “Jiná civilizace?” Svědectví 19, 74 (1985): 350–56; and Milan Hauser, “Dopis redakci The New York Review of Books,” Svědectví 19, 74 (1985): 356–59.

Chapter 3. Privileged Origins 1. An example of public health history with a purely national focus is Aina Schiötz, ed., Det offentlige helsevesen i Norge, 1603–2003, 2 vols. (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2003). Among internationally oriented studies focusing on clearly identifiable national models, see Erwin H. Ackerknecht, A Short History of Medicine, 2nd ed. (New York: Ronald Press, 1968); Elizabeth Fee and Roy M. Acheson, eds., A History of Education in Public Health: Health That Mocks the Doctors’ Rules (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); and Fee and Dorothy Porter, “Public Health, Preventive Medicine, and Professionalization: England and America in the Nineteenth Century,” in Medicine in Society: Historical Essays, ed. Andrew Wear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 249–76. 2. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1998). 3. Wolfram Kaiser, “Transnational Mobilization and Cultural Representation: Political Transfer in an Age of Proto-Globalization, Democratization, and Nationalism, 1848–1914,” European Review of History/Revue européenne d’histoire 12, 2 (2005): 404. 4. Through an initial workshop in the summer of 2004 and a conference in the summer of 2006, I have received both inspiration and valuable comments from participants in the “Imagining the West” project. For an elaboration of the overall perspectives behind this project, see György Péteri, “Imagining the West: Perceptions of the Western Other in Modern and Contemporary Eastern Europe and Turkey” (2005, available at www.hf.ntnu.no/peecs/home/ images/stories/PDF_filer/imagining_web.pdf). 5. John Farley, To Cast Out Disease: A History of the International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation (1913–1951) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Until 1927, the Rockefeller Foundation’s public health projects were implemented through the International Health Board, which then changed its name to the International Health Division. For this particular discussion, the organizational changes in 1927 are insignificant. To avoid unnecessary confusion, the name International Health Division (IHD) will be used throughout, including for the period prior to 1927. 6. For a definition of domestication as translation, see Michel Callon, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen at St. Brieuc Bay,” in The Science Studies Reader, ed. Mario Biagioli (New York: Routledge, 1999), 67–83. For

276 notes to pages 37–40 an elaboration of the concept “policy transfer,” see Kaiser, “Transnational Mobilization and Cultural Representation.” 7. The Rockefeller Foundation’s archives are accessible at the Rockefeller Archive Center in Tarrytown, NY. I am indebted to the descendants of one of the central Hungarian actors, Béla Johan, for allowing me to study selected parts of his personal archive, documents that are still in the possession of his family. 8. This discussion is based mainly on articles from medical periodicals covering the years 1925–35. I studied the following periodicals: Népegészségügy (The People’s Health, the official periodical of the welfare ministry), Orvosi Hetilap (The Physician’s Weekly), MONE (the periodical of the National Association of Hungarian Doctors), Zöld Kereszt (Green Cross, the periodical of the public health nurses), and Anya- és Csecsemővédelem (Mother and Infant Protection, the periodical of the Stefánia Association). 9. Andrew C. Janos, The Politics of Backwardness in Hungary, 1825–1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982). 10. György Péteri, Global Monetary Regime and National Central Banking: The Case of Hungary, 1921–1929 (Wayne, NJ: Center for Hungarian Studies and Publications, 2002). 11. Thomas Lorman, Counter-Revolutionary Hungary, 1920–1925: István Bethlen and the Politics of Consolidation (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 2006). 12. Hagiographies of Klebelsberg abound in postcommunist Hungary. For a critical assessment, see Miklós Szabó, “A Klebelsberg-legenda,” in Múmiák öröksége: Politikai és történeti esszék (Budapest: Új Mandátum Könyvkiadó, 1995), 177–79. 13. György Péteri, “‘Tying up a Loose End’: British Foreign Economic Strategy in 1924: The Hungarian Stabilization,” in Revolutionary Twenties: Essays on International Monetary and Financial Relations after World War I (Trondheim, Norway: Department of History, Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet, 1995), 147. 14. Letter from Professor Lajos Nékám to Minister of Culture and Religion József Vass, 24 December 1920, Magyar Országos Levéltár (the Hungarian National Archives, hereafter MOL), K636-1924-4-33790, 173; Protocols of the Ministerial Council, 22 March 1921, MOL, K27-1921márc-22-I; and Emil Grósz, “Az orvos-természsettudományok müvelésének válságos helyzete hazánkban,” A Felsőoktatási Egyesület Közleményei 3, 2 (1922): 54–58. 15. The initial Rockefeller Foundation support in 1920–23 was given as limited donations from the Division of Medical Education to the Medical Faculty in Budapest. 16. Paul Weindling, “Public Health and Political Stabilisation: The Rockefeller Foundation in Central and Eastern Europe between the Two World Wars,” Minerva 31, 3 (1993): 253–67. 17. Gábor Palló, “Rescue and Cordon Sanitaire: The Rockefeller Foundation in Hungarian Public Health,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 31, 3 (2000): 433–45. 18. Farley, To Cast Out Disease, 239–67. 19. The fact that Poland was established partly on former German territory and the prevailing state of war with the new Soviet regime accounts for the RF officers’ concerns in 1920 Poland. 20. Peter Baldwin, Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 21. Benjamin B. Page, “The Rockefeller Foundation and Central Europe: A Reconsideration,” Minerva 40, 3 (2002): 265–87. 22. By then, the RF’s Division of Medical Education had supported the Medical Faculty in Budapest with the shipment of English-language periodicals and books, as well as laboratory equipment, for little over a year.



notes to pages 40–44 277

23. Erik Ingebrigtsen, “Revisjonismens fortsettelse med andre midler: Rockefeller Foundation og folkehelsen i Ungarn, 1920–1941” (Ph.D. diss., Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 2007). 24. Weindling, “Public Health and Political Stabilisation,” 264. 25. Page, “The Rockefeller Foundation and Central Europe,” 279. 26. Linda Killen, “The Rockefeller Foundation in the First Yugoslavia,” East European Quarterly 24, 3 (1990): 349–72. 27. Maria Bucur, “From Private Philanthropy to Public Institutions: The Rockefeller Foundation and Public Health in Interwar Romania,” Romanian Civilization 4, 2 (1995): 47–60; and Bucur, Eugenics and Modernization in Interwar Romania (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002). 28. “Some critics were those who still embraced a neo-Lamarckian view, even though they did not identify themselves as such” (Bucur, Eugenics and Modernization in Interwar Romania, 70). Bucur here defines those who argued for improvements in environment, nutrition, or living conditions without any reference to eugenics as neo-Lamarckian eugenicists. One could just as well take their word that they were not eugenicists at all. 29. Ibid., 52–65. 30. Ibid., 200. 31. Unless otherwise noted, all information on the fellowship program in Hungary is from the cards kept on every individual fellow. These files are available at the Rockefeller Archive Center. 32. Elizabeth Fee, Disease and Discovery: A History of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, 1916–1939 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). 33. In IHD correspondence these projects were referred to as “health demonstration units” or “public health demonstrations.” In Hungarian these were called mintajárás, literally “model district.” 34. The new profession’s Hungarian title was Zöldkeresztes védőnő. 35. István Weis, “Tervezet az 1876: XIV. t.-czikk és 1908. XXXVIII. t.-czikk némely rendelkezéseinek módosítására (az egészségügyi közigazgatás szervezetére) vonatkozólag,” Népegészségügy 7, 21 (1926): 1207–42. 36. The Stefánia’s full name was Az Országos Stefánia Szövetség az Anyák és Csecsemők Védelmére (hereafter Stefánia). The establishment and early phase of the Stefánia’s activities are presented in László Kiss, “Egészség és politika—az egészségügyi prevenció Magyarországon a 20. század első felében,” Korall, no. 17 (2004): 107–37. 37. The specific regulation of this arrangement is to be found the ministerial decree 39.088/1917.XII.B.M., dated 6 June 1917. 38. In spite of extensive searches in the Hungarian National Archives, files related to this transfer have not been found, although the transaction must have been registered, as the Stefánia received at least 80 percent of its funding from the state. The transfer of the 56 American Red Cross units to the Stefánia are, however, mentioned in RF files from these years: Selskar M. Gunn, “Public Health Conditions in Hungary,” March 1922 (RAC, RF/1.1/750/1/1, 38); and Gunn, “Public Health in Hungary,” 1924 (RAC, RF/1.1/750/4/38, 112–15). 39. Az Országos Stefánia Szövetség memoranduma a népjóléti és munkaügyi miniszterhez a védőnők képzése és munkábaállitása tárgyában (Budapest: Az Országos Stefánia Szövetség Kiadványai, 1930). 40. Johan was quoted in János Oláh, “Egészségügyi mintajárást szerveznek a gödöllői járásból,” Magyar Újság, 24 April 1927, 3. 41. “A gödöllői egészségügyi mintajárás,” MONE—Magyar Orvosok Nemzeti Egyesülete, no. 6

278 notes to pages 44–47 (1927): 110–11. The name of the author is not given, but from the context it is evident that the article was based on information from Johan and Kornél Scholtz, state secretary in the Ministry of Welfare. 42. The observation that the use of English language in Hungarian medical periodicals was unusual is based on my own impression. I am not aware of any systematic study to validate (or counter) this argument. German and Latin expressions were, however, widely used. Orvosi Hetilap had a regular column promoting the Magyarization of Latin and German medical terms. 43. The quotation is from C. A. Macartney, October Fifteenth: A History of Modern Hungary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1957), 187. 44. Correspondence related to Endre’s scandalous visit fills a whole folder in the Rockefeller Archive Center: RF/2/750/12/99. All documents mentioned in this section are found in this folder. 45. See, for example, these two interviews with Endre: “Meg kell menteni a falu egészségét— A mintajárások ügye,” Nemzeti Újság, 11 December 1932; and “Vitéz Endre László és a falú egészségügye,” Magyar Orvosok Nemzeti Egyesülete, no. 2 (1938): 22–23. Endre’s version was that he had contacted “Mitchell” at the “Green Cross foundation in Paris” to procure their assistance for Johan’s reorganization of infant health care in Gödöllő. W. L. Mitchell was, indeed, an officer of the IHD who spent some time in Gödöllő on the orders of S. M. Gunn, but there was no Green Cross foundation in Paris (although there was a branch of the Rockefeller Foundation), and the one thing Johan certainly did not touch in Gödöllő was infant care, as this was the exclusive domain of the Stefánia. 46. Miklós Pfeiffer, “A mintajárás-mozgalom magyar eredete,” MONE—Magyar Orvosok Nemzeti Egyesülete, no. 9 (1927): 167–68. The article is signed “P.,” the standard signature for the editor of the column, Pfeiffer. 47. The author referred to the IHD’s donation to the district of Mokotow. 48. Pfeiffer, “A mintajárás-mozgalom magyar eredete,” 168. 49. Ibid., 168. 50. In contrast, the National Institute of Public Health, which was opened with extensive RF support in 1927, was often supposed to represent the incarnation of ideas presented in 1876 by the first Hungarian professor of hygiene, József Fodor. Even today, this is a generally accepted genealogy of the institute. See Károly Kapronczay, Fejezetek 125 év magyar egészségügyének történetéből (Budapest: Semmelweis Orvostörténeti Múzeum, Könyvtár és Levéltár, 2001). 51. Alexandra M. Wacker, “Általános vagy specializált egészségügyi gondozás,” Népegészségügy 9, 4–5 (1928): 295–98. 52. To my knowledge, no survey has been published on female authorship in Hungarian medical journals in this period. My impression is that this article is a rare, if not unique, exception. 53. Wacker, “Általános vagy specializált egészségügyi gondozás,” 296; italics in original. 54. In a large-scale experiment, the two alternative models had been tested in different districts of New York City. 55. Frances Elizabeth Crowell’s diary entry for 30 January 1928 (RAC, RF, 12.1/Diaries). 56. According to calculations that cannot be reproduced based on the information presented by Wacker, she concludes that the general model resulted in 40 percent more house calls than the specialized model at a cost of $4.69 and $6.93, respectively. 57. Lajos Keller, “A védőnőképzés problemája,” Anya- és Csecsemővédelem, no. 1 (1928): 515–16. 58. Ibid., 516. 59. Sándor Fekete, “Megjegyzések dr. Johan Béla ‘Az egészségvédelmi munka egységesítése



notes to pages 47–52 279

és rationalizálása’ czímű előadásához (1. rész),” Népegészségügy 10 (1929): 711–13. Today, these numbers appear rather meaningless. Infant mortality is no longer considered a cause of death but a statistical age category, combining deaths from multiple causes. 60. To quote but one example from outside the medical discourse, the widely popular author Renée Erdős in 1929 wrote a tearful comment in a national newspaper, interpreting the establishment of a new school for public health nurses as theft of funds from defenseless infants (“A csecsemők bőre,” Ujság, 8 December 1929, 9). 61. George K. Strode, diary, 3–6 April 1929 (RAC, RF, 12.1/Diaries). 62. “A m. kir. népjóléti és munkaügyi miniszter 41.066/1929. N. M. M. sz. rendelete—Az egészségügyi mintaszolgálat szervezése,” Népegészségügy 10 (1929): 93–94. 63. Béla Johan, “Az egészségvédelmi munka egységesítése és rationalizalása,” special issue of Népegészségügy 10, 5 (1929): 1–12; italics in original. 64. This article by Johan led to a series of articles from the Stefánia, in particular Fekete, “Megjegyzések dr. Johan Béla”; and Fekete, “Megjegyzések dr. Johan Béla ‘Az egészségvédelmi munka egységesítése és rationalizálása’ czímű előadásához (Folytatás és vége),” Népegészségügy 10 (1929): 760–62. 65. Johan, “Az egészségvédelmi munka egységesítése és rationalizalása,” 3; italics in original. 66. Béla Johan, “Az egészségvédelmi rendszerről, a védőnőkről és a hatosági orvosokról (Egyben válasz dr. Kovacsics cikkére),” special issue of Orvosi Hetilap, no. 5 (1931): 11. 67. Ibid., 2. 68. József Madzsar, Mit akar a Stefánia-Szövetség? (Budapest: Pfeifer Ferdinand, 1916). 69. Az Országos Stefánia Szövetség memoranduma, 5–6. Apart from the board of the Stefánia, the memorandum was signed by former Minister of the Interior Gábor Ugron, former State Secretary Aladár Fáy, the highly esteemed professor of pediatrics János Bokáy, and by the omnipresent András Csilléry, a minister representing the Christian radical right, leader of the anti-Semitic medical association MONE, and director of a national social insurance agency. 70. Lajos Antal, “A Magyar Király Országos Közegészségügyi Intézet a támadások pergőtűzében,” special issue of Betegápolásügy, no. 2 (1933): 4. 71. Information taken from various entries in the diaries of Strode, Crowell, and Gunn, 1928–32, all collected in RAC, RF, 12.1. From the RF files related to Hungary, it is not possible to get the full picture of these visits. Documents regarding such travels are collected in the files from the country of the particular expert’s origin. That is, documents showing that a Norwegian researcher received support for travel to Hungary are found among the Norwegian files. The list of countries presented is collected from mention in the officers’ diaries. They would note when they met experts traveling on RF grants during one of their visits to Hungary. Since the RF officers spent only a fragment of their time in Hungary, the list should probably be much longer. 72. The institute’s 1930 annual report lists 40 visitors from Europe (without specifying countries), 39 from the United States, 6 from China, 3 from Japan, and 1 each from Jamaica, Chile, and the Transvaal. The annual report from the following year presents a world map, showing countries from which visitors had come to the institute. In addition to the countries already mentioned, visitors had come from several African colonies, Australia, Brazil, and the Argentine, as well as all European countries except the Soviet Union. The titles of the annual reports were uniform from 1927 through 1944: Jelentés a m. kir. Orsz. Közegészségügyi intézet 19[XX] évben végzett munkájáról. 73. Strode, diary, 16 November 1931 (RAC, RF, 12.1). 74. Ibid., 20 May 1930. 75. Gunn, diary, 20 May 1930 (RAC, RF, 12.1).

280 notes to pages 52–56 76. Crowell, diary, 31 August 1930 (RAC, RF, 12.1). 77. She specifically named nurses from Poland, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, France, Yugoslavia, Italy, and Hungary. 78. Johan, quoted in Crowell, diary, 2 September 1930 (RAC, RF, 12.1). 79. “A m. kir. Országos Közegészségügyi intézettel kapcsolatban létesült Állami ápolón—és védőnőképző intézet és Orvosok háza megnyitása,” special issue of Népegészségügy 11, 22 (1930). 80. Béla Johan, “Milyen legyen a falusi egészségvédelmi munka szervezete: A Népszövetség Faluegészségügyi Bizottságának tárgyalásai a M. kir. Országos Közegészségügyi Intézetben 1930, október 27–31-ig,” special issue of Penztári Orvosok Lapja 3, 19 (1930): 4; Mária Steller, “A Népszövetség egészségügyi tanácsának bizottségi ülése Budapesten,” Zöld Kereszt 1, 1 (1930): 7; Steller, “Az európai ápolónői és gondozónői intézetek vezetőinek tanácskozása Budapesten,” Zöld Kereszt 1, 1 (1930): 7. 81. Mária Ormos, Magyarország a két világháború korában, 1914–1945 (Debrecen: Csokonai Kiadó, 1998). 82. In Hungarian documents referred to as a 6-os bizottság. 83. Letter from Chas N. Leach to G. K. Strode, 27 September 1931 (RAC, RF, 2-1931/750/64/521). 84. Johan’s personal notes, several entries from September 1931 in his family’s documents. 85. The quotation comes from a letter from Chas N. Leach to G. K. Strode, 5 September 1931 (RAC, RF, 1.1/27/306). 86. In addition to Leach to Strode, 5 September 1930, see Crowell’s diary, 1–5 September 1930 (RAC, RF, 12.1). Leach’s diaries have unfortunately been lost. 87. It must have been evident to all parties that this legalistic focus did not cover all aspects of the past decade of close cooperation between the IHD and Hungarian public health reformers. Johan later noted on several occasions that he was accused of disloyalty because he had asked for Leach’s assistance during the crisis. Johan wrote in his own personal notes that this was not the case, but Leach’s letter to Strode on 5 September 1931 suggests the opposite: “Johan appealed to us to help him, and I felt that in an emergency of this sort we were perfectly justified in going to the minister of social welfare and the prime minister.” 88. “Kína—tanulj Magyarországtól! A Népszövetség azt tanácsolta, hogy Magyar mintára szervezzék meg a kínai falusi egészségügyet,” Magyarország, 3 December 1931. 89. It is likely that the Rockefeller Foundation paid for trips made by the Chinese experts to Hungary. The foundation had extensive programs running in China, and the League of Nations’ Health Committee rarely provided travel grants except to members of its board or experts conducting services at the organization’s request. As noted above, documents regarding such actions by the foundation would have to be found in Chinese files. 90. Johan spent several months in both Bulgaria and Turkey during the summer of 1930 at the request of the IHD. Accepting the RF’s request during a personal meeting, Johan asked the RF officer to write to the Ministry of Welfare to apply for his expert advice, as this would further strengthen his esteem in Hungary. See Strode, diary, 20 May and 31 August 1930 (RAC, RF, 12.1). 91. On the concept of “mental mapping,” see Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994, 92). Béla Johan, “Megjegyzések Fekete Sándor dr-nak a m. kir. Országos Közegészségügyi Intézet ‘Jelentés’-éról írt ‘Könyvismertetés’-éhez,” special issue of Orvos-Szövetség, no. 3 (1933): 3–7; italics in original. 93. The same impression can be gained by browsing “historical paintings” on the museum’s website (www.mng.hu). Because the end of the Ottoman occupation was directly followed by



notes to pages 56–61 281

occupation by the Austrians, the Hungarians do not particularly stress the victory over the Turks as a cause for celebration. 94. Géza Gárdonyi, Egri Csillagok (published in English as Eclipse of the Crescent Moon, trans. George F. Cushing [Budapest, Corvina, 1991]). In December 2005 this book won first prize as the most popular Hungarian book ever in a contest organized by the national television station MTV and the Ministry of Culture. The victory is described at www.kultura.hu/culture/literature/ article/D999_article_64166.html, accessed November 2006. 95. From Johan’s personal notes it is evident that he particularly disliked Fekete. 96. Decrees from the Ministry of the Interior 730/1940.BM and 1000/1940.BM. 97. Johan, personal notes, entry made 11 April 1935, from his family’s documents.

