Virtuosi Abroad: Soviet Music and Imperial Competition during the Early Cold War, 1945–1958 9781501701825

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Shostakovich and The Iron Curtain: Intellectual Property and Transimperial Integration
2. Dueling Pianos: Imperial and National Dynamics in Postwar Music Competitions
3. From a Musical Holiday to the Tchaikovsky Competition: Moscow as a Global Center of Musical Culture
4. Oistrakh on Tour, Richter at Home: Display, Control, and the Style of Global Empire
5. Oistrakh and the Impresario: Soviet Concert Tours and Systemic Integration
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

VIRTUOSI ABROAD

VIRTUOSI ABROAD

S OV I E T MU S I C A N D I M P E R I A L CO M P E TI TI O N D UR I N G T H E EA R LY CO LD WA R , 1 9 4 5 – 1 9 5 8

K iril Tomoff

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

Cornell University Press gratefully acknowledges receipt of a grant from the Department of History, University of California, Riverside, which aided in the publication of this book. Copyright © 2015 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2015 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tomoff, Kiril, author.   Virtuosi abroad : Soviet music and imperial competition during the early Cold War, 1945/1958 / Kiril Tomoff.   pages cm   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-0-8014-5312-0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Music and state—Soviet Union—History. 2. Music— Political aspects—Soviet Union. 3. Cold War—Social aspects—Soviet Union. 4. Soviet Union—Cultural policy. 5. Soviet Union—Foreign relations—1945–1991. I. Title.  ML3917.R8T66 2015  306.4'8420947—dc23   2015007587 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Lilia

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction1 1.  Shostakovich and The Iron Curtain: Intellectual Property and Transimperial Integration

20

2.  Dueling Pianos: Imperial and National Dynamics in Postwar Music Competitions46 3.  From a Musical Holiday to the Tchaikovsky Competition: Moscow as a Global Center of Musical Culture 4.  Oistrakh on Tour, Richter at Home: Display, Control, and the Style of Global Empire

82

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5.  Oistrakh and the Impresario: Soviet Concert Tours and Systemic Integration146 Epilogue177 Notes 187 Bibliography 241 Index 257

Acknow l e dgme nts

I have benefited from intellectual engagement, research funds, companionship, and friendship from many sources. Without that support, I could not have written this book. Research in Moscow’s archives began long before the topic had crystallized. I gathered some materials while I was still a graduate student supported by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Abroad Fellowship. Subsequent research trips were funded in part by the Faculty Senate of the University of California, Riverside. My time in Moscow was made both more comfortable and more interesting by the logistical support, warmth, and friendship of Elena Drozdova, Leonid Weintraub, Aleksei Balashov, and Alla Ipatova. The research itself was facilitated by the professionalism and dedication of the entire archival staffs at RGALI, RGASPI, GARF, and RGANI, but I am particularly indebted to Galina Albertovna Kuznetsova, Dmitrii Viktorovich Neustroev, and Oleg Vladimirovich Naumov. My greatest debt as a historian is to Sheila Fitzpatrick, whose support and intellectual engagement have continued unabated in ways both large and small in the years since I left the University of Chicago. Her approach to historical investigation and writing still shapes mine. She read first drafts of all the chapters in this book, and her supportive, penetrating critiques and advice helped me immeasurably. Her erudition and generosity also saved me from committing a blunder in one chapter in particular. My ideas about the intersection of the national, the imperial, and the global in the mid-twentiethcentury world were also shaped by conversations with Ronald Grigor Suny and György Péteri and in engagement with two intellectual communities, the History Department at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) and the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. My colleagues and graduate students at UCR provided periodic sounding boards and an extremely supportive environment for research, for which I am grateful. For their contributions, I am especially indebted to Catherine Allgor, Lynda Bell, David Biggs, Thomas Cogswell, Jonathan Eacott, Ann Goldberg, Piotr Gorecki, Alexander Haskell, Randolph Head, ix