Chapter 4. Defending Children’s Rights, “In Defense of Peace” The research for this article was supported by a grant from the Leverhulme Trust no. F/08736/A, “Childhood in Russia, 1890–1991: A Social and Cultural History,” and by the British Academy; the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages, University of Oxford; and New College, Oxford. I would like to thank these institutions, our interviewers, and the postdoctoral fellows sponsored by the Leverhulme grant, Polly Jones and Andy Byford, for their help. For further information about the project, and the life history archive derived from it, see www.mod-langs. ox.ac.uk/russian/childhood and www.ehrc.ox.ac.uk/lifehistory. The material from the United Nations archive was supplied by Polly Jones. I am grateful to her and to György Péteri, Margaret Peacock, and the anonymous reviewers and editors of Kritika for helpful comments on earlier versions of the text. 1. A useful synthesis of this dynamic is given in Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500 (London: Longman, 1995). 2. “League of Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child” (1924), in International Documents on Children, ed. Geraldine Van Bueren (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 1998), 3. 3. Philip Alston and Stephen Parker, “Introduction,” in Children, Rights, and the Law, ed. Alston, Parker, and John Seymour (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), vii. 4. See Thomas Mergel, “Überlegungen zu einer Kulturgeschichte der Politik,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28, 4 (2002): 594. 5. There were two particular worries: that the political language of Soviet power was poorly understood, and thus ineffective, and that concrete statements about achievements all too often looked unimpressive compared with those of Western capitalist states. See V. O. Pechatnov, “‘Strel´ba kholostymi’: Sovetskaia propaganda na Zapad v nachale kholodnoi voiny (1945–1947),” in Stalinskoe desiatiletie kholodnoi voiny: Fakty i gipotezy, ed. A. O. Chubar´ian (Moscow: Nauka, 1999), 108–33, esp. 115–16. 6. The enormous literature on Soviet propaganda includes material on propaganda directed at the international arena (see, e.g., the articles by Pechatnov, D. F. Nadzharov, and E. Iu. Zubkova in Stalinskoe desiatiletie kholodnoi voiny) and material on the representation of the West in Soviet propaganda, such as David Feest and Gábor T. Rittersporn, “Antiamerikanismus und Amerikanophilie im Zarenreich und in der Sowjetunion der Vorkriegszeit,” in Antiamerikanismus im 20 Jahrhundert: Studien zu Ost- und Westeuropa, ed. Jan C. Behrends, Árpád von Klimó, and Patrice C. Poutrus (Bonn: Dietz, 2005), 72–87; Behrends, “Erfundene Feindschaft und exportierte Erfindung: Der spätstalinistische Antiamerikanismus als sowjetische Leiterzählung,” in Antiamerikanismus im 20 Jahrhundert, 159–86; and Eric Shiraev and Vladislav Zubok, Anti-Americanism in Russia: From Stalin to Putin (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2000). There is also substantial literature on state festivals; see, e.g., James von Geldern, Bolshevik

282 notes to pages 61–63 Festivals, 1917–1921 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993); Malte Rolf, Sovetskii massovyi prazdnik v Voronezhe i Tsentral´no-Chernozemnoi oblasti (1927–1932) (Voronezh: Izdatel´stvo Voronezhskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 2000); Karen Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); and Svetlana Malysheva, Sovetskaia prazdnichnaia kul´tura v provintsii: Prostranstvo, simvoly, istoricheskie mify (1917–1927) (Kazan: Ruten, 2005). I am not aware, however, of a study that analyzes these phenomena of Soviet history alongside the history of international contacts and cultural diplomacy in a narrow sense. 7. On the loss in aesthetic status of images of children once these had become standard fare in advertising, see Anne Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998), 9. 8. For the broader picture, see Catriona Kelly, Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero (London: Granta, 2005); Kelly, Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890–1991 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), chaps. 1–4; and Svetlana Leont´eva, Literatura pionerskoi organizatsii: Ideologiia i poetika (Tver´: Tverskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2006), available at http:footnote.myxomop.com/pionery/leonteva_disser.pdf. 9. See György Péteri, “Introduction,” to Nylon Curtain: Transnational and Transsystemic Tendencies in the Cultural Life of State-Socialist Russia and East Central Europe, ed. György Péteri (Trondheim: Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet, 2006), 1–13. This periodization is also set out, with direct reference to propaganda for children, in Catriona Kelly, “The Little Citizens of a Big Country”: Children and International Relations in the Soviet Union (Trondheim: Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet, 2002). 10. There is some sense of this in, for instance, Nigel Grant, Soviet Education (Harmonds­ worth, UK: Penguin, 1969); and in Urie Bronfenbrenner with John C. Condry Jr., Two Worlds of Childhood: U.S. and U.S.S.R (London: Allen and Unwin, 1971). See also the introductory discussion in William Partlett’s unpublished D.Phil. thesis, “The Village School on the Cultural Front: S. T. Shatskii’s Rural School Complex in Soviet Russia, 1919–1932” (University of Oxford, 2006). Of course, this is not to say that admiration for the Soviet Union was universal, or that awareness of educational success only went in one direction. On the first count, see, e.g., the reported comment of Susan Lawrence, an undersecretary in the British Ministry of Health who visited Russia in the 1920s: “As is always the case with dogmatic education, there can be no free play of thought” (quoted in F. A. Mackenzie, The Russian Crucifixion: The Full Story of the Persecution of Religion under Bolshevism [London: Jarrolds, c. 1930], 38). On the second count, one might cite the introduction of classical languages in selected Moscow schools in the late 1940s, in the hope that these would produce something like the cultivated British public-school boys that the Kremlin inner circle had encountered at Yalta, or the frequent articles about Western educational practices that appeared in Soviet educational journals, such as Sovetskaia pedagogika, from the late 1950s onward and in the specialist journal Defektologiia. 11. Sovetskoe zakonodatel´stvo o brake i sem´e (Moscow: Izdatel´stvo Akademii nauk, 1949), 51. For more details of propaganda images of children and childhood aimed at a Soviet audience, see Kelly, “The Little Citizens of a Big Country.” 12. Prejudice against single mothers began to be openly discussed in the glasnost´ era (previously these mothers had themselves been regarded as the “problem”). Natal´ia Kolesnikova, “Chetvertushka gor´kogo iabloka,” Nedelia, no. 47 (1988): 16, presents typical stories: a girl living with her mother forced to give up the child to save the “family honor,” and women migrants living in big-city hostels “persuaded” by the authorities that “renouncing the child” was the best solution, since this was the simplest solution in bureaucratic terms. Cf. Irina Ovchinnikova,



notes to pages 63–64 283

“Devochki-mamy,” Nedelia, no. 27 (1989): 22–23. Oral history indicates a persistence of such attitudes throughout the Soviet period. 13. As, for instance, in a vaguely phrased claim that life was worse in U.S. families than in Soviet ones, published in Nedelia, no. 17 (1963): 3—which substantiated what was a factually meaningless assertion by stating that it was taken from a U.S. source. Among the dozens of articles on the miserable lives led by children abroad, the following, published during the 1960s, may be mentioned: “‘Svobodnyi mir’ kak on est´,” Leningradskaia pravda, 2 October 1963, 3 (halfnaked miners’ children in the United States); “Mir i deti,” Leningradskaia pravda, 31 May 1964, 1 (references to “hunger, sickness, unmanageable physical labor”); “Rozhdennye dlia schast´ia,” Leningradskaia pravda, 1 June 1969, 1 (Soviet children are born for happiness, in Africa one in three die before the age of five); “Zdes´ sobakam zhivetsia luchshe,” Smena, 27 May 1970, 3 (a baby girl dies without medical treatment in Rome, but a dog holds a party for 30 “friends”); and “Tvoi sverstnik za rubezhom,” Smena, 5 February 1965, 1 (an exhibition held in Leningrad in early 1965 about the awfulness of young people’s lives abroad). 14. For further examples, see Leonid Sergeev, “Kanadskaia tragediia,” Nedelia, no. 26 (1960): 12 (on a mother who locked up three of her children for 11 years because she was afraid of alerting the landlord to their existence); O. V. Vasil´ev, “Rasisty zverstvuiut,” Nedelia, no. 8 (1965): 15 (with an illustration showing little children wearing Ku Klux Klan outfits); and P´er de la Fert, “Deti— tovar chernogo rynka,” Nedelia, no. 45 (1965): 17. The Radio Erevan (Armianskoe radio) joke goes: Radio Erevan is asked, “What is the difference between capitalism and communism?” Radio Erevan answers, “Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man, communism is the reverse.” 15. Alexander Wicksteed and Nicholas Settingson, English, pt. 1 (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1928), 34, 48; L. Kilochnitskaia, English/Angliiskii iazyk, pt. 2: Uchebnik dlia 10-go klassa srednei shkoly, 5th ed. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe uchebno-pedagogicheskoe izdatel´stvo, 1937), 36–37. 16. V. Diushen and A. Pel´tser, Uchebnik nemetskogo iazyka (Odessa: Radianska shkola, 1931), 81; Wicksteed and Settingson, English, 48. 17. Mat´ i ditia (Leningrad: Vsesoiuznoe obshchestvo kul´turnoi sviazi s zagranitsei [VOKS], 1933): “The children’s wards are separated from those of the mothers so that women can get some rest after the birth” (unnumbered spread in the middle of the book). 18. Such visits are recorded in most travel memoirs of the early and late Soviet period; for a view from the other side, see “Glazami inostrantsev,” Obrazovanie v Moskve (Moscow: Mosgorarkhiv, 2000), 155–56. See also the discussion of contemporary policy in Frederick C. Barghoorn, “Soviet Cultural Diplomacy since Stalin,” Russian Review 17, 1 (1958): 41–55. 19. The earliest example of this word given in vol. 3 of Slovar´ russkogo iazyka (Moscow: Russkii iazyk, 1983) comes from Aleksei Arbuzov’s play Poteriannyi syn (1961). In a 2001 interview, the pianist Eleonora Bekova, who with her sisters El´vira and Al´fiia makes up the well-known Bekova trio, has described being sent to Moscow at the command of Ekaterina Furtseva, then minister of culture: “We were a showpiece, I assume—a showpiece for all 15 republics” (My byli pokazukhoi, ia tak polagaiu,—pokazukhoi piatnadtsati respublik) (Dar´ia Mudroliubova, “‘Odno iz luchshikh fortep´iannykh trio nashikh dnei,’” Russkaia mysl´, 12–18 April 2001, 12). 20. For instance, Herschel and Edith Alt were taken to the Krupskaia maternity hospital, considered the best in Moscow; what they saw there was very different from what is recorded in oral history about maternity hospital experiences from this era (Russia’s Children: A First Report on Child Welfare in the Soviet Union [Westport, CT: Bookman Associates, 1959], 144–48; contrast E. A. Belousova, “Prima materia: Sotsializatsiia zhenshchiny v rodil´nom dome,” in Trudy fakul´teta etnologii, ed. A. K. Baiburin [St. Petersburg: Izdatel´stvo Evropeiskogo universiteta, 2001], 73–95).

284 notes to pages 65–68 21. A case in point was School No. 25 in Moscow, on which see Larry E. Holmes, Stalin’s School: Moscow’s Model School No. 25, 1931–1937 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999). 22. See, e.g., interview by Catriona Kelly with woman informant from Odessa, b. 1957, on a model school in Odessa (CKQ-Ox–03 PF3B, 9). 23. Mezhdunarodnaia detskaia nedelia v klube pionerov (Leningrad: Molodaia gvardiia, 1924), 3–6. 24. See, for example, A. Iu. Vatlin, Komintern: Pervye desiat´ let (Istoricheskie ocherki) (Moscow: Rossiia molodaia, 1993); and Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Agnew, The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1996). Document collections include Jane T. Degras, ed., The Communist International, 1919–1943: Documents (London: Oxford University Press, 1956; London: Cass, 1971); and I. S. Drabkin, L. G. Babichenko, and K. K. Shirinia, eds., Komintern i ideia mirovoi revoliutsii: Dokumenty (Moscow: Nauka, 1998). 25. For the use of the term “revolutionary culture” and a brief acknowledgment of the importance of all this, see McDermott and Agnew, The Comintern, 107. 26. See Vatlin, Komintern; McDermott and Agnew, The Comintern, 74–75 (on Bukharin), 91–93, 145 (on Stalin). 27. Quoted in McDermott and Agnew, The Comintern, 86. 28. Bol´shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1st ed. (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1926–47), 33: cols. 826–27. 29. For shefstvo, see the slogan for the 1925 International Children’s Week (Mezhdunarodnaia detskaia nedelia), 56: “Zapadnym brat´iam—proletarskaia pomoshch´ i bratskii privet!”; and 9-ia Mezhdunarodnaia detskaia nedelia (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1929), 20. 30. “Klich pionera,” Mezhdunarodnaia detskaia nedelia v klube pionerov, 44. The phrasing is ambiguous, since it could mean that children are happier than other citizens of the Soviet land, but the next verse, which talks about the razgon and stradan´e (oppression and suffering) endured by children in Italy and Germany, suggests that the comparison is between Soviet and other children. 31. Kommunisticheskoe dvizhenie detei (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1925). The book was published in the “Biblioteka vozhatogo” series of pamphlets for Pioneer leaders. 32. See, for example, “Kak ia vstretilsia s nemetskoi delegatsiei,” Pioner, no. 16 (1929): 10, claiming that those arriving at the 1929 All-Soviet Rally of Pioneers (slet) were tidier and neater than their Soviet counterparts. Germany had the largest children’s organization outside Russia: 15,000 in 1925, and the United States had the second-largest at 10,000. See Mezhdunarodnaia detskaia nedelia v klube pionerov, 53. 33. See Mezhdunarodnaia detskaia nedelia (Vladivostok: Delo, 1925), 3. 34. Ibid., 7–8. Fund-raising for good causes (and indeed for state agencies) was, of course, a widespread activity among both children and adults in this period: see, for example, the journal Drug detei on the activities of one particularly lively early Soviet philanthropic organization. 35. See Bol´shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1st ed., 33:829. 36. Mezhdunarodnaia detskaia nedelia, 10. 37. See Mirovaia pioneriia v dni sleta (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1929), 72–73 (correspondence), 76 (Esperanto), 96–103 (conference resolutions). 38. See Vozhatyi, no. 15–16 (1932): 46–47; and Vozhatyi, no. 19–20 (1932): 5–11, 29–34. 39. Tsentral´nyi arkhiv obshchestvennykh dvizhenii goroda Moskvy (TsAODM) f. 1884, op. 1, d. 51, l. 24. 40. Pionerskaia pravda, 18 March 1936, 1, “Kak prinimaiut v pionery?” 41. For the original 1922 oath, see Dokumenty TsK KPSS i TsK VLKSM o rabote Vsesoiuznoi



notes to pages 68–70 285

pionerskoi organizatsii imeni V. I. Lenina, ed. V. S. Khanchin (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1970), 76, henceforth DTsK; for the 1924 version, Komsomol i detskoe dvizhenie (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1924), 14. The 1936 oath read, “I, a Young Pioneer of the USSR, do solemnly swear, in the presence of my comrades, that I will staunchly support the cause of the working class in its battle for the liberation of laboring people all over the world and for the construction of socialist society, that I will honorably and unwaveringly follow the commands of Il´ich and the laws of the Young Pioneers.” 42. For the Scottsboro piece, see Zor´ka, no. 9 (1932): 13; on learning German, “Nemetskii ugolok,” running in Zateinik during 1932; and for the quiz, “Internatsional´naia viktorina,” Zateinik, no. 19 (1932): inside front cover. 43. Had the printing of the answers followed the usual pattern for quizzes in Zateinik, they would have come out in no. 21, but in fact they were absent (and this issue, according to the colophon, suffered an unusually long censorship delay, of five weeks rather than the standard three, which may possibly have been caused by the removal of the quiz answers from the master copy). 44. See the Central Committee decree, “O rabote pionerskoi organizatsii” (21 April 1932), DTsK, 33. 45. See the Decree of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of 25 August 1932, Izvestiia, 29 August 1932, 2, which speaks in alternate breaths of “significantly strengthening historicism in the social studies, native language and literature, and geography programs” and of the need to disseminate the “most important knowledge relating to the national cultures of the peoples of the USSR.” 46. See, e.g., “Prazdnik radostnoi molodezhi,” Pionerskaia Pravda, 4 September 1934, 2; “Radosti net kontsa” (on Artek), Pionerskaia pravda, 30 June 1935, 1; and “Schastlivym detiam nashei strany,” Pionerskaia Pravda, 2 September 1935, 1 (on the start of school). There was rather muted coverage of International Children’s Week in these years: see, for example, “XIV Mezhdunarodnaia detskaia nedelia,” Pionerskaia Pravda, 18 September 1934, 1. 47. See the article on Druzhba narodov in Bol´shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1949–65). The journal Druzhba narodov dates from 1939. 48. N. Frenkel´, “Oktiabriata—tovarishchi detiam trudiashchikhsia vsego mira,” Zateinik, no. 5 (1932): 32–36. 49. For example, children’s journals and newspapers contained remarkably little about the Terror—coverage in Koster during 1938 was limited to a mention of Stalin’s 3 March 1937 speech warning the Soviet nation about the presence of enemies everywhere (no. 1: 5). De-Stalinization was marked by the disappearance of images to and citations of Stalin, not by revisionist publications about the dead leader. 50. See Bol´shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 33:832. 51. For more details, see Kelly, “The Little Citizens of a Big Country.” 52. Elena Kononenko, “Za mir, za schast´e detei!” Pioner, no. 1 (1950): 22–25. Cf. “My ne khotim voiny” (a collection of letters from Russian children to children in the United States), Leninskie iskry, 30 May 1962, 2. 53. These letters are, of course, part of an extensive tradition of letter- and petition-writing by children that includes letters to party leaders, letters to newspapers (including children’s newspapers such as Pioneer Pravda), and letters to publishing houses—on which last, see Catriona Kelly, “‘Thank You for the Wonderful Book’: Soviet Child Readers and the Management of Children’s Reading, 1950–1975,” Kritika 6, 4 (2005): 717–51.

286 notes to pages 70–72 54. See, e.g., Pionerskaia pravda, 30 May 1952, where a picture of Stalin with a smiling she-tot appears on the front cover. 55. See Pioner, no. 7 (1950): 6, or the firsthand account by Ariadna Efron of dragging out to do this when living in a small Podmoskov´e village: “We were exhausted, we didn’t want to move, but we couldn’t possibly not go”: Efron and Ada Federol´f, Miroedikha: Ustnye rasskazy, ocherki, pis´ma, iz zapisnykh knizhek. Riadom s Alei: Vospominaniia (Moscow: Vozvrashchenie, 1996), 27. 56. Kononenko, “Za mir, za schast´e detei!” 2. Cf. Fedor Reshetnikov’s painting Za mir (1950), which shows a group of French boys cowering behind a wall for fear of reprisals from the authorities: one is scribbling PAIX! (Peace) on the wall. The picture was shown at the All-Union Exhibition in 1950 and was exhibited in the Pioneer press: see Pioner, no. 3 (1950): 3. 57. Slogan from Pioner, no. 12 (1950): 11, in a report on Warsaw Peace Congress; phrase from a poem by Iakov Akim, “Stalinskaia gvardiia,” Pioner, no. 12 (1950): 10. 58. “Soldaty mira,” Pioner, no. 10 (1950): 38. 59. Pionerskaia pravda, 1 June 1950: 2–3. 60. Evgeny Dobrenko, “Nadzirat´—Nakazyvat´—Nadzirat´: Sotsrealizm kak pribavochnyi produkt nasiliia,” Revue des études slaves 73, 4 (2001): 667–712. 61. See Catriona Kelly, “Boundaries of the Permissible: Children’s Affective Relationships in Twentieth-Century Russia” (unpublished paper). 62. I refer here to children in an ideal sense—there were contexts in which children in the sense of actual living humans were not treated as passive (e.g., in recruitment to “socially useful work,” or what in other societies would have been described as “child labor”). I discuss this paradox further in Children’s World. 63. For further reports on International Children’s Day, see Nedelia, no. 22 (1961): front page; Nedelia, no. 22 (1962): front page; Nedelia, no. 22 (1964): 21; and Nedelia, no. 24 (1965): 17. 64. This is among materials collected during the oral history project sponsored by the Leverhulme Trust. My thanks to Zoia Levocheskaia and to Alexandra Piir, her interviewer. Picasso’s famous Dove of Peace, showing a dove in full flight holding the biblical olive branch in its beak, was designed for the International Peace Congress held in Paris in 1949. Not long after the creation of the dove, it became a rather controversial symbol in the Soviet Union: the children’s journal Druzhnye rebiata, for example, was criticized for publishing Veronika Tushnova’s poem “Golub´ mira” on the grounds that it was “sentimental” (Zubkova, “Stalin i obshchestvennoe mnenie,” 166). 65. I prefer to emphasize the composition of a particular type of text for a particular political context rather than to draw conclusions about “Soviet subjectivity” in an overall sense; the type of self-description and worldview discussed in such interesting studies as Thomas Lahusen, How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), or Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), is characteristic of one highly specific group—male, self-improving “new intellectuals”—and not of Soviet citizens overall. To generalize about a complex multiethnic society of this kind with a good deal of variety even in terms of its behavior models would be foolish—as Anna Krylova has pointed out in a recent article, “Identity, Agency, and the ‘First Soviet Generation,’” in Generations in Twentieth-Century Europe, ed. Stephen Lovell (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2007), 101–21. 66. See Nedelia, no. 1 (1960): 4. 67. Nedelia, no. 1 (1966): 9; “Deti—mishen´ agressorov!” ibid., 42, prints such alongside “Obrashchenie k narodam mira” at the Stockholm International Congress on the Protection of Children.



notes to pages 73–78 287

68. For example, textbooks for learning Spanish emphasized that workers in Hispanic countries could not afford to care for their children properly or pay for adequate medical care (which was true of some, but certainly not all, workers in some, but not all, of these countries): see the discussion in Tat´iana Krugliakova, “Obraz kubinskogo sverstnika v uchebnike ispanskogo iazyka,” paper given at “Uchebnyi tekst v sovetskoi shkole,” conference at the St. Petersburg University of Culture and Arts, 15–16 December 2006. See further the conference Web site, sovietschool.org.ru/cgi/moin.cgi/Conference/2006. 69. Zashchita mira, which can also mean the “defense of the world.” 70. “Plan podgotovki Vsesoiuznogo sleta pionerov,” Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv politicheskoi istorii, Tsentr khraneniia dokumentov molodezhnykh organizatsii (RGASPITsKhDMO) f. 2 op. 1 d. 230, ll. 125–27. 71. After these rallies were revived in 1962, their character changed compared with 1929. They were now held at Artek, the flagship Pioneer camp, and not in Moscow and involved rituals rather than speeches. For example, there was a hymnic tribute, with radio voiceover, to Pioneer heroes from Pavlik Morozov onward (and even some earlier ones), a ceremonial march-past, and so on. See “Plan podgotovki Vsesoiuznogo sleta pionerov.” Reporting in the Soviet press about activities by Pioneer troops outside the USSR was limited, though occasional news was passed on: for example, readers of Nedelia were told in 1969 (no. 25, 19–20) that the French Communist association for children was called Les vaillants and had its own magazine, Pif (ibid., 19–20). 72. The text of the song appears in Kul´turno-prosvetitel´skaia rabota, no. 9 (1962): 50. It was very widely reprinted and recorded thereafter—I remember myself being made to sing it when on a language course in Leningrad in 1979. Its widespread presence on the Internet even now is an indication of lasting and genuine popularity. 73. Kornei Chukovskii published the text in “Pust´ vsegda budet solntse!” Literatura i zhizn´, no. 14 (December 1960): 3. 74. “Kogda ia vyrastu” (uncredited), Leninskie iskry, 30 May 1962, 1. 75. Folder/pereplet, Geroiko-patrioticheskaia viktorina “Podvig. Geroi. Knigi (1984–1986),” Oblastnaia detskaia biblioteka Leningradskoi oblasti, arkhiv (Archive of the Central Children’s Library of Leningrad Province, St. Petersburg). My thanks to the director of the library, M. S. Kurakina, and her colleagues for making this material available and for allowing me to publish it. 76. Irina Ovchinnikova, The Privileged Class (Moscow: Novosti Press Agency, 1979), 29 (caption to a photograph of a nurse clutching a baby). 77. UN E/ICEF/SR.249, 5. Material of this kind, of course, predated the late Soviet era: for example, in 1949, Borisov, the Soviet delegate to the UN in the late 1940s, speaking at the 84th Meeting of the Economic and Social Council on 19 May 1949, “explained that the USSR considered the rights of the child, the protection of mothers and orphans, and the education of children to be matters of first importance. As proof of that he pointed out that in his country budgetary allocations for work in those fields were increasing steadily year after year. The USSR had gone far beyond the stage at which the Social Commission was approaching the question and had concentrated on the practical implementation of the fundamental principles of its program.” He went on to mention the kindergarten program (17,000 full, 190,000 temporary nursery places; 5,000 homes for orphans): UN E/CN.5/SR.89. My discussion here, however, concentrates on the period from the late 1950s onward, at which point the Soviet contribution to policy making became more considerable. 78. UN A/34/PV.34: Provisional Verbatim Record of the 34th Meeting of the General Assembly of the United Nations, 15 October 1979. 79. UN E/CN.4/SR 630, 1 April 1959, 11.

288 notes to pages 78–83 80. UN E/ICEF/SR.249, 5. 81. UN E/CN.4/SR.628, 31 March 1959, 6. 82. Though not necessarily enacted: I should once again emphasize that I am dealing with propaganda here, not with actual Soviet achievements in the field of child welfare (on which some brief comments are offered at the end of the chapter). 83. UN E/CN.4/SR.631, 1 April 1959, 5. 84. Ibid., 4. 85. Ibid., 5. 86. UN E/CN.4/SR.632, 2 April 1959, 4, 11. 87. UN E/CN.4/SR.855, 10 March 1966, 6. 88. UN E/CN.4/SR.858, 11 March 1966. Similarly, the British delegate had insisted in April 1959 that parents should be allowed to choose the type of education that they preferred for their children: UN E/CN.4/SR.636, 6 April 1959, 3. 89. UN E/CN.4/SR.633, 2 April 1959. 90. Van Bueren, International Documents on Children, 4. 91. UN E/CN.4/SR.630, 1 April 1959, 11; UN E/CN.4/SR.639, 7 April 1959; Van Bueren, International Documents on Children, 6; emphasis mine. 92. UN E/CN.4/SR.631, 1 April 1959, 5. 93. UN E/CN.4/SR.850, 2 March 1963. France raised similar objections later (UN E/CN.4/ SR.750, 19 March 1963), as did the United States (UN E/CN.4/SR.752, 9 March 1964). 94. This does not, of course, mean that the expansion of welfare systems was necessarily directly modeled on Soviet practice—though one should not ignore the influence of this on European socialists in the postwar era. Rather, the decades between 1945 and the late 1970s (which witnessed the rise of monetarism and a shift, particularly in Britain, to an obsession with the United States as an economic model) saw the expansion of policies that had been pioneered in Western Europe, above all Germany, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (at which period reformers in the Russian empire had seen the West as a model for their efforts). 95. UN A/34/PV.34, 16 October 1979, 41 ff. 96. Interview with the director of a St. Petersburg baby home and former district pediatrician, St. Petersburg, 2005, recorded by Aleksandra Piir (Oxf/Lev SPb–04 PF56A, 14). 97. See “Prospali mezhdunarodnyi prazdnik,” Leninskie iskry, 18 May 1929, 3. 98. This statement is based on the interviews recorded for the Leverhulme project: for reminiscences of collecting scrap, see CKQ–0x–03 PF8B, 16 (interview recorded by Catriona Kelly, woman b. 1949, small town near Moscow, parents schoolteachers of peasant origin); on military education, see Oxf/Lev SPb-O2 PF7A, 47 (interview recorded by Alexandra Piir, woman b. 1931, parents factory workers); for the noninterest in foreign languages, see Elena Liarskaia and Alexander Liarskii’s contribution to the discussion of Catriona Kelly, “‘The School Waltz’: The Everyday Life of the Post-Stalinist Soviet Classroom,” Forum for Anthropology and Culture, no. 3 (2006): 377–84. 99. Pankaj Mishra, “The East Was Red,” Guardian (review section), 4 February 2006, 4. 100. Bernard Pares, Moscow Admits a Critic (London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1936), 49; Louis Fischer, Soviet Journey (New York: Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1935), 41–42, 96, 117, 155–62; Alice W. Field, Protection of Women and Children in the Soviet Union (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1932). 101. For outright enthusiasm, see, e.g., Kitty D. Weaver, Lenin’s Grandchildren: Preschool Education in the Soviet Union (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971); for more measured accounts, see Susan Jacoby, Inside Soviet Schools (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974); and Victoria Shennan, Russian Education for the Retarded (London: British Association for the Retarded, 1978).



notes to pages 84–86 289

102. Alongside the special provision sections for different levels of party officials that operated during the mid-1930s, there was also a special outlet for foreigners, Insnab, and the children of foreign officials had access to an elite network of educational facilities. The supply system has been vividly described by Freda Utley, Lost Illusion (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1949), 50–51. The children of foreign Comintern officials were schooled in a magnificent establishment at Ivanovo-Voznesensk, which offered, according to one former pupil, “a very privileged education. We had everything.” See Francis Beckett, Stalin’s British Victims (Stroud, UK: Sutton, 2004), 13, based on an interview with Rosa Rust. Beckett’s book, while not scholarly, is quite an interesting account of one small, but quite significant, group of privileged foreigners and their experience. At least some foreign Communists lived in humbler and more “Soviet” circumstances in the last years of Soviet power, however (on this, see Terry Bushell, Marriage of Inconvenience: An Anglo-Soviet Alliance [London: Deutsch, 1985], in which the correspondent of the Morning Star describes his and his Soviet wife’s struggles to acquire baby clothes and other essential domestic items). 103. A classic case of this is Sir William Hayter, The Kremlin and the Embassy (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1966). 104. See the item in Nedelia, no. 22 (1963): 12–13, asserting that only the Soviet Union had fully carried out the stipulations in the UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child. The point is not whether this claim was accurate—one suspects that it was not, even though the terms of the declaration had been put together with active participation from the USSR—but rather that such statements indicated a willingness to see the USSR assessed by international measures. One might compare the USSR’s role as signatory to the Helsinki Accord on Human Rights, which, as has often been pointed out (see, e.g., Geoffrey Hosking, A History of the USSR: Final Edition [London: Harper Collins, 1992]), provided an instrument for home critics of the regime. 105. See Aleksandr Losoto, “42 dnia vne zakona: Kak fal´tsifitsiruiut statistiku mladencheskoi smertnosti,” Rossiiskaia gazeta, 1 September 2004, available at www.rg.ru/2004/09/01/ deti.html (accessed 15 October 2007). 106. Such reports were regularly carried, for example, in the weekly newspaper Nedelia (the stablemate of Izvestiia newspaper, an important force for liberal discussion in the post-Stalin era). 107. A. A. Golov et al., Sovetskii prostoi chelovek: Opyt sotsial´nogo portreta na rubezhe 60-kh (Moscow: Vsesoiuznyi tsentr po issledovaniiu obshchestvennogo mneniia, 1993), 279. Figures for “dissatisfied” were agglutinated from several responses to the question “which of the following views of the relationship between the state and its citizens is closest to your own?”: “the state gives us quite a lot, but we could demand more” (11.3 percent); “the state gives us so little that we have no obligations to it at all” (8.4 percent); and “we should become free people and make the state serve our own interests” (32.5 percent). For the “joys” question, see 296. Of course, this may well be a case of coincidence as much as correlation. In any case, the resemblance between the figures, if not accidental, is partly explicable by age: there was a general tendency for younger people (with or without children) to be less satisfied with the state (see 275); and such younger people would also have been likely, given Russian demographics, to be the parents of young children. 108. Ibid., 154. 109. See the information on the Web sites of such typical charities as SOS Children’s Villages (www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/sponsor-a-child/european-child-sponsorship/russia.htm, accessed 5 November 2007), and Action for Russia’s Children (www.charitygiving.co.uk/minisites/ default.asp?subname=actionforrussiaschildren, accessed 5 November 2007).

290 notes to pages 87–92 Chapter 5. East as True West 1. Carlo Spango, “Reinterpreting the Marshall Plan: The Impact of the European Recovery Programme in Britain, France, Western Germany, and Italy (1947–1952),” in The Postwar Challenge: Cultural, Social, and Political Change in Western Europe, 1945–58, ed. Dominik Geppert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 281. 2. OMGUS “Report of Staff Conference,” 27 September 1947, Microfilm M1075, Roll 3, U.S. National Archives at College Park, MD. A later volley in the campaign against Western modernism was fired off by Vladimir Semenov, the political advisor to the commander in chief of the Soviet Military Administration in East Germany. Under the pseudonym N. Orlov, Semenov authored a two-part broadside titled “Wege und Irrwege der modernen Kunst” (“Methods and Mistakes of Modern Art,” Tägliche Rundschau, 20 and 23 January 1951); Semenov revealed in his autobiography that the pseudonym ‘N. Orlov’ was his (Wladimir S. Semjonow, Von Stalin bis Gorbatschow: Ein halbes Jahrhundert in diplomatischer Mission, 1939–1991 [Berlin: Nicolai, 1995]). 3. Volker Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), xvii. 4. Paul G. Hoffman, Peace Can Be Won (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1951), 105. 5. György Péteri, “Nylon Curtain—Transnational and Transsystemic Tendencies in the Cultural Life of State-Socialist Russia and East-Central Europe,” Slavonica 10, 2 (2005): 113, 117. 6. Terry Martin, “Modernization or Neo-Traditionalism? Ascribed Nationality and Soviet Primordialism,” in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (London: Routledge, 2000), 353. 7. Alan Nothnagle, “From Buchenwald to Bismarck: Historical Myth-Building in the German Democratic Republic, 1945–1989,” Central European History 26, 1 (1993): 96–97. 8. Michael Vlahos, “Culture and Foreign Policy,” Foreign Policy, no. 82 (Spring 1991): 60. 9. Ibid., 60. 10. John J. McCloy, quoted in Thomas Alan Schwartz, America’s Germany: John J. McCloy and the Federal Republic of Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 28. 11. HICOG Bonn to U.S. Department of State Bureau of German Affairs, 31 May 1952, RG59 862A.191 (Internal Affairs of State Relating to Exhibitions and Fairs in Germany), Box 5225, U.S. National Archives, College Park, MD. 12. Heinrich König, “Ausstellung: ‘Wir bauen ein besseres Leben,’” Architektur und Wohnform 61, 2 (1952): 87. 13. “Productivity and Integration Make for Higher Standard of Living,” 286 MP GER 2221, Still Pictures Unit, U.S. National Archives, College Park, MD. 14. “We Build a Better Life,” undated typescript, RG59/150/71/35/04, Entry 5323, Box 8 (Records of the International Information Administration, Subject Files, European Field Program 1949–1952), U.S. National Archives, College Park, MD. 15. Article in Der Tag, 22 September 1952, translated and quoted in Lyon to Secretary of State, 22 September 1952, RG59 862A.191 (Internal Affairs of State Relating to Exhibitions and Fairs in Germany), Box 5225, U.S. National Archives, College Park, MD. 16. On the “Better Life” exhibition, see Greg Castillo, “Domesticating the Cold War: Household Consumption as Propaganda in Marshall Plan Germany,” Journal of Contemporary History 40, 2 (2005): 261–88. 17. G. Alexandrov, cited in Edmund Collein, “Die Amerikanisierung des Stadtbildes von Frankfurt am Main,” Deutsche Architektur 1, 4 (1952): 151. 18. As Susan E. Reid has demonstrated, Soviet specialists in fields ranging from housing



notes to pages 93–95 291

construction to home decoration, backed by the party leadership, were in the process of defining a proprietary, socialist model of consumer culture. See Reid, “Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev,” Slavic Review 61, 2 (2002): 211–13; and Reid, “Khrushchev Modern: Agency and Modernization in the Soviet Home,” Cahiers du monde russe 47, 1–2 (2006): 227–68. 19. Theo Harych, “Stalinallee,” typescript, Mappe 7, Nachlaß Theo Harych, Literarische Abteilung, Akademie der Künste, Berlin. 20. Ellwood, Rebuilding Europe, 137; Jennifer A. Loehlin, From Rugs to Riches: Housework, Consumption, and Modernity in Germany (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 52; Michael Wildt, “Changes in Consumption as Social Practice in West Germany during the 1950s,” in Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century, ed. Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern, and Matthias Judt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 305. 21. Walter Ulbricht, “Die grossen Aufgaben der Innenarchitektur beim Kampf um eine neue deutsche Kultur,” in “Fragen der deutschen Innenarchitektur und des Möbelbaues: Bericht über die Arbeitstagung des Instituts für Innenarchitektur der Deutschen Bauakademie über Fragen der Innenarchitektur und des Möbelbaues am 14. März 1952,” Bundesarchiv SAMPO, DH2 DBA A 141. 22. Stefan Berger, Germany (London: Arnold, 2004), 208. 23. Hans Hopp, “Gegen den Formalismus–für eine fortschrittliche Innenarchitektur,” in “Fragen der deutschen Innenarchitektur und des Möbelbaues,” Bundesarchiv SAMPO, DH2 DBA A 141. 24. Hans Hopp, “Ansprache zur Eröffnung der Arbeitstagung für Innenarchitektur am 14.3.1952,” SAMPO, DH2 DBA A 141. Cited and translated in Paul Betts, “Building Socialism at Home: The Case of East German Interiors,” unpublished paper, March 2004. 25. Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus and the postwar chair of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, believed that bombastic Third Reich architecture, “each doorway as huge as the gates of hell,” had incubated Nazi Übermenschen. “Stop constructing superbuildings,” he declared in 1947. “Then there will be no more supermen.” Gropius’s statement can be found in “Architect Would Make a Guinea Pig of Germany,” New York Herald, 31 December 1947. 26. The term ”cultural revolution,” although not used in the early 1950s by the SED, is used by scholars today to refer to the party’s attempt to consolidate ideological control over the arts in 1951. This usage differs somewhat from the term’s use in the GDR when it came into vogue much later in the nation’s history. See, for example, Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim ZK der SED, ed., . . . einer neuen Zeit Beginn: Erinnerungen an die Anfänge unserer Kulturrevolution 1945–1949 (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1980). 27. “Gesetz über den Aufbau der Städte in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik und der Haupstadt Deutschlands, Berlin (Aufbaugesetz), vom 6. September 1950,” in Deutsche Bauakademie, ed., Für einen fortschrittlichen Städtebau für eine neue deutsche Architektur (Leipzig: Vereinigung Volkseigener Verlage, 1951), 7–11. 28. Walter Ulbricht, Das nationale Aufbauwerk und die Aufgaben der deutschen Architektur (Berlin: Amt für Information der Regierung der DDR, 1952), 8. 29. The volume was transformed in a 1953 edition to “The Architecture of the Peoples of the Soviet Union,” its coverage of contemporary Soviet architecture expanded, and any mention of the United States eliminated. Deutsche Bauakademie, Architektur der Völker der Sowjetunion, ed. and trans. B. P. Michailow (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1953). 30. Deutsche Bauakademie, Architektur, ed. and trans. B. P. Michailow (Berlin: Verlag Bruno Henschel und Sohn, 1951), 64.

292 notes to pages 95–101 31. Ibid., 73. 32. Ibid., 74–78, 81–87. 33. Ibid., 88. 34. Ibid., 89–90. 35. Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style: Architecture since 1922 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1932), 41. 36. “Amerika, das Geburtsland modernen Bauschaffens,” Die Bauzeitung (October 1950): 406; emphasis in original. 37. Vera Tolz, “Russian Orientalists and the Transnational Discourses of Empire at the Turn of the Twentieth Century” (paper presented at the “Imagining the West” workshop of the Program on Eastern European Cultures and Societies, Trondheim, 11–12 January 2008), 11. 38. Ibid., 10. 39. Yuri Slezkine, “N. Ia. Marr and the National Origins of Soviet Ethnogenetics,” Slavic Review 55, 4 (1996): 831. 40. Ibid., 838. 41. Ibid., 840. 42. Ibid., 842–43. 43. Ibid., 857. 44. “Thema: Innenarchitektur im Wohnungsbau,” 20 September 1953; “Protokoll über die vorbereitende Besprechung zur Konferenz über Fragen der Innenarchitektur,” 2 June 1953, DH2 VI/61/8, SAPMO, Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde. 45. Kurt Liebknecht, “Die Architektur der Wohnung,” in Besser leben—schöner wohnen! Raum und Möbel (Leipzig: VEB Graphische Werkstätten, 1954), 54, 15. 46. “Besser leben—schöner wohnen” (typescript), 103, DBA-DH2 A43, SAPMO, Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde. A similar message is advanced in the exhibition catalogue, Besser leben—schöner wohnen!, 13. 47. Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Aesthetic Dictatorship and Beyond, trans. Charles Rougle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 49–50. 48. On the “Away with National Kitsch” exhibition, see Paul Betts, The Authority of Everyday Objects: A Cultural History of West German Industrial Design (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 32–34. 49. On the Nazi “Degenerate Art” exhibition of 1937, see Peter-Klaus Schuster, ed., Nationalsozialismus und “Entartete Kunst”: die “Kunststadt” München 1937 (Munich: Prestel, 1998). 50. Wera Muchina, “Thema und Gestaltung in der dekorativ-monumentalen Bildhauerkunst,” Studienmaterial 7 (1953): 23–24. The article was translated from Sovetskoe iskusstvo, nos. 50–51 (1952). Mukhina’s dismissal of a private aesthetic realm under socialism appears in German translation as: “In unserer heroischen Zeit ist im Menschen das gesellschaftliche Bewußtsein erwacht; alles Private hat aufgehört.” 51. Photographers were sent to the Staatliche Kunstsammlung Dresden, Stadtmuseum Cottbus, Stadtmuseum Potsdam, Stadtmuseum Bautzen, Landesgalerie Sachsen-Anhalt (Halle/Saale), Stadt- und Bergmuseum Freiburg, Stadtmuseum Wurzen, Stadtmuseum Görlitz, Goethe-Museum and Schlossmuseum Weimar, Stralsundisches Museum Ostmecklenburg, Rostocker Museum, Stadtmuseum Zittau, Städtisches Museum Glauchau, Grassi-Museum Leipzig, and stately homes (Schloßmuseen) in Wernigerode, Quedlinburg, Wörlitz, Mosigkau, and Chemnitz, together with other private homes (DBA-DH2 VI/07/29). 52. “Reisebericht,” 20 October 1953, DH2 VI/61/8, SAPMO, Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde.



notes to pages 101–103 293

53. Jakob Jordan, “Wie müssen wir unsere Innenarchitektur verbessern?” Neues Deutschland, 5 November 1954. 54. On the broader history of postwar mass-produced apartments and their eventual degeneration into substandard housing, see Blair A. Ruble, “From Khrushcheby to Korobki,” in Russian Housing in the Modern Age: Design and Social History, ed. William Craft Brumfield and Ruble (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 232–70. 55. Deutsche Bauakademie, ed., Referate aus der Unionkonferenz der Bauschaffenden: Moskau 1954 (Berlin: Berliner Druckerei, 1955). The cover’s cautionary note reads: “Nur für Dienstgebrauch. Als Manuscript gedruckt.” 56. Kultur ins Heim 2, 1 (1959): 3, cited in Dominique Krössin, “Kultur ins Heim: Geschmackserziehung versus Eigensinn,” in Fortschritt, Norm und Eigensinn. Erkundungen im Alltag der DDR, ed. Andreas Ludwig (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2000), 157; “An die 3: Parteikonferenz der Sozialistischen Einheitspartei Deutschlands” (petition from leaders of the Kulturbund der Demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands), 15 March 1956. DH2 DBA/A79, SAPMO, Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde. 57. Successive volleys in this debate, which pitted reformists and traditionalists within East Germany’s state-managed design establishment against each other, appeared in the DBA journal Deutsche Architektur in 1959. They include Herbert Letsch, “Das Bauhaus–Wegweiser zur sozalistischen Architektur?,” no. 8 (1959): 459–60; and Lothar Kühne, “Der Revisionismus in der Architekturtheorie,” no. 10 (1959): 575–77. 58. L. Pazitnov, Das schöpferische Erbe des Bauhauses, 1919–1933 (Berlin: Institut für angewandte Kunst, 1963). The last East German denunciation of the Bauhaus as a degenerate aesthetic was Herbert Letsch, “Die konstruktivistische Ästhetik und das Problem der künstlerischen Widerspiegelung der Wirklichkeit” (The Constructivist Aesthetic and the Problem of Artistic Reflection of Reality), Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 9, 2 (1961). 59. Karl-Heinz Hüter submitted his manuscript, “Das Bauhaus in Weimar: Studie zur Sozialgeschichte einer deutschen Kunstschule” (The Weimar Bauhaus: Toward a Social History of a German Art Academy), for publication by the Bauakademie in 1968, and received assurances that it would be published. Three years later he was still writing exasperated letters attempting to solve the mystery of why the Bauakademie had suddenly reversed itself and deemed the manuscript unpublishable (letter attached to Hüter’s uncatalogued manuscript, archive of the Institut für Regionalentwicklung und Strukturplanung, Berlin-Erkner). Hüter’s study was finally published in 1976, timed to coincide with the restoration of the Dessau Bauhaus building. On East Germany’s retrieval of the Hannes Meyer Bauhaus as a beacon of socialist design, see Winfried Nerdinger, “Anstößiges Rot: Hannes Meyer und der linke Baufunktionalismus–ein verdrängtes Kapitel der Architekturgeschichte,” in Hannes Meyer, 1886–1954, ed. Peter Hahn (Berlin: Ernst & Sohn, 1989), 12–29. 60. “Beschluß des Sekretariats des ZK der SED,” 7 April 1976, DH2 A/499, SAMPO, Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde, 5. 61. “Origins of Socialist Countries’ Architecture: Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, GDR, Hungary, Poland, USSR,” Architecture and Society 4/5 (1985/1986): 50. 62. Ina Merkel, “Consumer Culture in the GDR, or How the Struggle for Antimodernity Was Lost on the Battleground of Consumer Culture,” in Strasser, McGovern, and Judt, Getting and Spending, 284. 63. The recollections evoked by these items are catalogued in Stadt Eisenhüttenstadt, Dokumentationszentrum Alltagskultur der DDR, ed., Alltagskultur der DDR, Begleitbuch der Austellung “Tempolinsen und P2” (Berlin: be.bra verlag, 1996).

294 notes to pages 103–110 64. Paul Betts, “The Twilight of the Idols: East German Memory and Material Culture,” Journal of Modern History 72, 3 (2000): 746. 65. Georg Bertsch and Ernst Hedler, SED: Schönes Einheits-Design (Cologne: Taschen, 1994), 27, 7. 66. John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin, 2005), 81–82, 114. 67. Duanfang Lu, Remaking Chinese Urban Form: Modernity, Scarcity, and Space, 1949–2005 (London: Routledge, 2006), 6. 68. Mark Landsman, Dictatorship and Demand: The Politics of Consumerism in East Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 174–75, 205–7. 69. Reid, “Khrushchev Modern.”

Chapter 6. Paris or Moscow? I would like to thank the anonymous readers and György Péteri for their attentive readings of this text and the generous suggestions they made for its improvement. 1. See Helena Kolanowska, “Varsovie functionnelle: Participation de la Pologne aux CIAM,” in Avant-garde polonaise, 1918–1939, ed. Olgierd Czerner and Hieronim Listowski (Paris: Moniteur, 1981), 49–63. 2. Ibid., 56. 3. On the cultural relations between Warsaw and Moscow in the twentieth century with a strong focus on the artistic avant-garde, see Warsaw—Moscow/Moscow—Warsaw, 1900–2000, exhibition catalogue (Warsaw: Zachęta Gallery, 2004). 4. Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 5. See Katarzyna Murawska, “Paris from behind the Iron Curtain,” in Paris: Capital of the Arts 1900–1968, ed. Sarah Wilson et al. (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2002), 250–61. 6. See Oscar Newman, Ciam ’59 in Otterlo: Documents of Modern Architecture (Hilversum: Tiranti, 1961), 191. 7. Interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Philippe Parreno in Domus (December 2003): 22. 8. On the idea of the city as heterotopia, see Kevin Hetherington, The Badlands of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1997). 9. Oskar Hansen, “Otwarta Form,” Przegląd Kulturalny, no. 5 (1957): 5. 10. Bolesław Bierut, Sześcioletni plan odbudowy Warszawy (Warsaw: Książka i Wiedza, 1951); Wojciech Włodarczyk, Socrealizm (Paris: Libella, 1986). 11. Vladimir Paperny, Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two, trans. John Hill and Roann Barris in collaboration with the author (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 116. 12. For a broad survey of the reconstruction of the Polish capital, see my Warsaw (London: Reaktion, 2003). 13. Moreover, Polish architects seem to have been silent on the clear parallels presented by the “Hausmannization” of the French capital in the 1870s—with its grand avenues and clearance of traditional neighborhoods—and the plans for Warsaw drawn up during the Bierut years. 14. James Carrier, Occidentalism: Images of the West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 8. 15. Bierut, Sześcioletni plan, 69. 16. Leopold Tyrmand describes how an exhibition entitled Oto Ameryka (This Is America), which circulated through the people’s republics in early 1952, sought to ridicule “capitalist culture” by exhibiting kitsch. The United States could be understood by the banal things that Americans reputedly consumed, not least debased “Brother Karamazov comic books.” See Tyrmand, The Rosa Luxemburg Contraceptives Cooperative (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 269.