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Georg Michels, Michele Salzman, Dana Simmons, Sterling Stuckey, Heather VanMouwerik, David Wagner, Amelia Warinner, Jeremiah Wishon, and the graduate students in my reading seminar on nation, empire, and transnational history in the winter of 2010: Carlos Dimas, Jordan Downs, Joshua Hudson, Gurveen Khurana, Elliott Kim, Jeno Kim, Katy Skoog, Ulices Pina, Stephen Teske, and Kevin Whalen. This book emerged out of a larger research project in 2012–2013, during a marvelously stimulating year of research, writing, intellectual engagement, and camaraderie while I was a senior fellow at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. For the vibrant intellectual community they created and fostered there, I thank Laura Adams, Anna Aleksanyan, Robyn Angely, Nelly Bekus-Goncharova, Julie Buckler, Katie Genovese, Ekaterina Khodzhaeva, Ingrid Kleespies, Nadiya Kravets, Andrej Krickovic, Robert Kusnierz, Anastasia Likhacheva, Erika Monahan, Gayane Novikova, Kelly O’Neill, Tommaso Piffer, Anvarjon Rahmetov, James Richter, Bruno Sergei, Yaroslav Shulatov, Morena Skalamera, Hugh Truslow, Alexandra Vacroux, the members of the Russian and East European History Workshop, Historians’ Seminar, and Working Group on Central Asia and the Caucasus, and especially Timothy Colton, Serhii Plokhii, and Terry Martin. A version of chapter 1 first appeared as “ ‘Shostakovich et al.’ and The Iron Curtain: Intellectual Property and the Development of a Soviet Strategy of Cultural Confrontation, 1948–1949,” in Writing the Stalin Era: Sheila Fitzpatrick and Soviet Historiography, edited by Golfo Alexopoulos, Julie Hess­ ler, and Kiril Tomoff, 133–56 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). It is reproduced here in a revised and expanded form with the permission of Palgrave Macmillan. I presented preliminary versions of chapters 2 and 3 to the Annual Convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in November 2009 and of chapters 4 and 5 at the Russian History Winter Quarter Speaker Series at UCR in February 2011, Pomona College’s Oldenborg Center in April 2011, and at the Midwest Russian History Workshop at the University of Chicago in April 2012. I thank the participants in all these venues for their helpful feedback, but especially the discussants and organizers who made them possible: Julie Hessler, Oliver Johnson, Larissa Rudova, Luz Forero, Faith Hillis, and Dana Immertreu. The book and its individual chapters also benefited from friendly conversations with Golfo Alexopoulos, Stephen Bittner, Pauline Fairclough, Matthew Lenoe, Ethan Pollock, Andrew Sloin, and Alison Smith. Catriona Kelly, Doug Rogers, and Mark Steinberg read a first draft of the manuscript, and their careful, insightful, and thought-provoking critiques made the final book much better. I am particularly indebted to John