notes to pages 110–116 295

17. On prewar overcrowding, see Edward D. Wynot, Warsaw between the World Wars: Profile of the Capital City in a Developing Land, 1918–1939 (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1983). 18. For a discussion of the use of international tours to “re-educate” German architects, see Greg Castillo, “Design Pedagogy Enters the Cold War: The Reeducation of Eleven West German Architects,” Journal of Architectural Education (May 2004): 10–18. 19. “Dyskusja na temat architektury gmachu KC PZPR,” Architektura, no. 5 (1952): 116–28. See also Tadeusz Barucki, Wacław Kłyszewski, Jerzy Mokrzyński, Eugeniusz Wierzbicki (Warsaw: Arkady, 1987); and Bogdan Garliński. Architektura polska, 1950–1951 (Warsaw: PWT, 1953). 20. Józef Ufnalewski, “O pobycie delegacji architektów polskich w ZSRR,” Architektura, no. 7–8 (1950): 252. 21. Architektura, no. 9–11 (1950), included the following reports from the delegation: Jan Minorski, “O miastach i architekturze Związku Radzieckiego” (258–67); Bohdan Pniewski, “Uwagi i spostrzeżenia z pobytu w ZSRR” (268–74); Eugeniusz Wierzbicki, “Wrażenia Moskiewskie” (275–78); Jan Knothe, “Wrażenia architektoniczne na temat pobytu w ZSRR” (279–84); Józef Jaszuński, “Stalingrad-Tbilsi-Soczi” (285–305); and W. Żenkowski, “Technika budowlana w ZSRR” (305–14). 22. See Włodarczyk, Socrealizm; and A. Åman, Architecture and Ideology in Eastern Europe during the Stalin Era (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). 23. The building did not receive a comprehensive report—the convention for all major buildings of the period—in the chief architectural magazine until 1958. See Z. Ihnatowicz and J. Romański, “Centralny Dom Towarowy w Warszawie,” Architektura, no. 12 (1958): 217–25. 24. I am grateful to Peter Martyn for this information. See Stefan Muthesius, “International Modernism or National Style: Warsaw Architecture of the Early Twentieth Century,” in Twentieth-Century Architecture and Its Histories, ed. Louise Campbell (London: Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, 2000), 233–50. 25. Stanisław Jankowski, ed., MDM: Marszałkowska, 1730–1954 (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1955). 26. Edmund Goldzamt, Architektura zespołów śródmiejskich i problemy dziedzictwa (Warsaw: Państwowe wydawnictwo naukowe, 1956), 32. 27. Ibid., 45. 28. Helena and Szymon Syrkus’s oeuvre is reviewed in a long discussion of their career that occupies most of the July 1957 issue of Architektura. She is also the author of Społeczne cele urbanizacji: Człowiek i środowisko (Warsaw: Państwowe wydawnictwo naukowe, 1984). 29. For a discussion of this speech and the response it received, see S. Giedion, Architecture, You and Me (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 79–90; and Eric Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928–1960 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 192–95. 30. Helena Syrkus later came to regret her forthright support for the Stalinist regime. Referring to Khrushchev’s report to architects in December 1954, Syrkus said, “it seems that since we accepted the theses proving that the direction adopted in 1949 was erroneous . . . we should not stick to the lost cause” (in Ogólnopolski narada architektów [Warsaw, 1956], 485). 31. Helena Syrkus, “[Art Belongs to the People],” in Architecture Culture, 1943–1968, ed. Joan Ockman (New York: Rizzoli, 1993), 120. 32. Ibid., 120–21. See also Greg Castillo, “Peoples at an Exhibition: Soviet Architecture and the National Question,” in Socialist Realism without Shores, ed. Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 91–119. 33. In the Soviet Union modernist aesthetics had already been unfavorably compared with transparent “classical art” such as that of the Renaissance. This, argued Anatolii Lunacharskii, the first commissar of enlightenment in the Lenin era, was the logical expression of a society

296 notes to pages 116–121 that had not experienced the dislocating effects of modernity. The Russian proletariat and peasantry were moving from conditions of imperial-era otstalost´ (backwardness) to socialism in one revolutionary leap and had no “need” for artistic expressions of the capitalist era such as futurism and cubism. See Catherine Cooke, “Socialist-Realist Architecture,” in Art of the Soviets, ed. Matthew Cullerne Bown and Brandon Taylor (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 89. 34. Goldzamt, Architektura zespołów śródmiejskich, 54. 35. Kazimierz Tymiński, “Zagadnienia Wieżowców Moskwy w Świetle Wypowiedzi Prasy Radzieckiej,” Architektura, no. 2 (1952): 37–48. 36. See Sarah Bradford Landau and Carl W. Condit, Rise of the New York Skyscraper (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 381–91. 37. See Sona Hoisington, “Soviet Schizophrenia and the American Skyscraper,” in Russian Art and the West: A Century of Dialogue in Painting, Architecture, and the Decorative Arts, ed. Rosalind P. Blakesley and Susan E. Reid (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007), 156–70. 38. Goldzamt, Architektura zespołów śródmiejskich, 329–30. 39. Ibid., 331. 40. Leopold Tyrmand, Dziennik (Warsaw: TenTen, 1995), 204. On Tyrmand’s output as a novelist in the 1950s, see Jolanta Pasterska, Świat Według Tyrmanda (Rzeszów: Fosze, 2000). 41. Jerzy Wierzbicki, “Parter ulicy w Warszawie,” Architektura, no. 7 (1955): 198. 42. See Tadeusz Barucki, “Autokarem przez Europę,” Stolica (25 November 1956): 13. 43. See Aleksander Wojciechowski, “Przeciwko Stojącej Wodzie,” Przegląd Artystyczny, no. 4 (1956): 35–37. 44. Wierzbicki, “Autokarem przez Austrię, Szwajcarię, Francję i Włochy Północne,” Architektura, no. 1 (1957): 38. 45. See Paweł Machcewicz, Polski rok 1956 (Warsaw: Mówią wieki, 1993); Stefan Bratkowski, Październik 1956: Pierwszy wyłom w systemie (Warsaw: Prószyński, 1996). 46. Nikita Khrushchev, “Remove Shortcomings in Design, Improve the Work of Architects,” Pravda and Izvestiia (28 December 1954), reproduced in Ockman, Architecture Culture, 184. See also Architektura, no. 1 (1955): 30–33. 47. These undertakings were expressed in Khrushchev’s famous Kitchen Debate with Nixon at the American National Exhibition in 1959. See Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1997); and Susan E. Reid, “Peaceful Competition in the Kitchen: The Soviet Encounter with the American Dream” (paper presented at the SHOT annual conference, University of Amsterdam, 2004). Khrushchev made similar statements when he announced at the Twenty-Second Party Congress in 1961, “For the first time in history there will a be a full and final end of the situation in which people suffer from the shortage of anything . . . [by] 1980 this country will far outstrip the United States in its per capita industrial and agricultural production” (quoted in Zsuzsanna Varga, “Questioning the Soviet Economic Model in the 1960s,” in Muddling through in the Long 1960s: Ideas and Everyday Life in High Politics and the Lower Classes of Communist Hungary, ed. János M. Rainer and György Péteri [Trondheim: Programme on East European Cultures and Societies, 2005], 110). 48. See Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 41–88. 49. György Péteri, “Nylon Curtain—Transnational and Transsystemic Tendencies in the Cultural Life of State-Socialist Russia and East-Central Europe,” Slavonica 10, 2 (2004): 114. 50. A. Cz., “Hotel in Stambule,” Stolica (23 December 1956): 24.



notes to pages 121–126 297

51. A. C., “Formy nowoczesnych mieszkań japońskich,” Stolica (29 January 1956): 14–15. 52. A. C., “Budynek biurowy ‘Olivetti’ w Mediolanie,” Stolica (18 March 1956): 12–13. 53. A. C., “Eksperymentalne domki z plastiku,” Stolica (7 October 1956): 12–13. 54. A. Cz., “The New Brutalism,” Stolica (14 July 1957): 14–15. 55. Anon., “Szkło w budownictwie i architekturze USA,” Architektura, no. 4 (1956): 115–16. 56. Reinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 4–6, 94–98. 57. Martin Pilch, “Organizacja projektowania architektonicznego w USA,” Architektura, no. 6 (1956): 197–200 (originally published as “Inside the U.S. Office,” Architectural Review [February 1956]: 99–104). 58. Ibid., 199. 59. Milka Bliznakov, “Soviet Housing during the Experimental Years, 1918 to 1933,” in Russian Housing in the Modern Age: Design and Social History, ed. William Craft Brumfield and Blair A. Ruble (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 85–149; Victor Buchli, An Archaeology of Socialism (Oxford: Berg, 1999); Susan E. Reid, “Destalinization and Taste, 1953–1963,” Journal of Design History 10, 2 (1997): 177–92. 60. See Waldemar Baraniewski, “Odwilżowe dylematy polskich architektów,” in Odwilż, exhibition catalogue (Poznań: National Museum of Poznań, 1996), 129–38. 61. Bolesław Szmidt, “Modern Architecture in Poland,” Architectural Design (October 1962): 496. 62. T. K., “O mieszkaniach optymistycznie,” Stolica (27 August 1961): 5. 63. Waldemar Baraniewski credits Stanisław Staszewski alone for pressing the case for a wholehearted critique of the ideological function of architecture in the people’s republic (“Odwilżowe dylematy polskich architektów,” 313). 64. Hansjakob Stehle, Independent Satellite (London: Pall Mall Press, 1965), 171. 65. Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless (1978), trans. Paul Wilson (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 37–40. 66. François Fejtö, A History of the People’s Democracies, trans. Daniel Weissbort (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1974), 308. 67. Iurii Gerchuk, writing in 1991, quoted in Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe, ed. Susan E. Reid and David Crowley (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 2. 68. St. S., “Hotel ‘Warszawa’ w Moskwie,” Architektura, no. 8 (1960): 316. 69. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 38–39. 70. “Budow: Eksperimentalni w Moskwie,” Architektura, no. 5 (1958): 257. 71. It should in fact be noted here that Novye Cheremushki was later much derided in the Soviet Union for its “dull elementarism” and for the flaws in the prefabrication system on which it was based. See Iurii Gerchuk, “The Aesthetics of Everyday Life in the Khrushchev Thaw in the USSR (1954–64),” in Reid and Crowley, Style and Socialism, 87. 72. Starewicz speech delivered to the Central Committee in July 1963, quoted in Fejtö, A History of the People’s Democracies, 307. 73. Benefiting from the official fetish made of the concept of experimentation, in 1954 Sołtan and Ihnatowicz formed Zakłady Artystyczno-Badawcze (ZAB), a team of designers, engineers, and artists which, on occasion, extended to include musicians and filmmakers. According to one student who worked with Sołtan in the 1960s, the ZAB operated self-consciously in the tradition of the Higher Art Technical Workshops in Moscow and the Bauhaus. See “A Conversation with Krzysztof Wodiczko,” October, no. 38 (1986): 3–51.

298 notes to pages 126–131 74. Jerzy Sołtan, quoted in Team 10 Primer, ed. Alison Smithson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974), 45. 75. Jerzy Sołtan, quoted in Architectural Design (special Team X issue) 30, 5 (1960): 28. 76. On the restaurant, see S. Hołowko, “Alga, Wenecja, Supersam,” Projekt, no. 5 (1962): 11–17. 77. Zbigniew Ihnatowicz, “Kombinat Gastonomiczny ‘Wenecja’ na Woli w Warsawie,” Architekt (October 1961): 373. 78. See Sarah Williams Goldhagen, “Freedom’s Domiciles,” in Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture, ed. Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Réjean Legault (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 75–95. 79. Paweł Machcewicz, “Intellectuals and Mass Movements, Ideologies and Political Programs in Poland in 1956,” in Intellectual Life and the First Crisis of State Socialism in East Central Europe, 1953–1956, ed. György Péteri (Trondheim: Programme on East European Cultures and Societies, 2001), 127. 80. The reformist Central Committee member Stefan Morawski, writing in Trybuna Ludu in 1958, acknowledged that Polish intellectual life needed exposure to forms of experimentation, “the normal requirements of artistic development.” In his words, “the works of Faulkner, Sartre, Camus, and Kafka are published in Poland and produced in the theatres, although they are products of a social climate and present philosophical schools which have little in common with Marxism. We also, for example, allow productions of Ionescu and Beckett for a special public, although the philosophy they are propounding is quite foreign to ours. But they are putting forward new and experimental ideas.” This was, in so many words, an acknowledgment that Stalinist aesthetics had produced cultural stagnation in Poland. See Stehle, Independent Satellite, 199. 81. Leszek Kołakowski, “The Priest and the Jester,” in Twórczość (1959), reproduced in Toward a Marxist Humanism, trans. Jane Zielonko Peel (New York: Grove Press, 1969), 34. See also Barbara Falk, The Dilemmas of Dissidence: Citizen Intellectuals and Philosopher Kings (Budapest: CEU Press, 2003), 157–65. 82. Oskar Hansen, “Otwarta Form,” Przegląd Kulturalny, no. 5 (1957): 5. 83. Oskar Hansen, Towards Open Form/Ku Formie Otwartej (Warsaw: Foksal Foundation, 2005), 184. 84. Oskar Hansen, in Newman, Ciam ’59 in Otterlo, 191. 85. Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, “Oskar Hansen, Henry Moore, and the Auschwitz Memorial Debates in Poland, 1958–59,” in Figuration/Abstraction: Strategies for Public Sculpture in Europe, 1945–1968, ed. Charlotte Benton (London: Ashgate, 2004), 193–211. 86. On Hansen at the last Team X meeting, see Newman, CIAM ’59 in Otterlo, 191. 87. Oskar Hansen, in ibid., 191. 88. In the 1960s Hansen developed the “Open Form” theory into the “linear continuous system” theory, which envisaged the extension of his principles to the arrangement of buildings and communications on a larger scale; projects included the Przyczułek Grochowski housing estate (1963) in Warsaw. These are widely regarded as social and economic failures. 89. Hansen can be regarded as a precursor of the kind of spatialized art practices in Poland in vogue in the 1960s. See various essays in Piktogram, no. 5/6 (2006). 90. Simone de Beauvoir, La force des choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), 577.

Chapter 7. Imagining Richard Wagner The research for this article was carried out with the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Small Grants in the Creative and Performing Arts Scheme.



notes to pages 131–134 299

1. Christian Joppke, “Intellectuals, Nationalism, and the Exit from Communism: The Case of East Germany,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, 2 (1995): 220. 2. Thomas Mann, “Germany and the Germans,” in Addresses Delivered at the Library of Congress, 1942–1949 (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1963), 47–48. 3. John Keane, “More Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, ed. James Tully (Cambridge: Polity, 1988), 204. 4. Winthrop Sargeant, “Europe’s Life,” Time (21 October 1946): 30, quoted in Elizabeth Janik, Recomposing Music: Politics and Tradition in Cold War Berlin (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 125. 5. In her discussion of the ubiquity of musical festivals in postwar Germany, Janik quotes from a 1946 report by the American music officer John Bitter in which he remarks, “the word ‘festival’ usually implies gaiety and happy times. The Germans, however, organize a ‘Fest’ on an even-numbered anniversary of any famous citizen’s birth or death and then drench the public with his works until it cries for help” (ibid., 221). 6. In the case of the Soviets, Norman M. Naimark quotes a commentator from the period, who observes typical German perceptions of “the backward Russian, whose cultural level was supposed to be so much lower,” in The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 114–15. David Monod describes a similar situation regarding the Americans in Settling Scores: German Music, De-Nazification and the Americans, 1945–1953 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005) and depicts the American cultural drive in Germany as an attempt to “show the Germans that the United States was a vital and enviable musical superpower” (14). 7. Robert Schumann, On Music and Musicians (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), 61. For a recent discussion of music and German identity in the twentieth century, see Celia Applegate, “Saving Music: Enduring Experiences of Culture,” History and Memory 17, 1/2 (2005): 217–37. 8. The American response to the war is outlined in terms of music in Janik’s Recomposing Music, Monod’s Settling Scores, and Amy C. Beal’s New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006). See also Toby Thacker’s Music after Hitler, 1945–1955 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007). 9. Monod, Settling Scores, 19. 10. Monod discusses this in some detail (ibid., 99). 11. David Bathrick, “The Powers of Speech”: The Politics of Culture in the GDR (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 42. 12. “Offener Brief des deutschen Kulturbundes an die westdeutsche Bevölkerung,” Neues Deutschland 129 (10 May 1960). Reprinted in Elimar Schubbe, ed., Dokumente zur Kunst-, Literaturund Kulturpolitik der SED (Stuttgart: Seewald, 1972), 654. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. 13. “Erklärung des Zentralkomitees der Sozialistischen Einheitspartei Deutschlands zum Händel-Gedenkjahr 1959” (dated 17 February 1959), Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganizationen der DDR (SAPMO) im Bundesarchiv (BA), DY 30/IV 2/9.06/294, 63–64. 14. “Wir bewahren Schillers humanistisches Erbe für die ganze Nation” (Rede Alexander Abuschs auf dem Festakt zur Schiller-Ehrung in Weimar, 10. November 1959), Neues Deutschland 311 (11 November 1959), in Schubbe, Dokumente zur Kunst-, Literatur- und Kulturpolitik der SED, 582. 15. “Die Kunst im Kampf für Deutschlands Zukunft” (Rede Otto Grotewohls zur Berufung der Staatlichen Kommission für Kunstangelegenheiten am 31. August 1951), Neues Deutschland 203 (2 February 1951), in Schubbe, Dokumente zur Kunst-, Literatur- und Kulturpolitik der SED, 206.

300 notes to pages 134–135 16. Lars Klingberg, “Politisch fest in unseren Händen”: Musikalische und musikwissenschaftliche Gesellschaften in der DDR (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1997), 82, and “Nationales Bekenntnis zu Bach: Stellungnahme des Parteivorstandes der Sozialistischen Einheitspartei Deutschlands zum Bach-Jahr, 19. März 1950,” Einheit 4 (1950), in Schubbe, Dokumente zur Kunst-, Literatur- und Kulturpolitik der SED, 134. 17. Pamela Potter, “The Politicization of Handel and His Oratorios in the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the Early Years of the German Democratic Republic,” The Musical Quarterly 85, 2 (2001): 329. 18. See, for example, Lothar Ehrlich and Gunther Mai, eds., Weimarer Klassik in der Ära Ulbricht (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000); Horst Haase, Die SED und das kulturelle Erbe: Orientierungen, Errungenschaften, Probleme ([East] Berlin: Dietz, 1986); Wolfram Schlenker, Das “Kulturelle Erbe” in der DDR: Gesellschaftliche Entwicklung und Kulturpolitik 1945–1965 (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1977). 19. Despite the disastrous state of many opera houses and the shortage of male singers, Wagner made a rapid return to German stages. A production of Tannhäuser was performed in Chemnitz in February 1946 and numerous productions of Tristan and Der fliegende Holländer followed, favored no doubt as a result of their relatively small production requirements. A comprehensive database of Wagner productions in the Soviet-Occupied Zone and the GDR has been compiled by Peter Kupfer and can be accessed at www.peterkupfer.com/research. 20. Valuable accounts of Wagner reception in the GDR are provided by Werner P. Seiferth, “Wagner-Pflege in der DDR,” Richard-Wagner-Blätter: Zeitschrift des Aktionskreises für das Werk Richard Wagners (Bayreuth) 13, 3–4 (1989): 89–113; and Marion Benz, “Die WagnerInszenierungen von Joachim Herz: Studie zur theatralen Wagner-Rezeption in der DDR” (Ph.D. diss., Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, 1998). See also Eckart Kröplin, “Aufhaltsame Ankunft und ahnungsvoller Abschied: Der Ring in der DDR,” Wagnerspectrum, no. 1 (2006): 63–110; Joachim Herz, “Anmerkung zum Beitrag von Eckart Kröplin über den Ring in der DDR,” Wagnerspectrum, no. 1 (2007): 171–73; and Kröplin, “Entgegnung von Eckart Kröplin auf die Einwände von Joachim Herz,” Wagnerspectrum, no. 1 (2007): 174–75. 21. A comprehensive account of Bayreuth in the postwar period is provided in Frederic Spotts, Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). A more specific discussion of American plans for Bayreuth in the immediate postwar years can be found in Sabine Henze-Döhring, “Kulturelle Zentren in der amerikanischen Besatzungszone: Der Fall Bayreuth,” in Kulturpolitik im besetzten Deutschland 1945–1949, ed. Gabriele Clemens (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1994), 39–54. David Monod also explores the implications of Bayreuth for the Americans in Settling Scores, 253–60. 22. Wieland Wagner’s aesthetics and production style are discussed at length in Patrick Carnegy, Wagner and the Art of the Theatre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 261–309. 23. As Carnegy explains, Hitler’s personal interest in Bayreuth and subsequent protection of it from the Nazis’ cultural ideology commission enabled the director Emil Preetorius and the conductor Heinz Tietjen to introduce Germany’s most experimental Wagner productions during the Third Reich (Wagner and the Art of the Theatre, 272–80). Regarding Wieland Wagner’s Altenburg Ring production of 1946, he notes that the job was acquired with Joseph Goebbels’s help (282). For further discussions of Wieland Wagner’s activities during the war, see HenzeDöhring, “Kulturelle Zentren in der amerikanischen Besatzungszone,” 48–49. 24. Monod, Settling Scores, 258. 25. See, for example, G. B. Shaw, The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Nibelung’s Ring (1898); Rosamund Bartlett, Wagner and Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995);



notes to pages 135–138 301

Frank Trommler, “The Social Politics of Musical Redemption,” in Re-Reading Wagner, ed. Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 119–35; and Gottfried Wagner, “Richard Wagner als Kultfigur ‘rechter’ und ‘linker’ Erlösungsideologien,” in Von der Romantik zur ästhetischen Religion, ed. Leander Kaiser and Michael Ley (Munich: Fink, 2004), 71–88. 26. Stephan Stompor, “Richard Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen in Dessau,” Musik und Gesellschaft (hereafter MuG) 4, 7 (1954): 269. 27. This theory found its ultimate exposition in Lukács’s Destruction of Reason (1952) but was manifest in earlier works such as History and Class Consciousness (1923) and The Young Hegel (1938). On Lukács’s impact on intellectual thought in the GDR, see Caroline Gallée, Georg Lukács: Seine Stellung und Bedeutung im literarischen Leben der SBZ/DDR (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1996). 28. See, in particular, Gerda Heinrich, Geschichtsphilosophische Positionen der deutschen Frühromantik (Friedrich Schlegel und Novalis) ([East] Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1976). 29. Bathrick, “The Powers of Speech,” 193–217. 30. See, in particular, Lukács’s The Historical Novel (1937) and German Realists in the Nineteenth Century (1951). 31. Walter Ulbricht set a precedent in 1945 with his dictate for winning the populace over to socialism: “It is essential that one tell the youth something first about the role of the Prussian military and the lies of the Nazis. Then one must begin to familiarize them with German literature, with Heine, Goethe, Schiller, etc. Not starting with Marx and Engels! They wouldn’t understand that” (quoted in Manfred Jäger, Kultur und Politik in der DDR 1945–1990: Ein historischer Abriß [Cologne: Edition Deutschland Archiv, 1995], 20). 32. Program book for the 2. Richard-Wagner-Festwochen in Dessau 1954, 47. 33. This was the second Ring production to take place in the GDR. The first one had been produced in Rostock; see Stompor, “Richard Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen in Dessau,” 268. 34. See, for example, Nora Eckert, Der Ring des Nibelungen und seine Inszenierungen von 1876 bis 2001 (Hamburg: Europäische Verlaganstalt, 2001), 193. 35. Seiferth, “Wagner-Pflege in der DDR,” 98. 36. Dieter Kranz, “Festspielhaus oder sozialistisches Theater?” Theater der Zeit (hereafter TdZ) 13, 7 (1958): 20. 37. A fact helped, Seiferth points out, by the absence in the 1950s of suitable venues for opera performances in larger towns such as Leipzig, Halle, and Magdeburg (“Wagner-Pflege in der DDR,” 97). 38. Ernst Krause, “Quo vadis, Bayreuth?” MuG 1, 8 (1951): 23–24. 39. See, in particular, the booklet outlining the aims of the theater that was issued upon its reopening in 1949: Vom Hoftheater zum Volkstheater (Dessau: Dessau Anhaltisches Landestheater, 1949). 40. Program book for the 2. Richard-Wagner-Festwochen in Dessau 1954, 8. 41. Joachim Weinert, “Bayreuth in neuem Licht,” MuG 3, 10 (1953): 384. 42. Eckert, Der Ring des Nibelungen, 195–96. 43. Program book for the 2. Richard-Wagner-Festwochen in Dessau 1954, 8. 44. Willi Bodenstein, “Richard Wagners erste revolutionäre Kunsttat,” in the program book for the 1. Richard-Wagner-Festwoche in Dessau 1953, 36–37 (quoted in Seiferth, “Wagner-Pflege,” 98). Benz likens Bodenstein’s reverence for Wagner’s wishes to that of Cosima Wagner; see Die Wagner-Inszenierungen von Joachim Herz, 27. 45. A classic case of a composer in need of rescue was Handel, whose oratorio texts had been bowdlerized by Fritz Stein and Hermann Stephani in the Third Reich. The SED were vocal in