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G. Ackerman at Cornell University Press, who expressed early enthusiasm for the project and worked both tirelessly and generously on it even after he had retired from the press. His attentive reading, editorial expertise, and wisdom were indispensable. I also thank Roger Haydon at Cornell for agreeing to oversee the last stages of the publication process. John found two remarkable readers, both of whom provided uncommonly extensive, perceptive, and helpful critiques that improved the book immensely. David Engerman revealed himself as one of those readers. I am especially grateful to him for his support of this project and for long conversations in Cambridge and Belmont while the book took form. The final result may not entirely satisfy these readers, but the book is better as a result of their generous and thoughtful efforts, and I am grateful to all of them. Finally, I thank my friends and family for sustaining me throughout. We received a warm welcome in Belmont, Massachusetts, not just from colleagues I have already thanked but from a remarkable number of old friends: Siobhan O’Neill, Karsten Kueppenbender, Kiril Kueppenbender, Etienne Kueppenbender, Ronan Kueppenbender, Joanna Dunn, Ed Amer, Sally Martin, and Stephanie Wratten. In Riverside, I am grateful for my friends Bart Kats, Vanda Yamaguchi, Kurt Schwabe, Citra Schwabe, Emily Garabedian, Kevin Esterling, Tomma Velez, and Brett Pollard. I am very fortunate to have a loving and supportive sister and in-laws: Alyssa Tomoff, Andrew Gagne, Gareth and Denny Geering, Christopher Geering, Julianne Rainbolt, Deborah Geering, David Nash, Deborah Macmillan, Daniel Macmillan, Gareth Geering (the younger), Martha Geering, Wilder Nash, and Etienne Gagne. My grandparents, William C. and Ruth Skibbe, cultivated my interest in history as a child and continue to encourage and inspire me as I think about the past. My parents, Joan and Carl Tomoff, enabled the Harvard year, endured truncated family visits, and provided constant understanding and a patient ear. But the sacrifices of living with a historian, itinerant through the research and writing and distracted while revising, were primarily borne by Lisa Geering Tomoff and Lilia Tomoff. To Lisa, I am particularly grateful for the love and support entailed in packing up and moving for a year, tolerating the loneliness of having her spouse halfway around the world or buried in a computer screen late into the night after a teaching day’s absence, and for providing the insights and expertise of a professional orchestral musician. To Lilia, who attended four different schools in four years to accommodate this project, whose cheerful brilliance keeps me hopeful about the future, and who kept us all laughing with her exasperation that Dada was still just writing the introduction (?!), I dedicate this book, finally complete.

VIRTUOSI ABROAD

Introduction

In April 1958, a young Texan named Van Cliburn stood on a Moscow stage acknowledging the audience’s stormy applause as he was named the winner of the First International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition. Van Cliburn would later thank those audiences through the Soviet press, while extolling the Russian musical heritage being developed in the Soviet Union: “Tchaikovsky is one of my most loved composers. I was twelve years old when I first performed his First Concerto for Piano and Orchestra. Since then, my whole short life as a musician, I have loved the work of this genius of humanity. . . . I still cannot get over the realization that I have walked in the classrooms and corridors of the Moscow Conservatory, where the spirit of Tchaikovsky still lives, where music is so loved and valued. . . . I want to assure all my Soviet friends and the excellent public who listened to me with such attention and friendly disposition that I will work tirelessly to perfect my art. Thank you very much!”1 It seemed a major upset, an American stealing the top prize at the Soviets’ own competition. But by the time the piano competition concluded, the Soviet domination of international music competitions was so well established that even the minister of culture welcomed the opportunity to show off Moscow as a center of global musical culture and the Soviets as magnanimous, fair-minded hosts. Van Cliburn’s win helped demonstrate Soviet evenhandedness and played the role of the exception that proved the rule of Soviet domination. After all, 1

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just two weeks earlier, six Soviet violinists had finished in the top eight of the First International Tchaikovsky Violin Competition. Like the controversial Soviet basketball gold at the 1972 Olympic Games or the Miracle on Ice in 1980, Van Cliburn’s Tchaikovsky win became a signal moment in the cultural Cold War—because it was such a surprising exception. A year later, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and visiting American Vice President Richard Nixon stood in the model American kitchen constructed in Moscow to introduce Soviet audiences to the wonders of American consumer goods. Khrushchev famously said to Nixon, “let’s say America has been in existence for 150 years and this is the level she has reached. We have existed not quite forty-two years, and in another seven years we will be on the same level as America. When we catch you up, in passing you by, we will wave to you. Then if you wish we can stop and say: Please follow up. Plainly speaking, if you want capitalism you can live that way. That is your own affair and doesn’t concern us. We can still feel sorry for you but since you don’t understand us—live as you do understand.”2 It was the summer of 1959, and Khrushchev’s statement evinced a still comparatively new Soviet emphasis on consumption and acknowledged that satisfaction of the population’s desire for consumer goods was the ultimate measure of systemic success.3 Considering just how far a Soviet economy nearly obliterated during World War II and still plagued by chronic inefficiencies lagged behind a U.S. economy that was far larger and far more focused on delivering consumer goods, why would Khrushchev stake the legitimacy of his system on a claim that in retrospect appears so outlandish? A deeply held ideological belief in the superiority of the Soviet system and the inevitability of its historical triumph was surely a major factor. But there was another reason as well: wherever Khrushchev and other interested observers looked in the direct cultural competition between the Soviet Union and the United States, they saw actual Soviet triumphs that justified their faith in the ultimate victory of their system. The parade of Soviet laureates who dominated international music competitions and drew glowing praise from Western music critics presented an image of Soviet cultural development, even sophistication, to the rest of the world, scoring propaganda victories for the Soviet system. Those cultural successes intensified the Cold War in the 1950s, but they masked—even from Soviet leaders such as Khrushchev—the comparative weakness of the Soviet system, which was quietly but steadily being submerged within the U.S.dominated global capitalist economic and legal system. Success emboldened the Soviets to engage the United States on whatever terms the Americans proposed. When the Cold War intensified again in the 1960s and 1970s, and