302 notes to pages 138–140 their demands for the removal of such distortions: “The brutal falsifications of Nazi-fascism in the field of the Handel edition, which are still included in the editions of Stephani and Fritz Stein, must, as has happened in the GDR, be stamped out everywhere; nevertheless, such editions play a considerable role in contemporary West German performance practice”; see “Aufgaben und Ziele unserer Händelpflege,” SAPMO-BA, DY 30/IV 2/9.06/294, 50, prepared by the Central Committee of the SED as part of the commemorative measures to mark the 200th anniversary of Handel’s death. 46. Werner Wolf, “Entrümpelung oder Verwaltigung? Bayreuther Festspiele 1957,” MuG 7, 9 (1957): 537. 47. Walter Ulbricht, “Warum Nationale Front des demokratischen Deutschland? Aus dem Referat auf der Parteiarbeiterkonferenz der SED Groß-Berlin, 17. Mai 1949,” in Zur Geschichte der Deutschen Arbeiterbewegung: Aus Reden und Aufsätzen, 3: 1946–50 ([East] Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1954), 488–509, translated and discussed in Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 109. 48. Johanna Rudolph, “Um das neue Bach-Bild,” Musik und Gesellschaft 2, 1 (1952): 18. Rudolph’s remarks were directed at the popular hit “Bach Goes to Town,” which she translated with ridicule as Bach geht bummeln [Bach goes strolling]. The piece is not actually American but by the Welsh composer Alec Templeton. 49. “Nationales Bekenntnis zu Bach: Stellungnahme des Parteivorstandes der Sozialistischen Einheitspartei Deutschlands zum Bach-Jahr, 19. März 1950,” Einheit 4 (1950), in Schubbe, Dokumente zur Kunst-, Literatur- und Kulturpolitik der SED, 134. 50. “Zum 125. Todestag Ludwig van Beethovens. Stellungnahme des Zentralkomitees der Sozialistischen Einheitspartei Deutschlands, März 1952,” MuG 2, 3 (1952): 74. 51. Werner Wolf, “Das Musiktheater und die Leipziger Meistersinger,” MuG 11, 1 (1961): 34. 52. David Pike notes, for instance, that “by declaring themselves the rightful heirs of the cultural heritage, the Communists hoped to strengthen their rhetorical hand further, contriving additional arguments to refute any contention that their ultimate objective was the importation of Soviet cultural norms into Germany” (The Politics of Culture in Soviet-Occupied Germany, 1945–1949 [Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993], 178). 53. Program book for the 2. Richard-Wagner-Festwochen in Dessau 1954, 8. 54. Ibid., 4. 55. In a speech broadcast globally during the intermission of the Die Meistersinger performance that opened the 1933 Bayreuth season, Goebbels declared, “There is certainly no work in the entire music literature of the German people that is so relevant to our time and its spiritual and intellectual tensions as is Richard Wagner’s Meistersinger. . . . Of all his music dramas the Meistersinger stands out as the most German. It is simply the incarnation of our national identity. In it is contained everything that conditions and inspires the German cultural soul” (Frankfurter Zeitung, 7 August 1933, quoted in Spotts, Bayreuth, 173). The prelude to the opera, and the chorus “Wach auf!” from the final act, provided the backdrop to numerous Nazi party congresses; and the opera formed the centerpiece of the war festivals that were held in place of the usual Bayreuth festival during the years 1940 to 1944 to bolster the spirits of those involved with the war effort. See Spotts, Bayreuth, 189–211; and Karl A. Zaenker, “The Bedevilled Beckmesser: Another Look at Anti-Semitic Stereotypes in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” German Studies Review 22, 1 (1999): 1. 56. Spotts, Bayreuth, 218–21. Wieland Wagner himself described the opera as “a dangerous mixture of Lortzing [the leading protagonist of nineteenth-century German comic opera, whose 1840 opera Hans Sachs was also based on the Meistersingers] and the Reichsparteitag [Reich party congress]”; see Geoffrey Skelton, Wieland Wagner: The Positive Sceptic (London: Gollancz, 1971), 134.



notes to pages 140–142 303

57. Joachim Herz, who directed the Leipzig production, recalls that he did not propose the opera himself. The choice of dedication opera came from on high and was included in the conditions of him assuming the role of director of the opera house. See Ilse Kobán, ed., Joachim Herz: Theater—Kunst des erfüllten Augenblicks. Briefe, Vorträge, Notate, Gespräche, Essays ([East] Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1989), 99. 58. Ernst Krause, “‘Die Weihe des Hauses’: Zur Eröffnung der neuen Deutschen Staatsoper Unter den Linden,” MuG 5, 10 (1955): 308. 59. Georg Knepler, Musikgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, 2 vols. ([East] Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1961), 893. 60. The fact that the Ring had been conceived before the Dresden uprisings, and that a significant amount of it was in place before Wagner’s encounter with Schopenhauer, provided commentators with some leeway. See, for example, Hans Pischner’s reading of it in his tract “Musik und Revolution”: Rede über Richard Wagner als 48er Revolutionär gehalten am 22. Juni 1948 in der Wirkungsgruppe Weimar des Kulturbundes zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands (Weimar: CDU-Verlag, 1948). 61. Hans Mayer, “Richard Wagners geistige Entwicklung,” Sinn und Form 5 (1953): 114. 62. Walther Siegmund-Schultze, in the program book for the 3. Richard-Wagner-Festwochen in Dessau 1955, quoted in Eckert, Der Ring der Nibelungen, 194–95. 63. Ibid., 196. 64. Gerard Dippel, in Sonntag, 30 May 1954, quoted in Eckert, Der Ring der Nibelungen, 196. 65. Seiferth describes him as “a highly qualified set designer with a lot of imagination and a perceptible link to the ideas and visions of Wieland Wagner” (“Wagner-Pflege,” 99). 66. He is described by The Musical Times critic R. R. as an “unexceptional Loge” in a review of the 1952 production (The Musical Times 93, 1316 [1952]: 463). 67. Kranz, “Festspielhaus oder sozialistisches Theater?” 17. 68. P. Witzmann, “Tönende Vorhalle des Faschismus,” TdZ 13, 11 (1958): 26. 69. As Kröplin observes, the reopening of the more centrally located opera houses in Berlin and Leipzig, in 1955 and 1960 respectively, also raised questions about the viability of Dessau (“Aufhaltsame Ankunft und ahnungsvoller Abschied,” 80). 70. Kranz, “Festspielhaus oder sozialistisches Theater?” 20. 71. Heinz Bär, “Wahllose Wagnerei,” TdZ 13, 7 (1958): 20–22. 72. Erika Witte, “Der mystische Gral deutscher Kunst: Lohengrin von Richard Wagner in der Staatsoper Berlin,” TdZ, 13, 8 (1958): 34–37. 73. The editorial explains, “The editors admit that we wanted [a discussion] and therefore made no suggestions to Frau Wilde to tone down the text” (“Wagner und kein Ende! Wagner— erst der Anfang!” TdZ 13, 10 [1958]: 36). Notably, this was not the first discussion about the relevance of Wagner in the GDR press, but it was by far the most thorough and wide-ranging. Kröplin outlines the less consequential discussion that played out around his seventieth anniversary in 1953 in “Aufhaltsame Ankunft und ahnungsvoller Abschied,” 88–89. 74. “Wagner und kein Ende! Wagner—erst der Anfang!” 36. 75. For an overview of the impact of these events on the intellectual culture of the period, see John C. Torpey, Intellectuals, Socialism, and Dissent: The East German Opposition and Its Legacy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 40–56; and John Rodden, Repainting the Little Red Schoolhouse: A History of Eastern German Education, 1945–1995 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 63–110. 76. Becher was frozen out of GDR politics while Wolfgang Harich was scapegoated and sentenced to ten years in prison; see Alexander Stephan, “Johannes R. Becher and the Cultural

304 notes to pages 143–145 Development of the GDR,” trans. Sara Lennox and Frank Lennox, New German Critique 2 (Spring 1974): 72–89. 77. Ernst Bloch, “Discussions of Expressionism” (1938), in Heritage of Our Times, trans. Neville and Stephen Plaice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 247. 78. Bertolt Brecht, “Die Essays von Georg Lukács,” Gesammelte Werke, vol. 19 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967), 298, translated in Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982). Lunn provides a good account of the different strands of cultural thought inherent in Marxism. See also Werner Mittenzwei, “Marxismus und Realismus: Die Brecht–Lukács Debatte,” Das Argument, no. 46 (March 1968): 12–43; and “Bertolt Brecht: Against Georg Lukács,” New Left Review 1, 84 (1974): 33–53. 79. Hanns Eisler, “Bemerkungen zum Entwurf eines Beschlusses des ZK der SED zum 125. Todestag Ludwig van Beethovens,” Hanns Eisler: Gesammelte Werke, Serie III, Schriften und Dokumente, vol. 2, Musik und Politik: Schriften 1948–1962, ed. Günter Mayer (Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1982), 195. 80. See Peter Davies, “Hanns Eisler’s ‘Faustus’ Libretto and the Problem of East German National Identity,” Music and Letters 81, 4 (2000): 585–98; and Hans Bunge, ed., Die Debatte um Hanns Eislers “Johann Faustus”: Eine Dokumentation (Berlin: Basis Druck, 1991). The Misere theory, which found its clearest expression in Abusch’s Irrweg einer Nation: Ein Beitrag zum Verständnis der deutschen Geschichte (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1946), depicts German history as a series of negative events that rendered the rise of National Socialism inevitable and blocked the path of Marxism. Abusch later retracted these ideas and shifted his allegiance to the party-line interpretation of the past. 81. Herf provides an extensive and illuminating discussion of this phenomenon in chapters 4 and 5 of his Divided Memory. 82. See Joachim Lucchesi, Das Verhör in der Oper: Die Debatte um die Aufführung “Das Verhör des Lukullus” von Bertolt Brecht und Paul Dessau (Berlin: Basis Druck, 1993); and Joy Haslam Calico, Brecht at the Opera (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), 109–39. The negative reception accorded to Eisler’s Johannes Faustus can also be read in this context; see Calico, Brecht at the Opera, 114. 83. Heinz Bär, “Zwischenbemerkung,” TdZ 13, 12 (1958): 14. 84. Bär, “Wahllose Wagnerei?” 21–22. 85. Ernst Krause, “So Nicht!” TdZ 13, 10 (1958): 38. 86. Eduard Plate, “Wagner: Wunder, Wirklichkeitsentzogen. Eine Zuschrift aus Dresden,” TdZ 13, 12 (1958): 14. A short letter by the writer Walther Victor emphatically supporting Erika Wilde had been published in the October edition of Theater der Zeit. 87. Erika Wilde, “Die Wunde ist’s, die nie sich schliesst,” TdZ 14, 1 (1959): 10. 88. Paul Dessau, “Musik der Gründerjahre: Ein Interview,” TdZ 13, 12 (1958): 19–20. 89. Bär, “Wahllose Wagnerei?” 22. 90. Dessau, “Musik der Gründerjahre,” 20. 91. Ibid., 20. 92. Psylander’s letter appeared in the October installment and Gerold’s in the November issue of vol. 13 (1958). According to the editors, contact details were provided for neither letter; see TdZ 13, 10 (1958): 36. 93. G. Psylander, “Einer der ‘vergass’ seine Anschrift exakt anzugeben,” TdZ 13, 10 (1958): 36. 94. Heinz Bär, “Zwischenbemerkung,” TdZ 13, 12 (1958): 14. 95. Bär quotes the following excerpt from Psylander: “In your opinion, all Wagner’s works



notes to pages 145–147 305

that cannot be brought into direct compliance with the aims of the SED no longer have a place in our time” (ibid., 14). 96. Herbert Kawan and Alfred Paul, “Gespräch mit einem Komponisten: Aufgezeichnet nach einer Tonbandaufnahme,” TdZ 13, 12 (1958): 17. Kawan’s use of the word “brown” is a reference to the brown shirts worn by the Nazi storm troopers (Sturmabteilung, or SA). 97. Ibid., 17. 98. The myth paraded the communist resistance as the primary victim of World War II; Jews, Gypsies, and other “passive” victims were simply subsumed under the generic title of “victims of fascism” (Opfer des Faschismus). 99. Herf, Divided Memory, 69–161. 100. Beckmesser’s job in the singing competition is to “mark” the mistakes each competitor makes on a slate. Stephan Stompor, “Musikalische Überbetonung und Zuspitzung in der deutschen Oper von Mozart bis Wagner,” MuG 3, 6 (1953): 252. 101. Theodor Adorno, Versuch über Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone as In Search of Wagner (London: New Left Books, 1981), 23. Not everyone agrees with Adorno. See, for example, Hans Rudolf Vaget, “Wagner, Anti-Semitism, and Mr. Rose: Merkwürd’ger Fall!” German Quarterly 66, 2 (1993): 222–36; and Vaget, “‘Du warst mein Feind von je’: The Beckmesser Controversy Revisited,” in Wagner’s Meistersinger: Performance, History, Representation, ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003), 190–208. 102. Barry Millington, “Nuremburg Trial: Is There Anti-Semitism in Die Meistersinger?” Cambridge Opera Journal 3, 3 (1991): 247–60; and David J. Levin, “Reading Beckmesser Reading: Antisemitism and Aesthetic Practice in The Mastersingers of Nuremburg,” New German Critique 69 (1996): 127–46. 103. Millington, “Nuremburg Trial,” 250–51. 104. Ibid., 251–54. 105. Stompor, “Musikalische Überbetonung und Zuspitzung in der deutschen Oper von Mozart bis Wagner,” 252. 106. The changing climate was marked by the release of the most prominent victim of the anti-Semitic purges, the politician Paul Merker, from prison in the summer of 1956; see Herf, Divided Memory, 154–55. 107. Notably in Joachim Herz’s 1960 Leipzig production of Die Meistersinger, Beckmesser was granted clemency. Herz diminished the level of ridicule associated with his prize-song rendition by combining Walther’s words with the melody of Beckmesser’s act 2 serenade. He also redeemed the character by effecting a reconciliation between him and Sachs at the end of the opera, a ploy that met with stringent opposition from the Leipzig critic Werner Wolf. See Werner Wolf, “Das Musiktheater und die Leipzig Meistersinger,” MuG 11, 1 (1961): 33–37; and Joachim Herz, “Musik und Szene in den Meistersingern,” MuG 11, 3 (1961): 157–62. David Levin uses the analogy of “ghettoization” to describe Beckmesser’s banishment from the stage and exclusion from the newly strengthened Germanic community at the end of Die Meistersinger (“Reading Beckmesser Reading,” 144–46). 108. See, in particular, Fritz Erpenbeck, “Statt eines Schlussworts,” TdZ 14, 1 (1959): 13–16. 109. Prof. Dr. A. Gerold, “Ein Schmutzfink aus dem Hinterhalt,” TdZ, 13, 11 (1958): 22. 110. Kupfer’s database documents seven new productions of Wagner in 1959 in the GDR, including one of Lohengrin in Rostock and Tristan und Isolde in Leipzig. 111. Kupfer demonstrates a four-year gap between Witte’s Lohengrin and the Staatsoper’s next Wagner contribution, a production of Tannhäuser (directed by Erich-Alexander Winds) that premiered on 3 October 1962.

306 notes to pages 147–150 112. Seiferth notes that the festivals of 1959 and 1960 were confined to eight performances each. The next festival did not take place until 1963, and a final performance of the Ring spread over a month occurred in 1965 (“Wagner-Pflege,” 101). 113. Hanns Eisler, “Ask Me More about Brecht: Conversations with Hans Bunge. Four Excerpts,” Hanns Eisler: A Miscellany, ed. David Blake (Luxembourg: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996), 422. 114. Richard Petzoldt, “Symbolik zweier Denkmäler: Zu Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdys 150. Geburtstag am 3. Februar 1959,” Musik in der Schule 10, 1 (1959): 11–17. 115. Letter from Meyer to Alfred Kurella of the Central Committee of the SED (26 January 1959), SAPMO-BA DY 30/IV 2/2.026/105. 116. Eisler’s opinions are expressed in a document he prepared on behalf of the Akademie for publication in Neues Deutschland. The document is attached to a letter from Eisler to Kurella (9 February 1959), SAPMO-BA DY 30/IV 2/2.026/105. 117. Prof. Hans Pischner, “Festrede zur Eröffnung der Mendelssohn-Bartholdy-Gedenkwoch in Leipzig,” Musik in der Schule 10, 3 (1959): 108–16, 125–26. 118. René Svanda, “Eine Stimme aus Freundesland,” TdZ 13, 10 (1958): 42. 119. “1. Konzeption für die Wagner-Ehrung 1963” (October/November 1961), prepared by Hans-Georg Uszkoreit, BA DR 1/73, 4. 120. “Hinweise und Empfehlungen für die Richard-Wagner-Ehrung 1963,” prepared by Deputy Culture Minister Kurt Bork, dated 7 January 1963, BA DR 1/74, 4. 121. “Vorlage für die Ideologische Kommission beim Zentralkomitee der SED: Betr. RichardWagner-Ehrung 1963” (16 February 1963), BA DR 1/74, 3. 122. Regarding the aims and establishment of the committee, see “1. Konzeption für die Wagner-Ehrung 1963,” and the committee meeting announcement of 3 February 1962, in the Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Künste (SA-AdK), VDK 589. 123. A number of other members were co-opted along the way. For full details, see the minutes of the committee meetings, which are held in the Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Künste: SA-AdK, VDK 589. Further documents relating to the meetings can be found in BA DR 1/73–74 and SAPMO-BA DY 30/IV 2/9.06/295. 124. SA-AdK, VDK 589. 125. See the correspondence in SA-AdK, VDK 589. Drafts of Knepler’s “Wagner-Ehrung 1963” can be found in SAPMO-BA DY 30/IV 2/9.06/295, 20, and SA-AdK VDK 589. The statement was published in MuG 12, 11 (1962): 681–83; and Richard Wagner, 1813–1883 ([East] Berlin: Deutscher Kulturbund, 1963): 5–9. All later references are to the Kulturbund edition. 126. His reports are filed in BA DR 1/73–74. 127. SA-AdK, VDK 589. 128. Knepler, Musikgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, 2:863. 129. Georg Knepler, “Festrede zu Richard Wagners 150. Geburtstag,” SA-AdK VDK 589, 2. 130. Ibid., 2–3. Knepler is referring to the following lines from Wagner’s 1848 draft of the Nibelung myth: “Yet the peace by which they have arrived at mastery does not repose on reconcilement: by violence and cunning was it wrought. The object of their higher ordering of the world is moral consciousness, but the wrong they fight attaches to themselves” (“Der NibelungenMythus als Entwurf zu einem Drama,” in Richard Wagner, Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, trans. William Ashton Ellis [London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1892–99], 7:302). 131. “Hinweise und Empfehlungen für die Richard-Wagner-Ehrung 1963” (7 January 1963), prepared by Kurt Bork, BA DR 1/74. 132. “Protokoll des Wagner-Kolloquiums am 4.11.1961,” SA-AdK, VDK 589.



notes to pages 150–152 307

133. “1. Konzeption für die Wagner-Ehrung 1963,” 5. Uszkoreit questioned the possibility of a performance in Berlin’s Komische Oper or at the very least the procurement of Walter Felsentein as a guest director for a performance. Felsenstein notably abstained from directing Wagner after the war, although he did invite Joachim Herz to direct Der fliegende Höllander at the Komische Oper in 1962. See Stephan Stompor, ed., Walter Felsenstein, Joachim Herz: Musiktheater (Leipzig: Verlag Philipp Reclam, 1976), 404–10; and Carnegy, Wagner and the Art of the Theatre, 315, 323. 134. Georg Knepler, “Zur Wagner-Ehrung 1963,” 8. This reading of Wagner reception in the West was not confined to the GDR and was also evident in the USSR. Rosamund Bartlett quotes from a review by I. Nestiev of Joachim Herz’s 1963 production of Der fliegende Höllander, published in Trud on 22 May 1963, in which he observes that “Wagner’s legacy is perceived in different ways in the West—bourgeois-idealist aesthetics fetishize the weak, reactionary sides of Wagner’s work and see him as forefather of contemporary modernism. Progressive musicians see in him a musician-innovator, a fighter for new mass art, calling for a revolutionary transformation of life” (Wagner and Russia, 7). 135. Knepler, “Zur Wagner-Ehrung 1963,” 6. 136. Ibid., 6. 137. BA DR 1/74. The official status of the festival had never been fully confirmed. In December 1961, VDK leader Notowicz had informed Goldschmidt, the convenor of the Wagner committee, that Culture Minister Bentzien would let the committee know in due course whether or not their final statement would be issued as an official declaration from the SED (SA-AdK, VDK 589 [letter of 6 December 1961]). 138. Richard Wagner, 1813–1883. In addition to the article prepared by the Wagner committee, the handbook includes as source material for discussion a number of Wagner’s own writings, including his “A Pilgrimage to Beethoven” of 1840 and his “Proposal for the Organization of a German National Theater for the Kingdom of Saxony” (1848). 139. Ibid., 71. 140. “Richard Wagner und das Erbe—Möglichkeiten des Musiktheaters an einer Repertoirebühne,” lecture given at the Internationale Kolloquium des Internationalen Theaterinstituts zum Thema “Zeitgenössische Opern-Interpretation,” 6–11 November 1965, reprinted in Kobán, Joachim Herz: Theater—Kunst des erfüllten Augenblicks, 129. 141. Herz himself identified the three modes of staging Wagner’s operas as “the illusionistic action stage,” as espoused by Wagner; “the symbolistic dream stage” found in Bayreuth; and his own “realistic action stage” (“Richard Wagner und das Erbe,” 129). 142. See, in particular, his complaints about the unconvincing narratives brought about by Bayreuth’s abstract productions (ibid., 131). 143. Ibid., 129. 144. See Kobán, Joachim Herz: Theater—Kunst des erfüllten Augenblicks, 102–7; and Felsenstein and Herz, Musiktheater, 212–22. 145. Lydia Goehr, “Undoing the Discourse of Fate: The Case of Der fliegende Holländer,” Opera Quarterly 21, 3 (2005): 448. 146. Herz’s production was staged in Leipzig between 1973 and 1976. 147. Seiferth, “Wagner-Pflege in der DDR,” 112. 148. Götz Friedrich brought Tannhäuser to Bayreuth in 1972, and Harry Kupfer Der fliegende Holländer in 1978. Berghaus made her mark on the West with her stagings of Parsifal (1982) and the Ring (1985–87) with the Frankfurt opera. See Dieter Kranz, ed., Der Regisseur Harry Kupfer, “Ich muß Oper machen”: Kritiken, Beschreibungen, Gespräche ([East] Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1988); and Corinne Holtz, Ruth Berghaus: Ein Porträt (Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 2005).