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the terrain of its major clashes shifted into the realms of economic development and popular culture, the Soviets could not hope to compete on the terms, essentially set by the United States, to which they had already agreed. The seeds of the eventual Soviet collapse would not sprout for decades, but they were already planted even at the Soviet high-water mark of the late 1950s. Virtuosi Abroad uses the lens of classical music to reveal how—in competition after competition—Soviet short-term success hid from view a more decisive integration into a global order dominated by the United States. This claim—that Soviet success in the Cold War’s cultural competitions of the late 1940s and 1950s propelled the Soviets to intensify the struggle, led them to overestimate their ultimate chances of success, and simultaneously laid the groundwork for the ultimate integration of the failed Soviet Union’s successor states into a U.S.-dominated world order—depends on a reconceptualization of both the nature of the Cold War and the sources of the globalization that is widely considered to have succeeded it as the dominant structure of world history. The linchpin connecting the Cold War and globalization is “empire.” The Cold War was a struggle between imperial projects, the U.S. and the Soviet. The first postwar decade witnessed the collapse of the British and French empires in the face of decolonization movements across the world, but their disappearance did not spell the end of empire.4 Instead, these years saw a fundamental transformation in the nature of empire itself, as its metropolitan centers shifted from Europe to the United States and Soviet Union. Neither the Soviets nor the Americans sought empires that resembled those of Great Britain, France, the Habsburgs, or the Romanovs, yet each of them sought to integrate the world into its own economic, political, and cultural system. This domination by integration constituted a fundamentally new form of empire. To make it happen, practitioners in the new metropoles—Moscow, Washington, New York—co-opted the rhetoric of national liberation to suggest that membership in the new system would be emancipatory, modern, and universally beneficial. The Soviet Union was a heavily centralized multinational state constituted in part by the domination of a vast and differentiated periphery by a powerful core that sought total control over the state’s politics, economy, and ideological production.5 It was, as Ron Suny has written, “a composite state structure in which the metropole is distinct in some way from the periphery and the relationship between the two is conceived or perceived by metropolitan or peripheral actors as one of justifiable or unjustifiable inequity, subordination, and/or exploitation.”6 Yet the Soviet Union was a new form of empire, combining the foreign domination of traditional empires with a modernizing agenda that sought to transform and homogenize domestic

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society in ways that resembled other modern mobilizational states.7 As Mark Beissinger notes, it constituted “a new form of empire whose crucial contributions were its denial of its imperial quality and its use of the very cornerstones of the nation-state system . . . as instruments of nonconsensual control over culturally distinct populations, thereby blurring the line between state and empire.”8 The other new empire, the United States, also denied its imperial character, perhaps even more convincingly since the “instruments of nonconsensual control” often operated more subtly in the American empire than they did in the Soviet.9 Indeed, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and especially after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, scholars of international relations and critics of the militarist foreign policy of the post-Cold War United States alike turned their attention to a debate about twenty-first-century American imperialism. Many of these scholars and other commentators understood contemporary developments to be a fundamental shift in U.S. foreign policy from the Cold War to a new imperial mode. Some used “empire” primarily as a term of condemnation; whereas others convincingly posited the shift as merely a change in tactics, a continuation of imperial domination of the capitalist world established by the United States after World War II.10 In any case, both postwar superpowers constituted new forms of empire seeking to subjugate as much of the world as possible by incorporating the remnants of disintegrating traditional empires into their own systems. Each of these projects of imperial integration was predicated on the superpowers’ universalist claims. For the United States, universalism was paradoxically rooted in firmly held conceptions of American exceptionalism. According to this strain of American political thought, what is posited as exceptional about the United States—its particular combination of, in layman’s terms, democracy, freedom, liberty, free market capitalism—is also an exemplary model for the rest of the world. Indeed, manifest destiny had provided the ideological underpinnings for American expansionism and a justification for U.S. imperialist activity on the North American continent in the nineteenth century and abroad at least as early as the Spanish-American War. That U.S. ideologues saw in their system a model for the rest of the world also endowed American expansionism with a universalizing character.11 The Soviet Union, too, entered the postwar period guided by universalist visions and programs. The dialectical materialism of Marxism, the teleological millenarianism of the most exuberant strains of Marxism-Leninism, and the inherent logic and self-justifications of Stalinist nationalities policy all contained strong strains of developmentalism—the notion that societies, cultures, and/or peoples can be arranged on a hierarchical scale from least to most

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developed, with those at the bottom striving to catch up with those at the top.12 What made this developmentalism universalist in the Soviet case was its fusion with the idea of the Revolution, the messianic notion that the Great October Revolution inaugurated the final stage of humanity’s inevitable progress to communism.13 Though this messianism was always mediated by a calculated Leninist realism, its underlying universalism drove the Soviets, like their American counterparts, to imperial expansion. To be integrated into the Soviet empire was eventually to become “communist.” To be integrated into the American empire was eventually to participate in what came to be called “globalization.” The two empires projected different social, political, economic, and cultural systems of organization. These differences constituted the binaries of the Cold War world: market versus planned economy, liberal representative government versus party dictatorship, mass entertainment and high modernist arts culture versus socialist realism and its successors, even NATO versus the Warsaw Pact. These oppositions were never absolute or cleanly dichotomous, but they captured an essential characteristic of the postwar order: the United States and Soviet Union represented competing modern empires with global ambitions.14 As they pursued those ambitions, both contributed to the emergence of a “global” world. Most theorists realize that globalization was a complex, long-term process that has been underway for centuries, if not millennia. Still, the rapid global expansion of competitive European imperialism in the 1870s and the subsequent rise of the United States and Japan as the first modern non-European imperialists are generally recognized as marking a major acceleration.15 The other decisive period of globalization is identified as beginning in the early 1970s (1974 often gets pride of place), with the period in the middle understood as being a sort of pause.16 The destruction of the world economic system in the Great Depression certainly constituted a distinct break in the trend toward globalization, and in Europe it inaugurated a desperate struggle among three dominant ideological systems: liberalism, with its capitalist economy and representative democracy; communism; and fascism. During World War II the first two allied to destroy the fascist states only to return to the conflict between themselves at war’s end.17 The destruction of fascism inaugurated, earlier than most theorists of globalization suggest, a period of global competition between the Cold War’s two universalist imperial projects and laid the groundwork for an even more rapid acceleration of globalization later in the century. Though its role has often been ignored, the Soviet Union contributed in important ways to the emergence of this globalized world. Theorists of globalization have emphasized the growth of global cultural and capital