308 notes to pages 153–155 Chapter 8. From Iron Curtain to Silver Screen 1. S. Vladimirov, “Fabrication on the Screen,” Komsomol´skaia pravda, 24 August 1957, 3; Current Digest of the Soviet Press (hereafter CDSP) 9 (1957), 18. 2. Inostranka, directed by Aleksandr Seryi and Konstantin Zhuk (USSR, 1965). 3. On the relationship among tourism, film, and the “map—real and imaginary—of Sovietness” in the 1920s and 1930s, see Emma Widdis, Visions of a New Land: Soviet Film from the Revolution to the Second World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), esp. chaps. 4 and 5. 4. Vasilii Aksenov, A Ticket to the Stars (New York: Signet Books, 1963), 18. 5. Apart, that is, from the travel of diplomats, trade officials, journalists, cultural figures, and the two sets of exemplary workers sent on cruises around Europe in 1930 and 1931. On domestic tourism (and working-class travel abroad), see Diane P. Koenker, “The Proletarian Tourist in the 1930s: Between Mass Excursion and Mass Escape,” in Turizm: The Russian and East European Tourist under Capitalism and Socialism, ed. Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 131, and generally 119–40. On European travel by the Soviet elite, see Michael David-Fox, “Stalinist Westernizer? Aleksandr Arosev’s Literary and Political Depictions of Europe,” Slavic Review 62, 4 (2003): 733–59. On travel in late Stalinism, see Anne E. Gorsuch, “‘There’s No Place Like Home’: Soviet Tourism in Late Stalinism,” Slavic Review 62, 4 (2003): 760–85. 6. Anne E. Gorsuch, “Time Travelers: Soviet Tourists to Eastern Europe,” in Gorsuch and Koenker, Turizm, 206–12. 7. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii (RGANI), f. 5, op. 30, d. 161, l. 35 (a meeting of the Cheliabinsk KPSS obkom in response to a resolution from the CC KPSS of 3 January 1956, “On the Organization of Trips by Soviet Tourists Abroad”); Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiskoi Federatsii (GARF), f. 9612, op. 1, d. 387, l. 33 (requirements for a character recommendation, 1957); GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 430, l. 187 (report on the cost of trips abroad); GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 432, ll. 3, 5–7, 29 (lists of numbers and categories of tourists going abroad in 1960 and 1961); Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial´no-politicheskoi istorii (RGASPI), f. m-5, op. 1, d. 52, l. 9 (list of the composition of Soviet youth tourists to capitalist countries in 1960). On reporting back to people at home, see, for example, GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 317, l. 17 (on the fulfillment of plans for travel abroad, 1956, Leningrad oblast). 8. See Anne E. Gorsuch, “Performing on the International Stage: Soviet Tourism to the Capitalist West in the Cold War,” Antropologicheskii forum/Forum for Anthropology and Culture (forthcoming, in Russian). 9. Mikhail German, Slozhnoe proshedshee (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPB, 2000), 161, 233, 234, 262, 264–65. 10. Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997, 1998). 11. Programma Kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza priniata XXII s˝ezdom KPSS (Moscow, 1962), 278–79. 12. Susan E. Reid, “Who Will Beat Whom? Soviet Popular Reception of the American National Exhibition in Moscow, 1959,” in this volume, chapter 10. Originally published in Kritika 9, 4 (2008): 864; K. Skovoroda, Planovoe khoziaistvo, no. 2 (1960): 43–53, in CDSP 12, 12 (20 April 1960): 7. 13. Nikita Khrushchev, “Report of the Central Committee of the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,” in Documents of the 22nd Congress of the CPSU, 1:120, available at www.archive.org/details/DocumentsOfThe22ndCongressOfTheCpsuVolIi.



notes to pages 155–157 309

14. Steven E. Harris, “In Search of ‘Ordinary’ Russia: Everyday Life in the NEP, the Thaw, and the Communal Apartment,” Kritika 6, 3 (2005): 583–614; Christine Varga-Harris, “Forging Citizenship on the Home Front: Reviving the Socialist Contract and Constructing Soviet Identity during the Thaw,” in The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization: Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era, ed. Polly Jones (London: Routledge, 2005), 101–16; Donald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and De-Stalinization: The Consolidation of the Modern System of Soviet Production Relations, 1953–64 (London: Macmillan, 1993); Filtzer, “From Mobilized to Free Labour: De-Stalinization and the Changing Legal Status of Workers,” in Jones, The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization, 154–69; Susan E. Reid, “Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste under Khrushchev,” Slavic Review 61, 2 (2002): 211–52. 15. Khrushchev, “Report of the Central Committee of the 22nd Congress,” 115. 16. See this volume, György Péteri, chapter 1, “Introduction: The Oblique Coordinate Systems of Modern Identity.” 17. Khrushchev, “Report of the Central Committee of the 22nd Congress,” 131–32. 18. Ibid., 132. 19. Andrei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 163. 20. Ibid., 169–75. 21. Nikita S. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament, trans. and ed. Strobe Talbott (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), 379, 400, 403. 22. Ibid., 386, 409. 23. Russkii suvenir, directed by Grigorii Aleksandrov (USSR, 1960). 24. Ia shagaiu po Moskve, directed by Georgii Danelia (USSR, 1963). 25. Moi mladshii brat, directed by Alexander Zarkhi (USSR, 1962). 26. Inostrantsy: Kinofel´eton, part of Sovershenno ser´ez Komediinyi al´manakh 1 (Completely Serious: Comedy Almanac 1), directed by Eduard Zmoiro (USSR, 1961). 27. Soy Cuba, directed by Mikhail Kalatozov (USSR, 1964). 28. David Denby, “Big Pictures: Hollywood Looks for a Future,” The New Yorker, 8 January 2006, 60. 29. Peter Ruppert, “Tracing Utopia, Film, Spectatorship, and Desire,” Utopian Studies 7, 2 (1996): 145. On the convergence of cinematic vision and international travel, see Stephen Hutchings, “Introduction,” in Russia and Its Other(s) on Film: Screening Intercultural Dialogue, ed. Stephen Hutchings (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), 8–9. 30. The authenticity, or not, of the tourist experience has been a matter of long scholarly debate. The most prominent defender of tourism as a search for authenticity is Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (1976; repr., Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999). John Urry has questioned the possibility of authenticity, emphasizing instead the constructed nature of the tourist gaze, in The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage, 1990). More recent work questions this dichotomy. See Rudy Koshar, German Travel Cultures (Oxford: Berg, 2000); and Ellen Strain, Public Places, Private Journeys: Ethnography, Entertainment, and the Tourist Gaze (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 2–6 and throughout. 31. Strain, Public Places, 4. 32. Widdis, Visions of a New Land, 108, 3. 33. Zapasnoi igrok, directed by Semen Timoshenko (USSR, 1954). 34. Ted Hopf, The Social Construction of International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 72.

310 notes to pages 158–162 35. Alexander Prokhorov, “Inherited Discourse: Stalinist Tropes in Thaw Culture” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2002), available online at etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/ etd-07242002-135513/ (accessed 22 February 2008); Julian Graffy, “Scant Sign of Thaw: Fear and Anxiety in the Representation of Foreigners in the Soviet Films of the Khrushchev Years,” in Hutching, Russia and Its Other(s) on Film, 27–46. On Thaw cinema more generally, see Josephine Woll, Real Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000). On Soviet attitudes toward the West as expressed in postrevolutionary and Stalinist films, see Oleg Kovalov, “Zvezda nad step´iu: Amerika v zerkale sovetskogo kino,” Iskusstvo kino, no. 10 (2003), available at www. kinoart.ru/magazine/10-2003/review/Kovalov0310 (accessed 10 May 2010). On representations of the West, with particular attention to the Brezhnev era, see Sergei Dobrynin, “The Silver Curtain: Representations of the West in the Soviet Cold War Films,” History Compass 7, 3 (2009), available at www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/122314400/HTMLSTART (accessed 10 May 2010). 36. N. Ignatieva, “Along the Beaten Path,” Izvestia (11 April 1961); CDSP 13, 15 (10 May 1961), 40. 37. John Haynes, “Reconstruction or Reproduction? Mothers and the Great Soviet Family in Cinema after Stalin,” in Women in the Khrushchev Era, ed. Melanie Ilič, Susan E. Reid, and Lynne Attwood (London: Palgrave, 2004), 115. 38. Mikhail Romm, “Traditions and Innovations,” in Khrushchev and the Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture, 1962–1964, ed. Priscilla Johnson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965), 101. 39. M. R. Zezina, “S tochki zreniia istorii kinozala,” in Istoriia strany, istoriia kino, ed. S. S. Sekirinskii (Moscow: Znak, 2004), 400–401. Soviet citizens went, on average, to the movies at least twice a month (Josephine Woll, The Cranes Are Flying [London: I. B. Tauris, 2003], 109). 40. Editor’s notes to Khrushchev Remembers, trans. and ed. Strobe Talbott (Boston: Little Brown, 1970), 392. 41. Ryszard Kapuściński, “The Open World: A Legendary Travel Writer’s First Trip Abroad,” The New Yorker, 5 February 2007, 60. 42. The film director Andrei Konchalovskii was, for example, transformed by his experiences in Rome: “We spent the entire evening sitting in the trattoria. . . . We drank wine for three dollars. I will never forget the feeling of ease, happiness, light, music, holiday. All of my subsequent ideological vacillations and anti-patriotic actions started with this” (Nizkie istiny [Moscow: Sovershenno sekretno, 1998], 112). 43. Postcards, U.S.S.R. Pavilion, Larry Zim World’s Fair Collection, The Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Box 48. 44. “Brussels Asks World to Its Fair,” Life 44, 13 (31 March 1958): 23, 27; “Pavilion of the U.S.S.R.: A Guide,” National Archives and Records Administration (hereafter NARA), RG 43, Box 5, BEG 401; “Incoming Telegram (from Brussels), Department of State, August 1, 1957,” NARA, RG 43, Box 5, BEG 401; Postcards, U.S.S.R. Pavilion, Larry Zim World’s Fair Collection, Box 48, Box 80. 45. “Pavilion of the U.S.S.R: A Guide,” NARA, RG 43, Box 5, BEG 401. 46. Alexander Werth, Russia under Khrushchev (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1961), 236. 47. “Ob˝ektivnyi vzgliad,” Krokodil, no. 22 (10 August 1959), back page; see fig. 10.1. 48. As described in Widdis, Visions of a New Land, 176–82. 49. Woll, Real Images, 159. Woll describes I Walk around Moscow as a safe and uncontroversial “replacement” for another film about youth, II´ich’s Gate (ibid., 142, 159–60). 50. Richard Taylor, “‘But Eastward, Look, the Land Is Brighter’: Toward a Topography of



notes to pages 162–166 311

Utopia in the Stalinist Musical,” in The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space, ed. Evgeny Dobrenko and Eric Naiman (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 201–15. 51. On the Thaw as a period of “fierce [technologically driven] competition between the superpowers for possession of the future,” see David Crowley and Susan E. Reid, “Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe,” in Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe, ed. Susan E. Reid and David Crowley (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 9. 52. Victor Nekrasov, Both Sides of the Ocean: A Russian Writer’s Travels in Italy and the United States, trans. Elias Kulukunis (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1964), 62. 53. Ibid., 62–63. 54. Zametki o putesheshvii v Svettsiiu (Tallinnfilm, 1960), viewed at Eesti Filmiarhiiv, 1427. 55. See, for example, Karen Dubinsky, “‘Everybody Likes Canadians: Canadians, Americans, and the Post–World War II Travel Boom,” in Being Elsewhere: Tourism, Consumer Culture, and Identity in Modern Europe and North America, ed. Shelley Baranowski and Ellen Furlough (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). 56. Em. Dvinskii, Ia shagaiu po Moskve: Putevoditel´ dlia turistov, as described in Diane P. Koenker, “Historical Tourism: Revolution as a Tourist Attraction,” presented at the conference “Historical Memory and Society in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union (1860–1939),” St. Petersburg, June 2007. 57. On the valorizing of “away-ness” in Thaw-era film, see Petre Petrov, “The Freeze of Historicity in Thaw Cinema,” in KinoKultura, no. 8 (April 2005), available at www.kinokultura. com/articles.apr05-petrov.html (accessed 22 February 2008). 58. Possible exposure to non-Soviet citizens increased dramatically in 1965 when regular ferry trips were opened between Helsinki and Tallinn, allowing tens of thousands of Finnish and other Scandinavian tourists to visit Tallinn (Eesti Riigiarhiiv, arhiivifond R-2288, arhiivinimistu, 2-c, säilitushüik 19, leht 1, 5). On popular culture and politics in the Baltics, see Mark Allen Svede, “All You Need Is Lovebeads: Latvia’s Hippies Undress for Success,” in Reid and Crowley, Style and Socialism 189–208; and Amir Weiner, “Déjà vu All Over Again: Prague Spring, Romanian Summer, and Soviet Autumn on the Soviet Western Frontier,” Journal of Contemporary European History 15, 2 (2006): 159–94. 59. Turistskie marshruty po SSSR (Moscow: Profizdat, 1958), photo following 64; Tallinn (Tallinn: Eesti raamat, 1965). 60. Nekrasov, Both Sides of the Ocean, 26–27. 61. Eva Näripea, “Medieval Socialist Realism: Representations of Tallinn Old Town in Soviet Estonian Feature Films, 1969–1972,” in Kont ja Paik/Place and Location: Studies in Environmental Aesthetics and Semiotics, vol. 4, ed. V. Sarapik, E. Näripea, and K. Tüür (Tallinn: Estonian Academy of the Arts, 2004), 126; and Näripea, “Turistlik eskapism ja sümfoonilised variatsioonid: Tallinna vanalinn vaatefilides 1960.1970. aastail,” Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi, nos. 2–3 [14] (2003): 88. 62. Tallinna mosaiik, directed by Andrei Dobrovolskii (Tallinnfilm, 1967), viewed at Eesti Filmiarhiiv, 1744/1-11. 63. Tallinn: Estlands pittoreska huvudstad, Tallinna Linnaarhiivi [Tallinn City Archive], folder “Turism Tallinnas.” 64. In 1957, 78 percent of tourists traveled to the cities and beach resorts of Estonia without a travel voucher, as compared to Moscow, where less than 1 percent of tourists did so. See GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 357, l. 1 (on fulfilling the plan for Tourist Excursion Bureau work). 65. Aksenov, Ticket to the Stars, 61, 65, 83.

312 notes to pages 166–171 66. Woll, Real Images, 155. On the differences between the book and the movie, see Julian Graffy, “Film Adaptations of Aksenov: The Young Prose and the Cinema of the Thaw,” in Russian and Soviet Film Adaptations of Literature, 1900–2001: Screening the Word, ed. Stephen Hutchings and Anat Vertitski (London: Routledge, 2004), 108–13. 67. Aksenov, Ticket to the Stars, 132. 68. Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, 3rd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 226–31. 69. Anatolii Kuznetsov, The Journey, trans. William E. Butler (New York: Transnational Publishers, 1984); Sergei Antonov, Alyona, trans. Helen Altschuler (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1960). 70. Julian Graffy provides a detailed explication of this film in “Scant Sign of Thaw,” 38–42. 71. Aleksei Kozlov, Kozel na sakse (Moscow: Vagrius, 1998), 82. 72. Ibid., 82. 73. Juliane Fürst, “The Arrival of Spring? Changes and Continuities in Soviet Youth Culture and Policy between Stalin and Khrushchev,” in Jones, The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization, 134–53; Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 170–75; Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Social Parasites: How Tramps, Idle Youth, and Busy Entrepreneurs Impeded the Soviet March to Communism,” Cahiers du monde russe 47, 1–2 (2006): 401–3. 74. Vasilii Aksenov, “A Case Is Heard: Princes with the Spirit of Beggars,” Literaturnaia gazeta (17 September 1960); CDSP 12, 36 (10 May 1960), 13. 75. Ibid., 13–14. 76. Ibid., 13–14. 77. Reid, “Cold War in the Kitchen,” 239. 78. Western fashions were gradually introduced to the Soviet public in the late 1950s. See ibid., 237–40; and Larissa Zakharova, “Fabriquer le bon goût: La Maison des modèles de Leningrad à l’époque de Hruščev,” Cahiers du monde russe 47, 1–2 (2006): 195–225. 79. Interview with Yevgeny Yevtushenko conducted by Professor Jerry W. Carlson, City University Television/CUNY-TV, 2004, in the Milestone Video and Film version of O Mamute Siberiano (The Siberian Mammoth, directed by Vicente Ferraz [Brazil, 2005]), in I Am Cuba: The Ultimate Edition (Milestone Film and Video). 80. Dennis Dordos and Amy Heller, “I Am Cuba: The True Story,” booklet included in I Am Cuba: The Ultimate Edition. 81. As interviewed in The Siberian Mammoth, a documentary film on the making of I Am Cuba. 82. Petr Vail and Aleksandr Genis, 60-e: Mir sovetskogo cheloveka (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1998), 55. 83. See the discussion in Rudy Koshar, “Seeing, Traveling, and Consuming,” in Histories of Leisure, ed. Rudy Koshar (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 15. 84. Iul´skii dozhd´, directed by Marlen Khutsiev (USSR, 1967). A different, tongue-in-cheek view of the West, and specifically of travel to the West, can be found in the 1968 comedy Brilliantovaia ruka (The Diamond Hand), directed by Leonid Gaidai (USSR, 1968).

Chapter 9. Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall . . . Is the West the Fairest of Them All? I would like to thank the Fulbright-Hays Program and the Social Science Research Council for the support provided for this research, and Emory University’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry for the time and space to begin this article.



notes to pages 173–178 313

1. As quoted in Vladimír Macura, “Mandelinka bramborová,” Šťastný věk: Symboly, emblémy a mýty 1948–1989 (Prague: Pražská imaginace, 1992), 29. 2. Heda Margolius Kovály, Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague, trans. Franci Epstein and Helen Epstein (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1997), 94. 3. All translations from Czech and Slovak are mine unless noted otherwise. “IV. Sjezd československých spisovatelů: Historická událost,” Svědectví [Paris] 8, 32 (Fall 1967): 530. Ludvík Vaculík’s speech has also been translated into English: “Document No. 1: Proceedings of the Fourth Czechoslovak Writers’ Congress, 27–29 June 1967, and a Follow-Up Resolution by the CPCz CC Plenum, September 1967 (Excerpts),” in The Prague Spring 1968: A National Security Archive Documents Reader, ed. Jaromír Navrátil (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1998). 4. As loaded as the term “communism” may be, I still prefer it over “socialism.” To use the word “socialism” to describe Czechoslovakia’s political system in the two decades after the Prague Spring would do a great disservice to West European socialisms and socialists during the same period. For more, see the well-argued call for retaining the term “communism” in Andrew Roberts, “The State of Socialism: A Note on Terminology,” Slavic Review 63, 2 (2004): 349–66. Moreover, in Czechoslovakia, the party in power from 1948 to 1989 was the Czechoslovak Communist Party. 5. For more on this issue of the West as a shifting cultural symbol, see Paulina Bren, “Looking West: Popular Culture and the Generation Gap in Communist Czechoslovakia, 1969–1989,” in Representations and Cultural Exchanges across the Atlantic: Europe and the United States, 1800–2000, ed. Luisa Passerini (Brussels: PIE-Peter Lang, 2000), 295–322. 6. David Crew, writing about East Germany, similarly points out, “For most of the period from 1949 to 1989, the standard by which East Germans judged their material existence was not their own previous deprivation in 1945 or 1946 but the real and imagined quality of life across the border in West Germany” (“Consuming Germany in the Cold War: Consumption and National Identity in East and West Germany, 1949–1989. An Introduction,” in Consuming Germany in the Cold War, ed. David Crew [New York: Berg, 2003], 3). 7. The German historian Erica Carter, in her important work on gender, sees the late 1950s as the period in West Germany when the struggle for the attainment of basic goods transformed into an environment ripe for the realization of a consumerist lifestyle (How German Is She? Postwar West German Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997], 65). My sense is that the term “lifestyle” came into popular usage in the United States with the arrival of the immensely successful and tacky television show, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, first broadcast in 1984. 8. Open Society Archives, Budapest (OSA), Radio Prague Domestic, 25 August 1967, 09:00 hrs. 9. National Archives of the Czech Republic [NAČR], Prague, ÚV KSČ (Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party fond), fond 10/5, sv. 16, aj. 70, 100–5, “Soudobé proudy antikomunismu a náš ideový postup [Příloha IV],” 33rd Meeting of the Central Committee’s Ideological Commission, 24 September 1965. 10. Ibid. 11. OSA, Budapest: Lidová demokracie, 24 August 1967 (RFE press clipping). 12. NAČR: ÚV KSČ, fond 10/10, sv. 1, a.j. 2, bod 0, “Záznam pro 2. schůzi ideologické komise ÚV KSČ” (17 June 1970) [Fojtík]. 13. Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), dir. Philip Kaufman. 14. Police records show that from August 1968 until 1987, 136,876 people left Czechoslovakia; and whereas police records end in 1987, illegal emigration continued up to the Velvet Revolution

314 notes to pages 178–183 in November 1989. (See Jiří Pernes, Takoví nám vládli: Komunističtí prezidenti Československa a doba, v níž žili [Prague: Nakladatelství Brána, 2003], 292.) Another number cited elsewhere is 106,837 citizens who left Czechoslovakia between 1968 and 1989. This number seems to be derived from how many people were tried in absentia for doing so (Jaroslav Cuhra, Trestní represe odpůrců režimu v letech 1969–1972 [Prague: ÚSD, 1997], 26). 15. Jiří Kocian, Jiří Pernes, Oldřich Tůma et al., České průšvihy aneb Prohry, krize, skandály a aféry českých dějin let 1848–1989 (Prague: Barrister & Principal, 2004), 296. 16. Identifying emigration with betrayal was helped by the patriotic term “abandonment of the republic,” with the word “republic” more suggestive of the fledgling Czechoslovak Republic of the interwar years than of the postwar Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. 17. See, for example, OSA, Reuters, 19 February 1969 (RFE press clipping). The same was freely admitted in the Czech press since it was considered to be good publicity for the generosity of the new normalization leadership. 18. Kocian, Pernes, Tůma et al., České průšvihy, 298. 19. Cuhra, Trestní represe odpůrců režimu v letech 1969–1972, 27. 20. Kocian, Pernes, Tůma et al., České průšvihy, 299. 21. Marcus Ferrar, “Modest Success Claimed for CSSR Amnesty,” Reuters, 8 July 1973. 22. Miroslav Hájek, “Devět dopisů,” Rudé právo, 24 July 1971, 3. Only seldom did the legitimate question of human rights and sealed borders officially come up. 23. ČT APF (Czech Television Archives—Written Materials), Prague: Ve–2 fond, k# 143, ev.j. 979, Jiří Fér, “Podíl Čs. televize na boji proti emigraci a při rozvíjení socialistického vlastenectví,” 7 March 1985. The report further notes that “in the emphasis of this theme, television programs for children and youth are particularly important” because “television broadcasts are as a whole conceptualized so as to create an atmosphere that will influence viewers at home parallel to the principles of Marxist-Leninist instruction and the values of real socialism.” 24. Jiří Bagar in Tvorba, no. 47 (21 November 1984): 5. 25. OSA, Radio Play, “Opustíš-li mě,” by Lubomír Tachovský, Radio Prague, June 1970. The novel was by Zdeněk Pluhař and the television drama by D. Štursová. See Rudé právo, 6 March 1979, 5. 26. “Proč se Zlatníkovi vrátili z australského ráje: Klokaní skok,” Rudé právo, 27 April 1971, 3. 27. One can read this in countless articles, interviews, and remembrances produced in the early 1990s. 28. “Kolo dějin nezastaví,” Tribuna, no. 16 (14 April 1976): 9. 29. Moreover, it was often frustrating for émigrés from Eastern Europe to communicate their unique experiences of communism to politically left-oriented friends in the West. For a sense of these miscommunications, see my essay on Czech students’ attempts during 1968 to find a middle ground with student activists in the West: Paulina Bren, “1968 East and West: Visions of Change in France, Germany, and Italy, as seen from Prague,” in Transnational Moments of Change in Postwar Europe, ed. Padraic Kenney and Gerhard-Rainer Horn (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 119–35. 30. OSA, Rádio Hvězda, 17 September 1970, 21:00 hrs. (translation by RFE). 31. OSA, “Politická Aktualita”—Jarmila Stejskalová Speaks with Returnee Josef Čermák, Rádio Hvězda, 28 August 1973, 15:30 hrs. 32. OSA, Czechoslovak Television, 24 July 1972, 19:30–20:00 hrs. (translation by RFE). 33. OSA, “Draze zaplacené zkušenosti”—Karel Kvalip Talks to Returnee Zdeněk Lédl, Rádio Praha, 10 April 1970, 20:30 hrs. 34. Jaroslav Horák, “Vrátili se z ‘ráje,’” Tribuna, no. 38 (1 October 1969): 16.