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flows that conditioned people to think of themselves and their immediate social contexts in relation to ideas, identities, communities, and processes that transcend not only these local contexts but even the boundaries of nation-states.18 The result is a compression of the world that is often cited as globalization’s most essential aspect. Though this compression has typically been understood as a function of the global reach of the U.S.-dominated capitalist economy, the Soviet Union posed its own different but equally universal vision of a globalized world, one that targeted domestic, developing postcolonial, and Western audiences. Both the Soviet vision and its competition with that of the United States contributed to the economic, political, and cultural developments that enabled the emergence of the transnational imagination fundamental to globalization. Encounters between Soviet musicians and the West allowed individuals on both sides of the imperial divide to draw on different understandings of national and ideological belonging while contributing to the universalization of cultural technologies, cultural media, and financial structures for enabling cultural display. Similarly, the Soviets and the Americans both framed membership in a global community as a choice between their respective projects. The cultural diplomacy and musical competition described in this book expanded global awareness of both universalizing options, even if the realities of the Cold War allowed individuals little choice between the two in practice. Alternative, nonuniversal sorts of identity (nationality, for example) were subsumed within and transcended by both universalizing systems, so the universal itself became normalized over the course of the Cold War by the competition between the empires. Finally, the transimperial mobility of Soviet musicians and the agents who enabled it helped to constitute patterns of mediation between the global and the local. During the period of imperial competition explored in this book, Soviet efforts to establish and thereby influence cultural flows led them to participate, even to integrate into the economic and legal regimes that structured the capital flows that have been so crucial to theories of globalization.19 The dynamic relationship between competition and integration that animates this book’s analysis thus contributed to the most important elements and structures of globalization. And it did so during the early Cold War, before the period in which most globalization theorists have suggested their theories apply.

Soviet Music, Culture, and Cultural Empire Music provides a particularly powerful lens through which to examine the dynamic relationship between competition and integration that characterized

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the cultural Cold War. On one hand, music was understood on both sides of the imperial divide to constitute a universal language, intelligible to audiences all over the world in a way that text-based cultural forms—including literature, theater, and even film—simply were not. On the other hand, its very abstraction has always made it more difficult to affix concrete meaning to music than to text-based art forms. This combination of abstraction and assumed universal intelligibility made music especially mobile internationally. Furthermore, Soviet musicians were spectacularly successful when they went abroad, either to participate in (and almost always win) international competitions or to concertize before large and enthusiastic audiences. Though American popular music, first jazz and then rock, eventually reached an even larger global audience, the excellence of Soviet virtuosi made music an area of particular Soviet success in the cultural Cold War. Music was also a component of broader Soviet culture, typical in some ways and exceptional in others. When they embarked on the cultural Cold War, Soviet leaders operated with a particular understanding of Soviet culture and its potential usefulness in the imperial clash with the United States. They had always placed a high value on the production and dissemination of accessible art culture, which they thought had the capacity to remake human beings to suit a postrevolutionary society. The arts were central to the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary mission and played a constitutive role in the ever-changing definition and structure of Soviet society. The importance of the arts in reforging Soviet society was clear even in the earliest days of Soviet power, when they both generated and reflected the enthusiasm and anxieties of a revolutionary era.20 But the 1930s saw the emergence of a more thoroughly institutionalized system for defining and disciplining Soviet culture: socialist realism. Socialist realism encompassed many things. In the most general sense, it was a normative mode of perception for Soviets confronting a society in the midst of cataclysmic upheaval. In its most narrow applications, it constituted a poorly codified set of ideals meant to shape new Soviet artistic production in a way that promoted the normative mode of perception. Some scholars have even argued that it was an engine for the very realization of the Soviet Union as an “aesthetic state” and indeed of socialism itself.21 As a mode of perception, socialist realism required observers of Soviet conditions to apprehend characteristics of an ideologically determined radiant future within a decidedly imperfect, even squalid present. This mode of perception was ubiquitous in Stalinist society, in economic and social policy as much as in the arts. It provided justifications for the material privileges of elites, whose comforts were understood to point the way to a future society of material