notes to pages 183–190 315

35. OSA, Rádio Hvězda in Slovak, 17 September 1970, 21:03 hrs. (translation by RFE). 36. OSA, Rádio Hvězda, 24 November 1971, 17:30 hrs. 37. OSA, Rádio Hvězda, 24 November 1971, 17:30 hrs. 38. OSA, “Richard Podhorský Speaks with Returnee Milan Matulík,” Rádio Praha, 17 February 1974, 22:00 hrs. 39. Horák, “Vrátili se z ‘ráje,’” 16. 40. OSA, Budapest, “Jarmila Stejskalová Speaks with Father and Son Barták,” Rádio Hvězda, 25 December 1971, 19:30 hrs. 41. Ibid., pt. 1. 42. Ibid., pt. 2. 43. ČT APF, Ve–2 fond, k# 143, ev.j. 979. 44. Otakar Turek, Podíl ekonomiky na pádu komunismu v Československu (Prague: ÚSD, 1995), 67–71. 45. Otakar Turek, “Plánované hospodářství,” in Proč jsme v listopadu vyšli do ulic, ed. Jiří Vančura (Brno: Doplněk, 1999), 74. 46. See Turek, Podíl ekonomiky, 75–76; and Turek, “Plánované hospodářství,” 74. He further argues, as have other economists, that in fact Czechoslovakia’s economy was not nearly in as bad a shape as many had thought. 47. Lenka Kalinová, Sociální vývoj Československa 1969–1989 (Prague: ÚSD AV ČR, 1998), 71, 33, 20. 48. OSA, Rádio Praha and Rádio Hvězda, 6 January 1972, 19:00 and 19:30 hrs. (translation by RFE). 49. Broadcast on Rádio Praha, 26 February 1972, quoted in Radio Free Europe Situation Report, Czechoslovakia/2 (10 January 1973); “Czechoslovakia Tackles the Birth Rate Problem.” 50. NAČR: ÚV KSČ, fond 10/10, sv. 1; a.j. 3, bod 0, “Záznam: pro 3. schůzi ideologické komise ÚV KSČ” (19 October 1970) (Bil’ak). 51. Jiří Svoboda, “Rozhovor se čtenářem: Jaký způsob života?” Rudé právo (příloha), 30 October 1976, 2. 52. Ibid., 2. 53. See, for example, Miloslav Chlupáč, “Být neznamená jen mít,” Rudé právo, 21 April 1978, 4–5. 54. NAČR, ÚV KSČ, uncatalogued (pre-1989 catalogue no. IK–63/24), “6. schůze ideologické komise ÚV KSČ, 15 October 1985,” “Stav a tendence rozvoje socialistického společenského vědomí,” Materiály pro ideologickou komisi ÚV KSČ, 6 (put forward by L. Novotný). 55. NAČR, ÚV KSČ, uncatalogued (pre–1989 catalogue no. IK–63/24), 6–7. 56. ČT APF, uncatalogued (photocopy of document in author’s possession); Report from the Department of Correspondence on viewers’ letters to Prague’s Czechoslovak Television headquarters, 1977–82: “Viewers are in the habit of turning to Czechoslovak Television when they do not know where else to turn (the earlier tradition was to send all such questions to the President’s Office)” (18). 57. ČT APF, Prague, k# 214, e.j. 1279, “Rozbor anonymních dopisů došlých do OD ČST Praha v srpnu 1983.” 58. For more on the country cottage trend in communist Czechoslovakia, see Paulina Bren, “Weekend Get-Aways: The Tramp, the Chata, and the Politics of Private Life after the Prague Spring,” in Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc, ed. David Crowley and Susan E. Reid (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 123–40. 59. Milan Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe (April 26, 1984),” in From Stalinism to

316 notes to pages 190–195 Pluralism: A Documentary History of Eastern Europe since 1945, ed. Gale Stokes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 222. 60. Václav Havel, “Moc bezmocných,” in O lidskou identitu: Úvahy, fejetony, protesty, polemiky, prohlášení a rozhovory z let 1969–1979, ed. Vilém Prečan and Alexander Tomský (London: Rozmluvy, 1984), 71. The italics are Havel’s. 61. Libri Prohibiti Archive, Prague (LPA), Y. P., “Po nás potopa?” Vokno, no. 14 (1988). 62. This song, archived at the Open Society Archives in Budapest, is available only in English, having been translated by Radio Free Europe. The title of the song, however, would most likely make better sense as “Let Me Be.” 63. A reference to the common practice of stealing bricks and other building materials from building sites to construct a private weekend cottage. 64. Most likely a reference to the Czech crooner Karel Gott, also beloved by Germans, East and West, and dubbed the “Idiot of Music” by Milan Kundera in his novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. 65. Tuzex was a special chain of stores where one could buy Western goods for Western currency. Since it was illegal to possess Western currency, technically one could only shop at Tuzex if one had relatives abroad who sent Western currency directly to Tuzex, which transferred the money into special vouchers and passed them on to the relatives. Of course, there was a widespread black market for these vouchers, which were sold directly on the street at the entrance of the stores, thus allowing anyone with money to have access to the Tuzex goods. Items for sale through Tuzex even included new houses and cars. Prostitutes were often referred to in the press as “Tuzex-ladies.” 66. Refers to the common practice of bribery for any small service, especially doctors’ visits and medical care. 67. Refers to the flashy lifestyles of black marketeers and party bosses. 68. Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 28. 69. Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 159. 70. Judd Stitziel, “On the Seam between Socialism and Capitalism: East German Fashion Shows,” in Consuming German in the Cold War, ed. David F. Crew (New York: Berg, 2003), 76.

Chapter 10. Who Will Beat Whom? 1. Norman K. Winston, “Six Things Mikoyan Envied Most in America,” This Week Magazine, 29 March 1959. 2. Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2005), 456. 3. Gereon Zimmerman and Bob Lerner, “What the Russians Will See,” Look, 21 July 1959, 54; Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1997), chaps. 6–7; Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), esp. 16–20 and chap. 7; Karal Ann Marling, As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 243–60; Cristina Carbone, “Staging the Kitchen Debate: How Splitnik Got Normalized in the United States,” and Susan E. Reid, “‘Our Kitchen Is Just as Good!’: Soviet Responses to the American Kitchen,” in Cold War Kitchen: Americanization, Technology, and European Users, ed. Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 59–82, 83–112; Rosa Magnusdottir, “‘Be Careful in America, Premier Khrushchev!’: Soviet



notes to pages 195–197 317

Perceptions of Peaceful Coexistence with the United States in 1959,” Cahiers du monde russe 47, 1–2 (2006): 109–30; David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), chap. 2; Yale Richmond, Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 133–35; Frederick C. Barghoorn, The Soviet Cultural Offensive: The Role of Cultural Diplomacy in Soviet Foreign Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 94; Amanda Aucoin, “Deconstructing the American Way of Life: Soviet Responses to Cultural Exchange and American Information Activity during the Khrushchev Years” (Ph.D. diss., University of Arkansas, 2001); David Crowley and Jane Pavitt, eds., Cold War Modern: Design 1945–1970 (London: V & A Publishing, 2008). For the virtual day-trip theme, see “Puteshestvie v Ameriku za rubl´,” Krokodil, no. 22 (10 August 1959): 4–5. 4. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD, Record Group 306 (USIA), entry 1050, box 7, hereafter NARA 306/1050/7; “Memorandum of Agreement between U.S.–U.S.S.R. Representatives Pertinent to the Staging of a U.S. Exhibit in Moscow,” NARA 306/1050/7; protocol agreement of 10 September 1958 on exchange of exhibitions, Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), f. 9518, op. 1, d. 595, l. 131 (correspondence relating to American exhibition, Moscow 1959). 5. On the displays, see Hixson, Parting the Curtain, chaps. 6–7; Marilyn Kushner, “Exhibiting Art at the American National Exhibition in Moscow, 1959: Domestic Politics and Cultural Diplomacy,” Journal of Cold War Studies 4, 1 (2002): 6–26; Carbone, “Staging the Kitchen Debate,” 59–82. 6. Foreign Services dispatches, “Seven Days of Sokolniki,” 3 August 1959, and “Four Weeks of Sokolniki,” 28 August 1959; USIA report, “The American National Exhibition in Moscow,” all in NARA 306/1050/7. 7. Hixson, Parting the Curtain, 213; De Grazia, Irresistible Empire, 456. 8. Foreign Service dispatch, “Khrushchev Interview with U.S. Governors,” 15 July 1959, NARA 84/3133C/1. 9. Hixson, Parting the Curtain, 210; weekly Foreign Service dispatches from U.S. Embassy Moscow to Department of State, Washington, NARA 306/1050/7. 10. Joan Barth, report, NARA 306/1043/11. 11. “Visitors’ Reactions to the American Exhibit in Moscow: A Preliminary Report,” 28 September 1959, NARA 306/1070/10, referring to reports in Time magazine and the Herald Tribune. See also “‘Ivan’ Takes a Look at American Life,” U.S. News and World Report (10 August 1959): 40–43. 12. Hixson, Parting the Curtain, chap. 7. On the Whig consensus in an earlier phase of Sovietology, see Stephen F. Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History since 1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), chap. 1. 13. Hixson, Parting the Curtain, 213. 14. See, e.g., John Gunther, Inside Russia Today, rev. ed. (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1964); and Harrison E. Salisbury, To Moscow—and Beyond (London: Joseph, 1960). 15. Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System Online (hcl.harvard.edu/collections/hpsss/ index.html, last consulted 24 July 2008); E. V. Kodin, “Garvardskii proekt” (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2003). 16. See Iurii Aksiutin, Khrushchevskaia “ottepel´” i obshchestvennye nastroeniia v SSSR v 1953–1964 gg. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004). 17. Primarily NARA 306/1050, 306/1011, 306/1043, and 59/861.191. 18. Caute, Dancer Defects, 613–14.

318 notes to pages 197–200 19. Notably Hixson, Parting the Curtain, chap. 7; and De Grazia, Irresistible Empire, 453–57. 20. Question asked of ANEM guides in debriefing interviews, NARA 306/1043/11. 21. Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 4–8; Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 4–8; Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience, chap. 1. 22. Richmond, Cultural Exchange, 181; Krisztina Fehérváry, “American Kitchens, Luxury Bathrooms, and the Search for a ‘Normal’ Life in Postsocialist Hungary,” Ethnos 17, 3 (2002): 369–400. 23. “Policy Guidance for the U.S. Exhibit in Moscow in 1959,” NARA 306/1050/7. 24. “Policy Guidance”; “Visitors’ Reactions.” 25. Hixson, Parting the Curtain, 165–67. 26. Ibid., 165–68; Winston, “Six Things Mikoyan Envied”; correspondence concerning the American Exhibition in Sokol´niki, 31 January–23 November 1959, GARF, f. 9518, op. 1, d. 594, ll. 221–28. Compare David Riesman, “The Nylon War,” in Abundance for What? And Other Essays (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964), 65–77. 27. Barghoorn, Soviet Cultural Offensive, 94; Hadley Cantrill in consultation with Frederick Barghoorn, “Some Notes concerning the U.S. Exhibit in Moscow,” 22 January 1959, NARA 306/1050/7; Memorandum to L. Brady concerning Austrian exhibit, 21 May 1959, NARA 306/1050/7; Carbone, “Staging the Kitchen Debate,” 59–82; Greg Castillo, “Domesticating the Cold War: Household Consumption as Propaganda in Marshall Plan Germany,” Journal of Contemporary History 40, 2 (2005): 261–88. 28. Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 74–75; Beatriz Colomina, Annemarie Brennan, and Jeannie Kim, eds., Cold War Hothouses: Inventing Postwar Culture, from Cockpit to Playboy (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004). There were dissenting voices in the United States: “Exhibits for Russia,” Houston Press, 19 March 1959; and Royce Brier, “A Model Home for Russian Viewing,” San Francisco Chronicle, 26 March 1959. 29. “Five Weeks of Sokolniki,” 8 September 1959, NARA 306/1050/7; Zimmerman and Lerner, “What the Russians Will See,” 52–54; Susan E. Reid, “Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev,” Slavic Review 61, 2 (2002): 211–52. 30. “Khrushchev Interview with U.S. Governors,” 15 July 1959, NARA 84/3133C/1. The Soviet authorities were well informed about the exhibits in advance of the opening (GARF, f. 9518, op. 1, d. 594, d. 595). 31. U.S. Ambassador William Lacy, transcript of tape recording concerning Moscow fair, White House, January 1959, NARA 306/1050/7. On the low impact of U.S. pavilions at Brussels and other international exhibitions, compared to those of communist countries, see USIA Office of Research and Intelligence, “Visitor Reaction to the U.S. Exhibit at the Paris Trade Fair, 1956,” 27 July 1956, NARA 306/1011/1; “Highlights of USIA Research on the Presidential Trade Fair Program, 1959,” NARA 306/1011/1; “Follow-Up Study of Visitor Reaction to the U.S. versus Major Competing Exhibits at the Brussels International Fair,” June 1959, NARA 306/1011/2. 32. Hixson, Parting the Curtain, 137, 151; Magnusdottir, “‘Be Careful in America,’” 111. 33. William J. Tompson, Khrushchev: A Political Life (Houndmills, UK: Macmillan, 1995), 216–17; William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 415–16; Vladislav Zubok and Konstantin Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to



notes to pages 200–204 319

Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 174–75; Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 23. 34. “Khrushchev Interview with U.S. Governors”; Hixson, Parting the Curtain, 165. 35. “Khrushchev Interview with U.S. Governors.” 36. Richard E. Mooney, “Soviet Seeks to Open Doors to U.S. Trade, but Washington Officials Balk at Bids for Increased Commerce,” New York Times, 5 July 1959; report on Mikoian interview with U.S. governors, 18 July 1959, NARA 84/3133C/1. 37. “Khrushchev Interview with U.S. Governors.” 38. “My peregonim Ameriku! Rech´ Predsedatelia Soveta ministrov SSSR N. S. Khrushcheva pri otkrytii vystavki Soedinennykh shtatov Ameriki v Moskve,” Trud, 25 July 1959. 39. Hixson, Parting the Curtain, 165. The All-Union Agricultural Exhibition—modernized, expanded, and newly reopened in June 1959 as the Exhibition of National Economic Achievements (VDNKh)—presented the ideal Soviet future in this way. 40. Philip Hanson, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy: An Economic History of the USSR from 1945 (London: Longman, 2003), 60–63. 41. Alec Nove, “Is the Soviet Union a Welfare State?” in Readings in Russian Civilization, ed. Thomas Riha (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 3: 745–56. 42. Examples include “Davaite razlozhim svoi ‘tovary,’” Ogonek, no. 10 (1 March 1959): 4–5; “Vse dlia sovetskogo cheloveka,” Izvestiia, 25 July 1959, and various socialist bloc exhibitions set up in competition with ANEM. 43. György Péteri, “Nylon Curtain—Transnational and Transsystemic Tendencies in the Cultural Life of State-Socialist Russia and East-Central Europe,” Slavonica 10, 2 (2004): 114; Aksiutin, Khrushchevskaia “ottepel´,” 350. 44. Comments books of visitors to American National Exhibition, Moscow, 1959, NARA 306/1043/11; “Two Weeks of Sokolniki,” 13 August 1959, NARA 306/1050/7. 45. “Two Weeks of Sokolniki.” 46. Richmond, Cultural Exchange, 135. 47. “Three Weeks of Sokolniki.” 48. Leslie Brady, “Post Mortem on Sokolniki,” 6 October 1959, NARA 306/1050/7. 49. Joan Barth, report, NARA 306/1043/11. 50. Brady, “Post Mortem”; “Three Weeks of Sokolniki.” 51. Brady, “Post Mortem”; Barth, report, NARA 306/1043/11. 52. USIA Report, “The American National Exhibition in Moscow,” NARA 306/1050/7; Brady, “Post Mortem”; “Three Weeks of Sokolniki.” 53. Hixson, Parting the Curtain, 201, citing “McLellan Report on the American Exhibition in Moscow,” NARA 59/861.191–MO/7-2759. 54. “Visitors’ Reactions”; De Grazia, Irresistible Empire, 456. 55. “Five Weeks of Sokolniki”; “Six Weeks of Sokolniki,” 11 September 1959, NARA 306/1050/7. 56. “Visitors’ Reactions.” 57. United States’ current and retrospective reports, debriefings of guides, and transcribed comments books held in NARA 306/1043/11 and 306/1050/7; reports by party activists held in the Tsentral´nyi arkhiv obshchestvenno-politicheskoi istorii Moskvy (TsAOPIM), Moskovskii gorodskoi komitet KPSS, Otdel propagandy i agitatsii, f. 4 , op. 139, d. 13 (27 July–2 September 1959). 58. Report on questions visitors asked of guides, Foreign Service dispatch 105, September 1959, NARA RG 306/1050/7.

320 notes to pages 204–209 59. A survey research program was set up within USIA in early 1956 to guide USIA operations by providing “concrete detail [of] the image of America held by peoples abroad,” including the economic picture of the United States and attitudes toward capitalism, socialism, and communism. See “A Brief Overview of Recent Survey Findings on the Economic Image of America Abroad,” November 1958, NARA 306/1011/1. Surveys conducted include “West European Reactions to American Jazz,” 11 September 1957; “The Credibility of What America Says Abroad and Receptivity to U.S. Information Efforts,” 30 July 1958; and “Highlights of USIA Research,” all in NARA 306/1011/1; “The Image of American Youth and American Women in Western Europe,” September 1960; and “Posts’ Assessment of the Impact of Hollywood Films Abroad,” September 1961, both in NARA 306/1011/2. 60. A “Proposed Schedule of Reports on Public Opinion in USSR” (undated, c. 1959) identified sources of data to be gathered at ANEM, to include interviews with guides and students, questionnaires filled out by them, material from a repatriate survey, and a Radio Liberty report (NARA 306/1043/11). 61. “Seven Days of Sokolniki,” “Two Weeks of Sokolniki,” and others, NARA 306/1050/7. 62. Herbert Howard, “Interviews with Guides,” January–February 1960, NARA 306/1043/11. 63. David Mark, “Soviet Attitudes and Public Opinion,” 6 June 1959, NARA 84/3313C/9. 64. Ibid. 65. “Visitors’ Reactions.” 66. “A Brief Overview of Recent Survey Findings”; “Highlights of USIA Research.” 67. Hixson, Parting the Curtain, 193, 197; TsAOPIM, f. 4, op. 139, d. 13. 68. Boris A. Grushin, Chetyre zhizni Rossii v zerkale oprosov obshchestvennogo mneniia (Moscow: Progress-Traditsiia, 2001), 41–68. 69. “Two Weeks of Sokolniki.” The agitators noted that there was no book by the model house (TsAOPIM, f. 4, op. 139, d. 13, l. 25). 70. “Two Weeks of Sokolniki”; Hixson, Parting the Curtain, 167. 71. Some records did reach the Central Committee somehow, including comments on a USIA report on the exhibition and comments books. See Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii (RGANI), f. 5, op. 30, d. 318, ll. 52–60 (Stephen Bittner, personal communication). 72. Sharon Macdonald, “Accessing Audiences: Visiting Visitor Books,” Museum and Society 3, 3 (2005): 119–36; Susan E. Reid, “In the Name of the People: The Manège Affair Revisited,” Kritika 6, 4 (2005): 73–71; Reid, “The Exhibition Art of Socialist Countries, Moscow 1958–59, and the Contemporary Style of Painting,” in Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe, ed. Susan E. Reid and David Crowley (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 101–32; Jan Plamper, “The Stalin Cult in the Visual Arts” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2001), chap. 4. 73. “Visitors’ Reactions.” 74. The USIA report after the exhibition was very cautious about the quantitative indicators, noting the problem of self-selection. In other cases, such as letter-writing to Voice of America, self-selection was found to bias the response toward favorable comments, and “no one assumes that this correctly represents the true balance of opinion.” The tiny fraction of all visitors who “voted” on ANEM—about fifteen thousand out of 2.7 million in the case of the voting machine, and two thousand in the case of the comments books—meant that “if there were a tendency for the more favorably inclined to ‘vote’ more than the less favorably inclined, a very serious bias in the data could result” (“Visitors’ Reactions”). 75. Macdonald, “Accessing Audiences,” 122, citing Gordon Fyfe, personal communication; Reid, “In the Name of the People,” 681.



notes to pages 209–215 321

76. Tamar Katriel, Performing the Past: A Study of Israeli Settlement Museums (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997), 71n5, as cited by Macdonald, “Accessing Audiences,” 121. 77. Comments books, NARA 306/1043/11. Krokodil humorously described Soviet people getting dressed in their best to visit ANEM, wishing to present themselves as respectable to their hosts (“Puteshestvie v Ameriku,” 4). 78. “Seven Days of Sokolniki.” Agitation continued but without the intensity of the first ten days. “Six Weeks of Sokolniki.” 79. TsAOPIM, f. 4, op. 139, d. 13. 80. Ibid., l. 24. 81. Ibid., l. 25; version cited here from comments books, NARA 306/1043/11. 82. “Two Weeks of Sokolniki” (emphasis added). 83. Hixson, Parting the Curtain, 196–201. 84. The agitators were, by their own account, ill prepared by their party instructors (TsAOPIM, f. 4, op. 139, d. 13, l. 40). Their presence (if detected) may have affected the field, but presumably they eavesdropped on bona fide ordinary people, not fellow agitators masquerading as such. 85. Ibid., l. 34. 86. Hixson, Parting the Curtain, 197. 87. “Visitors’ Reactions.” Americans recorded 134 overheard comments. The report considered that eavesdropping data was least subject to systemic bias since the listener was supposedly undetected. 88. TsAOPIM, f. 4, op. 139, d. 13, l. 55. 89. Ibid. Petty theft worried the Soviet authorities. The U.S. press and Hixson made much of it as an indicator that the exhibition had broken down Soviet discipline and achieved the aims Winston articulated (“‘Ivan’ Takes a Look,” 40; Hixson, Parting the Curtain, 191). 90. TsAOPIM, f. 4, op. 139, d. 13, esp. ll. 3, 4, 7, 8. 91. Ibid., ll. 1–55. 92. Ibid., l. 34. Similar comments were written in the visitors’ books. It is noteworthy that the speaker thinks in terms of the family weekend outing, a form of leisure commonly identified with American middle-class modernity. 93. Ibid. 94. Ibid., l. 37. 95. Reid, “In the Name of the People,” 679–80. 96. U.S. observers reported “a barrage of articles [that] told the Soviet citizen the ‘truth about America’ with predictable emphasis on unemployment, race problems, education and youth problems, the high cost of living” (“Six Weeks of Sokolniki”; “Two Weeks of Sokolniki”). For the counterpropaganda measures and press coverage, see Hixson, Parting the Curtain, 188–89. 97. It is not always possible to trace chronologically precise relations between comments and articles in the central press. Press reports commonly refer to (real or fictional) viewers’ comments to legitimate their judgments and portray them as those of the Soviet people. Much of the press coverage was translated in Current Digest of the Soviet Press. 98. Mark, “Soviet Attitudes.” 99. “Five Weeks of Sokolniki.” 100. Report on interviews with guides, NARA 306/1043/11. 101. Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956). 102. Examples are cited by Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 5.

322 notes to pages 215–222 103. Ibid., 9. The binary distinction between “agitators” and “genuine” viewers also needs to be dismantled. 104. For some aspects of the debate, see Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995); Anna Krylova, “The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies,” Kritika 1, 1 (2000): 119–46; Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Making a Self for the Times: Impersonation and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia,” Kritika 2, 3 (2001): 49–87, esp. 472–77; Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 105. See Reid, “In the Name of the People,” 673–716, esp. 681–83. 106. On public letter-writing, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Supplicants and Citizens: Public LetterWriting in Soviet Russia in the 1930s,” Slavic Review 55, 1 (1996): 78–105; and Magnusdottir, “‘Be Careful in America,’” 109–30. 107. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 21. 108. Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience, 128–57; Nikolai Mitrokhin, Russkaia partiia: Dvizhenie russkikh natsionalistov v SSSR, 1953–1985 (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2003); and on the fractured art world and its publics, Reid, “In the Name of the People,” 673–716; and Reid, “The Exhibition Art of Socialist Countries,” 101–32. 109. “Three Weeks of Sokolniki.” 110. Mikhail German, Slozhnoe proshedshee (passé composé) (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo, 2000), 350. 111. For example, although normative family values were central to the ideal image of the United States that ANEM projected, Nixon’s performance in the Kitchen Debate gave him iconic status among homosexuals in Eastern Europe, who “often identify with ‘free’ America and the ‘capitalist world’” (Tom Reeves, “Red and Gay,” Fag Rag 6 [Fall 1973]: 3). I am indebted to Dan Healey for bringing this article to my attention. While many comment writers assume the authority to write in the collective name of the “Soviet people,” others assert their right to differ, objecting to being spoken for. One wrote, in reference to such a comment, “I did not authorize him to speak for me and my taste” (comments books, NARA 306/1043/11). 112. Mark, “Soviet Attitudes.” 113. Ibid. 114. Interviews with guides, NARA 306/1043/11. 115. “Five Weeks of Sokolniki.” 116. “Soviet Citizens Indict Their Government,” 30 September 1959, NARA 306/1050/7. 117. Comments books, NARA 306/1043/11. Henceforth, all unattributed quotations are from this source. I have slightly modified some of the USIA translations to make the English more idiomatic. This comment is also cited by Hixson, Parting the Curtain, 200. 118. “Three Weeks of Sokolniki.” 119. The Soviet writer Marietta Shaginian, already an accredited expert on U.S. modernity in the 1920s, developed this theme in the press (“Razmyshleniia na amerikanskoi vystavke,” Izvestiia, 23 August 1959). 120. “Three Weeks of Sokolniki.” 121. Hanson, Rise and Fall, 60–63; “Three Weeks of Sokolniki.” 122. Their expectations may have been aroused and then frustrated by a U.S. exhibition of machines planned for 1958, which had been canceled (report: “The American National Exhibition in Moscow,” NARA 306/1050/7; confidential memo regarding possible Daily Mail “Ideal Home” exhibition in Moscow, 18 November 1957, Public Record Office, Kew, London, BW2/532 ).



notes to pages 223–228 323

123. Brady, “Post Mortem.” 124. M. Shatrov, “Razmyshleniia o vystavke,” Trud, 31 July 1959. 125. TsAOPIM, f. 4, op. 139, d. 13, l. 8. 126. See, e.g., Vladimir Dudintsev, “Ne khlebom edinym,” Novyi mir, no. 8 (1956). See also George Breslauer, Khrushchev and Brezhnev as Leaders: Building Authority in Soviet Politics (London: Allen and Unwin, 1982). 127. “Six Weeks of Sokolniki.” 128. Press release, telegram from Moscow to secretary of state, 8 September 1959, NARA 306/1050/7. This was a version of an old joke circulating already in the 1930s. See Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times. Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 184. 129. Ambassador Thompson, as cited by Hixson, Parting the Curtain, 167; on public responses to the slogan “catch up and overtake,” see Aksiutin, Khrushchevskaia “ottepel´,” 350–62. 130. Barth, report, NARA 306/1043/11. 131. Ibid. 132. “Khrushchev–Nixon Debate, July 24, 1959,” CNN Perspectives series (www.cnn.com/ SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/14/documents/debate, last accessed 19 March 2002, adapted translation); Richmond, Cultural Exchange, 9. 133. “Four Weeks of Sokolniki”; “Visitor Reactions”; “Visitors’ Reactions”; Hixson, Parting the Curtain, 207. 134. Oleg Anisimov, “The Attitude of the Soviet People toward the West,” Russian Review 13, 2 (1954): 79–90, here 79–81; “The Credibility of What America Says Abroad and Receptivity to U.S. Information Efforts,” 30 July 1958, NARA 306/1011/1. 135. TASS objected that the model home was no more the typical house of an American worker than the Taj Mahal was the typical home of a Bombay textile worker or Buckingham Palace the typical home of an English miner (NARA 306/1050/7). 136. “Seven Days of Sokolniki”; “Five Weeks of Sokolniki.” 137. TsAOPIM, f. 4, op. 139, d. 13, l. 2. 138. Irene Cieraad, “The Radiant American Kitchen: Domesticating Dutch Nuclear Energy,” in Oldenziel and Zachmann, Cold War Kitchen, 113–36. 139. The guides retorted that the Soviet exhibition in New York also showed something of the future (TsAOPIM, f. 4, op. 139, d. 13, l. 8). 140. Ibid., l. 7. 141. Ibid. 142. “Three Weeks of Sokolniki.” This theme was set by Khrushchev in the Kitchen Debate and continued in the comment written by agitators (above). 143. Ben Highmore, “Spectral Banalities: The American National Exhibition in Moscow, 1959” (paper presented at the symposium “Cold War Modern: Art and Design in a Divided World,” Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 4–5 January 2007). 144. Julie Hessler, “Cultured Trade: The Stalinist Turn towards Consumerism,” in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (London: Routledge, 2000), 182–209; Fitzpatrick, “Becoming Cultured: Socialist Realism and the Representation of Privilege and Taste,” in The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 216–37. 145. For argumentation, see Susan Reid, “Khrushchev Modern: Agency and Modernization in the Soviet Home,” Cahiers du monde russe 47, 1–2 (2006): 227–68. 146. Rational consumption—an aspect of communist morality’s requirement for self-

324 notes to pages 228–234 discipline and voluntary submission of the individual to the collective will—was supposed to render the self-development of the individual compatible with the development of society as a whole. 147. Report on questions visitors asked of guides, NARA 306/1050/7. 148. “‘Ivan’ Takes a Look,” 40–43; Hixson, Parting the Curtain, 189, 191. 149. Marta Dodd, “Pod pozolochennym kupolom,” Ogonek, no. 32 (2 August 1959): 5; “Three Weeks of Sokolniki.” 150. Trud and Pravda, 25 July 1959; Sergei N. Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 321–23. 151. TsAOPIM, f. 4, op. 139, d. 13, l. 27. 152. TsAOPIM, f. 4, op. 139, d. 13, l. 33. This corresponded to the ideal self-image of the intelligentsia as high-minded and disdainful of material comforts as distinct from “petitbourgeois’” elements (meshchanstvo) both within and outside Soviet society. For official discourse on communist morality, see Deborah A. Field, Private Life and Communist Morality in Khrushchev’s Russia (New York: Peter Lang, 2007). 153. “Six Weeks of Sokolniki.” 154. Brady, “Post Mortem.” 155. “Five Weeks of Sokolniki.” 156. Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). On Hegel’s The Philosophy of History, see Christopher Gogwilt, The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 52. 157. Competitions run by the color television studios were found to exacerbate the impression of nekul´turnost´ (“Four Weeks of Sokolniki”). It was an established trope in Soviet discourse to designate the United States as nekul´turnyi. Il´ia Erenburg in 1946 contrasted American modernity with the more mature values of Europe (Caute, Dancer Defects, 38; Hixson, Parting the Curtain, 137). This built on existing old-Europe prejudice against the New World, deploying it in the Cold War East-West ideological struggle. At the Paris Trade Fair in 1956, USIA reported, “In its attempt at lightness and mass appeal, the U.S. pavilion seems to have given many of its visitors an effect of triviality,” whereby it lost out to the successful Chinese pavilion (“Visitor Reaction”). In this respect, the Soviet reception of ANEM was part of a wider European response to Amerika. 158. “Four Weeks of Sokolniki.” 159. Tsentral´nyi arkhiv goroda Moskvy (TsAGM), f. 21, op. 1, d. 125, l. 6 (comments books for exhibition Art into Life, Moscow, 1961). 160. “Two Weeks of Sokolniki”; “Three Weeks of Sokolniki.” Divisions within public discourse and popular response over abstraction and modernist art during the Thaw are analyzed in Reid, “In the Name of the People” and “The Exhibition Art of Socialist Countries.” 161. TsAOPIM, f. 4, op. 139, d. 13, l. 7. 162. “Four Weeks of Sokolniki.” 163. This response was not unique to Soviet popular opinion. A 1958 digest of USIA surveys found that in Western Europe (and, tentatively, in developing countries too), “the average person, paradoxically, favors ‘Socialism,’” although they did not mean by that the nationalization of industry but “strict government supervision over private enterprise and a great deal of attention to such things as social welfare, protection of the rights of labor, [and] equality of educational opportunity” (“Brief Overview of Recent Survey Findings,” NARA 306/1011/1).



notes to pages 234–242 325

164. See Reid, “‘Our Kitchen Is Just as Good!’” 83–112. 165. See www.teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=176 (accessed 6 October 2008). 166. Shaginian, “Razmyshleniia na amerikanskoi vystavke.” 167. For the argumentation, see Reid, “Cold War in the Kitchen,” 211–52; and “Khrushchev Modern,” 227–68. 168. De Grazia notes that there was little sign that the model kitchens were a particular attraction and that votes cast in the secret ballot box placed the model house thirteenth of fifteen with the “Miracle” kitchen at the bottom (Irresistible Empire, 456). Compare table 10.1. 169. Compare Gunther, Inside Russia Today, 63. 170. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 5, 8.

11. Moscow Human Rights Defenders Look West Epigraph: Ludmilla Alexeyeva and Paul Goldberg, The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993), 130. 1. For a vivid description of these contradictory emotions among some early Soviet intellectuals, see Michael David-Fox, “The Fellow-Travelers Revisited: The ‘Cultured West’ through Soviet Eyes,” Journal of Modern History 75, 2 (2003): 300–35; for further elucidation of this phenomenon more broadly, see György Péteri, introduction to “Nylon Curtain—Transnational and Transsystemic Tendencies in the Cultural Life of State-Socialist Russia and East Central Europe,” Slavonica 10, 2 (2004), 113–23. 2. J. V. Stalin, Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955), 13: 40–41, cited in Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 130. 3. For a detailed discussion of the questions of loyalty and identity, insiders and outsiders in the early period of Stalin’s rule, see Golfo Alexopoulos, Stalin’s Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926–1936 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). 4. Dina Kaminskaya, Final Judgment: My Life as a Soviet Defense Attorney, trans. Michael Glenny (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 41. 5. Ida Nudel, A Hand in the Darkness, trans. Stefani Hoffman (New York: Warner Books, 1990), 12. For more on the lasting trauma of the Doctors’ Plot for Jewish Soviets, see Mark Azbel, Refusenik: Trapped in the Soviet Union (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), 97. 6. Yuri Orlov, Dangerous Thoughts (New York: William Morrow, 1991), 111, 125. 7. For extensive discussion of the kompaniia movement, see Alexeyeva and Goldberg, The Thaw Generation, 83ff. 8. Ibid., 94–95. 9. On samizdat, see, for example, George Saunders, ed., Samizdat: Voices of the Soviet Opposition (New York: Monad, 1974); Michael Meerson-Aksenov and Boris Shragin, eds., The Political, Social, and Religious Thought of Russian “Samizdat”: An Anthology, trans. Nickolas Lupinin (Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1977); see also Alexeyeva and Goldberg, The Thaw Generation, 97–99. 10. Barbara Walker, “Pollution and Purification in the Moscow Human Rights Networks of the 1960s and 1970s,” forthcoming in Slavic Review 68, 2 (2009): 376–95. 11. Pavel Litvinov and Aleksandr Daniel, interview with Barbara Walker, Moscow, 26 June 2005. 12. Ibid. 13. Alexeyeva and Goldberg, The Thaw Generation, 130. 14. Viktor Dziadko and dacha visitors, interview with Barbara Walker, Moscow, 25 June 2005.

326 notes to pages 242–249 15. Quoted from Milan Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” trans. Edmund White, New York Review of Books, 26 April 1984, 38. 16. Tat´iana Starostina, interview with Barbara Walker, Moscow, 17 July 2006. A similar impression was expressed by a noted former dissident in Aleksandr Podrabinek, interview with Barbara Walker, Moscow, 21 July 2005. 17. Arsenii Roginskii, interview with Barbara Walker, Moscow, 14 July 2006. 18. Aleksandr Podrabinek, interview with Barbara Walker, Moscow, 21 July 2005. 19. Ibid. 20. Barbara Walker, Maximilian Voloshin and the Russian Literary Circle: Culture and Survival in Revolutionary Times (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), esp. introduction and chaps. 1–3. 21. “The Hypocrites,” in Izvestiia, 16 January 1966, cited in translation in Alexeyeva and Goldberg, The Thaw Generation, 127. 22. Ludmilla Alexeyeva, interview with Barbara Walker, Moscow, 1 July 2005. 23. Alexeyeva and Goldberg, The Thaw Generation, 106–9; Vladimir Bukovskii, To Build a Castle, trans. Michael Scammell (New York: Viking, 1979), 234–41. For a richly detailed discussion of Vol´pin’s intellectual and political development, see Benjamin Nathans, “The Dictatorship of Reason: Aleksandr Vol´pin and the Idea of Rights under ‘Developed Socialism,’” Slavic Review 66, 4 (2007): 630–63. 24. Andrei Sakharov, Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom, trans. The New York Times, ed. and intro. by Harrison Salisbury (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988); Boris Shragin, The Challenge of the Spirit, trans. P. S. Falla (New York: Knopf, 1978); see esp. the introduction, 3–13. 25. Vaclav Havel, Open Letters, trans. and ed. Paul Wilson (New York: Knopf, 1991), 125–214. 26. Ludmilla Alexeyeva, interview with Barbara Walker, Moscow, 1 July 2005. 27. Ibid. 28. Padraic Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe, 1989 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 91–92. 29. Arina Ginzburg, interview with Barbara Walker, Paris, 2003; Gleb Yakunin, interview with Barbara Walker, Moscow, 6 July 2006. 30. Barbara Walker, “On Reading Soviet Memoirs: A History of the ‘Contemporaries’ Genre as an Institution of Russian Intelligentsia Culture from the 1790s to the 1970s,” Russian Review 59, 3 (2000): 327–52. 31. Hedrick Smith, interview with Barbara Walker, Washington, DC, 21 May 2005. 32. Peter Osnos and Susan Osnos, interview with Barbara Walker, Greenwich, CT, 19 March 2005. 33. Tat´iana Starostina, interview with Barbara Walker, Moscow, 17 July 2006. 34. Harry Dunphy, quoted in Whitman Bassow, The Moscow Correspondents: Reporting on Russia from the Revolution to Glasnost (New York: William Morrow, 1988), 265. For more on the U.S. journalists’ perspective on their Soviet experiences, see not only the excellent and detailed book by Bassow, but also such books as Anatole Shub, The New Russian Tragedy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969); David Bonavia, Fat Sasha and the Urban Guerilla: Protest and Conformism in the Soviet Union (New York: Athenaeum, 1973); Hedrick Smith, The Russians (New York: Ballantine, 1977); Robert Kaiser, Russia: The People and the Power (New York: Athenaeum, 1976); Andrew Nagorski, Reluctant Farewell: An American Reporter’s Candid Look Inside the Soviet Union (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1985); and Daniel Schorr, Staying Tuned: A Life in Journalism (New York: Pocket Books, 2001).



notes to pages 249–256 327

35. This is not to say that journalists were unaware of potential conflicts that arose from their engagement with the human rights scene; Bassow covers some of the discussion among journalists that arose over this topic in The Moscow Correspondents, 240–48. That at least one journalist did in fact publicly represent himself as a partisan or ally of one particular circle of dissenters may be seen in the words of David Bonavia: “Two of the most intelligent people in Moscow are Valery and Vera Chalidze. Vera is also one of the city’s most charming women” (Fat Sasha and the Urban Guerilla, 13). It is unclear, however, whether or not Moscow human rights activists had access to such a text. 36. Note the importance of English-language skills among dissenters such as Sharansky, as well as Russian-language skills among U.S. journalists such as Anatole Shub, Hedrick Smith, and Anne Garrels; these skills were not common but could have a real impact on journalistdissident relations. That the Soviet state was aware of this and took action against some Russian-speaking U.S. journalists was noted upon Shub’s expulsion from the Soviet Union in a 1969 Time magazine article, “Bringing down Thunderbolts,” Time, 30 May 1969. 37. Natan Sharansky, Fear No Evil, trans. Stefani Hoffman (New York: Random House, 1988), 102–5. 38. Yuri Orlov, interview with Barbara Walker, Ithaca, NY, 17 March 2005. 39. Sergei Kovalev, interview with Barbara Walker, Moscow, 5 July 2005. 40. Bukovsky, To Build a Castle, 360. 41. Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs, trans. Richard Lourie (New York: Knopf, 1990), 204, 342. 42. Ibid., 476. 43. Ibid., 565. 44. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “A World Split Apart,” text of address by Alexander Solzhenitsyn at Harvard Class Day afternoon exercises, 8 June 1978 (www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine. arch/solzhenitsyn/harvard1978.html), accessed 31 March 2008. 45. Michael Scammell, Solzhenitsyn (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 758–63. For further discussion, see Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf: Sketches of Literary Life in the Soviet Union, trans. Harry Willetts (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 331, 503–14; Smith, The Russians, 557–67; Kaiser, Russia, 428–33. 46. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Invisible Allies, trans. Alexis Klimov and Michael Nicholson (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1995), 265. 47. Ibid., 265. 48. Alexeyeva and Goldberg, The Thaw Generation, 165–66; Andrei Amalrik, Notes of a Revolutionary, trans. Guy Daniels (New York: Knopf, 1982), 3. 49. Andrei Amalrik, “News from Moscow,” New York Review of Books, 25 March 1971. 50. Arina Ginzburg, interview with Barbara Walker, Paris, 1 May 2004; Ludmilla Alexeyeva, interview with Barbara Walker, Moscow, 1 July 2005. 51. Peter Osnos and Susan Osnos, interview with Barbara Walker, Greenwich, CT, 19 March 2005. 52. Amalrik, “News from Moscow.” 53. Ibid. 54. Peter Osnos and Susan Osnos, interview with Barbara Walker, Greenwich, CT, 19 March 2005. 55. Amalrik, Notes of a Revolutionary, 292–93; the Osnoses gave their take on this experience in their 19 March 2005 interview.

328 notes to pages 259–267 Chapter 12. Conclusion 1. Previous such attempts organized by György Péteri include Michael David-Fox and György Péteri, eds., Academia in Upheaval: Origins, Transfers, and Transformations of the Communist Academic Regime in Russia and East Central Europe (Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 2000); “Patronage, Personal Networks, and the Party-State: Everyday Life in the Cultural Sphere of Communist Russia and East Central Europe,” special issue of Contemporary European History 11, 1 (2002); and “Across and Beyond the East West Divide II: Transnational and Transsystemic Tendencies in State-Socialist Russia and East Central Europe,” special issue of Slavonica 11, 1 (2005). 2. For just one example, see “Plan raboty VOKS” for 1931, Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), f. 5283, op. 1, d. 158, ll. 55, 59, which logically counted interwar Czechoslovakia as part of Western Europe; on 1948, see Bradley F. Abrams, The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation: Czech Culture and the Rise of Communism (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004). 3. Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). This division had its incarnation even in fascist ideology: see Pier Giorgio Zunino, “Tra americanismo e bolchevismo,” in L’ideologia del fascismo: Miti, credenze e valori nella stabilizzazione del regime (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1985), 322–44. 4. Yves Cohen, “Circulatory Localities: The Example of Stalinism in the 1930s,” Kritika, 11, 1 (2010): 11–45. 5. See “AHR Conversation: On Transnational History,” American Historical Review 111, 5 (2006): 1140–65. For the case that comparisons are furthered by the study of interactions across borders, see Deborah Cohen and Maura O’Connor, eds., Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2004). 6. For a notable attempt to link the two separate literatures, see Jon Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994). 7. Among many others, see A. V. Golubev et al., Rossiia i zapad: Formirovanie vneshnepoliticheskikh stereotipov v soznanii rossiiskogo obshchestva pervoi poloviny XX veka (Moscow: Institut rossiiskoi istorii RAN, 1998); Sophie Coeuré, La grande lueur a l’Est: Les français et l’Union soviètique 1917–1939 (Paris: Seuil, 1999); Gerd Koenen, Der Russland-Komplex: Die Deutschen und der Osten, 1900–1945 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2005); and David C. Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 8. On the far-reaching effects of the Khrushchev opening, see Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago’s Children: The Last Soviet Intelligentsia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); and Stephen Lovell, Shadow of War: Russia and the USSR, 1941 to the Present (New York: Wiley, 2010). 9. Ilya Ehrenburg, Memoirs: 1921–1941, trans. Tatiana Shebunina (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1966), 26. 10. Liah Greenfeld, “The Formation of the Russian National Identity: The Role of Status Insecurity and Ressentiment,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 32, 3 (1990): 585. See also Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd, eds., Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution, 1881–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 166.

CONTRIBUTORS

Paulina Bren is adjunct assistant professor of history at Vassar College. She is the author of The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring (2010), as well as various essays about the Eastern bloc. She has recently finished a coedited volume titled Communism Unwrapped: Consumption in Postwar Eastern Europe. Her next project is on the spy family, the Fields. Greg Castillo is senior lecturer in architectural history at the University of Sydney. His research—supported by fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Getty Center for Research, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture—examines the use of architecture and design as Cold War propaganda. His Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design was published in 2010. David Crowley is a historian working at the Royal College of Art in London. His specialist interests lie in the architecture and design of Eastern and Central Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is the author of Warsaw (2003) and coeditor, with Susan E. Reid, of Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc (2002). He curated Cold War Modern: Design 1945–1970, a major exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2008–2009. Michael David-Fox is associate professor of history at the University of Maryland and a founding editor of Kritika. His most recent book, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to Soviet Russia, 1921–41, is forthcoming. He is now working on a study of “Smolensk under Nazi and Soviet Rule.” Karen Gammelgaard is professor of Czech language and literature in the Department of Literature, Area Studies, and European Languages, University of Oslo. She has authored and edited publications on Prague school semiotics, standard languages, and Czech literature. She is currently heading a project on Czech public discourse in 1948–53 and is participating in Red-Letter Days in Transition, a joint project on the semantic and pragmatic changes of red-letter days in Central Europe and the Balkans from 1985 on. Anne e. Gorsuch is associate professor at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of Youth in Revolutionary Russia: Enthusiasts, Bohemians, Delinquents (2000) and the editor (with Diane P. Koenker) of Turizm: The Russian and East European Tour329

330 contributors ist under Capitalism and Socialism (2006). She is completing a book titled All This Is Your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad after Stalin and working on a coedited volume with Diane Koenker on popular culture in the socialist 1960s. Erik Ingebrigtsen recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), as an affiliate of the Program on East European Cultures and Societies (PEECS). In 2007, he defended his Ph.D. thesis on the Rockefeller Foundation’s contribution to the modernization of interwar Hungary’s public health system. He has published articles on the relationship between right-wing radicalism and rural health in Hungary and on a controversial figure in present-day Hungarian collective memory, the interwar public health reformer Béla Johan. His most recent research is oriented toward Hungary’s 1922 entry into the League of Nations. Currently, he holds an administrative post at NTNU. Catriona Kelly is professor of Russian at Oxford University and a fellow of New College, Oxford. Her recent publications include Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture, and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (2001); Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero (2005); and Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890–1991 (2007). She is currently working on a book about cultural memory in Leningrad/St. Petersburg in the late Soviet and post-Soviet era, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/russian/nationalism). Elaine Kelly is lecturer in music at Edinburgh University. She has published on a range of topics exploring music historiography and canonic reception in nineteenthand twentieth-century Germany and is currently writing a book on narratives of romanticism in the German Democratic Republic. György Péteri teaches in the Department of History and Classical Studies and is director of the Program on East European Cultures and Societies (PEECS) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. His latest book is Global Monetary Regime and National Central Banking: The Case of Hungary, 1921–1929 (2002). His current research interest is the everyday life of the elites and middle classes of state-socialist societies. Susan E. Reid is professor of Russian visual culture in the Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies, University of Sheffield. She has published widely on Russian and Soviet visual arts, gender, space, consumption, and material culture, with a focus on the post-Stalin era. She has also edited a number of publications, most recently, with David Crowley, Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and Luxury in the Bloc (2010). She is currently completing a work provisionally titled “Khrushchev Modern: Making a Home and Becoming a Consumer in the Soviet 1960s.” Barbara Walker teaches Russian and Soviet history at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her research focus is on Russian intellectual elites of the twentieth century. She published Maximilian Voloshin and the Russian Literary Circle: Culture and Survival in Revolutionary Times in 2005 and is currently writing a book on relations between Soviet human rights activists and U.S. journalists during the Cold War. With Lisa Kirschenbaum she is also working on a translation of the Siege of Leningrad survivor Ol´ga Berggol´ts’s memoir Daytime Stars.