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abundance. It undergirded the emergence of a specifically Stalinist ideal laborer, the Stakhanovite, who was understood to be the first appearance of an exponentially more productive future worker. And it provided a guide for interpreting the massive construction projects that were springing up across the Soviet Union during the rapid industrialization drive of the 1930s, which were understood to be—quite literally—the future in the process of becoming in the present.22 The arts were meant to model and embody this mode of perception by portraying the radiant future in the process of its development, a call that was clearly articulated by Stalin’s head of ideology in the 1930s, Andrei Zhdanov, when he addressed the first Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934: “Comrade Stalin has called our writers engineers of human souls. What does this mean? What requirements does this title impose on you? It means, first of all, to know life in order to be able to depict it correctly in artistic works, to depict it not scholastically, not lifelessly, not simply as ‘objective reality,’ but rather to depict reality in its revolutionary development.”23 This brief quote contains two of the paradigmatic phrases of the Soviets’ administration of cultural life, Stalin’s dictum about writers as the “engineers of human souls” and Zhdanov’s formulation of the requirement that the arts “depict reality in its revolutionary development.” Zhdanov continued by articulating the assumption that underpinned the Bolsheviks’ sense of the fundamentally important role of the arts in socialist society: “Consequently, the truthfulness and historical concreteness of artistic depiction should be combined with the task of the ideological reworking and education of the toiling people in the spirit of socialism. This method of literature and literary criticism is what we call the method of socialist realism.”24 By definition, from the very beginning, socialist realism was thus imbued with a fundamentally pedagogical purpose of mass significance. The importance of socialist realism’s pedagogical purpose to the regime meant that the ideas that were supposed to guide actual artistic production attracted constant attention from artists and periodic notice from party officials and government bureaucrats. These ideas were never well codified in any artistic field; instead, they developed over time through the elaboration of a series of positive and negative models. In literature, for example, socialist realism was eventually exemplified by a “positive hero” wending through a “master plot” that depicted the fundamental transitions of a Marxist-Leninist view of history as applied to the novel’s subject matter. How exactly writers crafted their novels changed over time, but positive hero, master plot, and what was called “contemporary reality” would remain essential components.25 Painting was meant to be representational at the very least; it was also supposed to depict heroic, optimistic, positive themes.26

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In music, an accessible musical language was expected to express optimistic themes with triumphant or heroic conclusions. Structural or harmonic complexity and introspective or tragic themes were much less desirable. The gradual fusion of traditionally “serious” art music with traditionally “light” folk or other popular music forms was perhaps the most essential trait of ideal Soviet music, a point made explicitly in one of the most popular films of the 1930s, the musical comedy Volga,Volga.27 Despite these vague guidelines, the assessment of artistic production, especially music, was always primarily a professional affair and seldom a matter for party elites. When politicians did intervene in ongoing artistic discussions, it was generally through harsh criticism of failed models in the press or Central Committee resolutions.28 Whatever its ever-changing artistic parameters, and whoever determined acceptability within those parameters, the intended purpose of socialist realism and the justification for devoting so many resources and such high-level attention to it were, to reiterate Stalin’s axiom, “to engineer human souls.” Soviet culture was an essential tool for building a socialist society and the population that would inhabit it. It was meant to mold the worldviews of those who consumed it, at home and abroad. Though composers, playwrights, writers, poets, and artists were exhorted to produce work that appealed to a general audience, the actual preferences of those audiences were not decisive, even in the rare instances when they were actually consulted. Nevertheless, there is a great deal of evidence that Soviet culture did serve this intended purpose domestically, molding Soviet citizens’ views of the world around them and their own place in it.29 Even after the restrictions of the narrowest interpretations of socialist realism’s artistic ideals faded during the Khru­ shchevian Thaw, the didactic function of culture in the Soviet system remained to the very end. Another essential component of Soviet culture developed according to what Katerina Clark has called a “Great Appropriation”: “In building up its own image, Moscow appropriated both laterally (absorbing contemporary trends in other countries, primarily western European, but also American) and diachronically (appropriating Great Russian and European culture of the past).”30 This appropriated culture was taken on so thoroughly that it contributed an important and prominent component of what Vadim Volkov has called the “common cultural horizon” against which Soviet citizens determined whether or not they could consider themselves “cultured” individuals.31 “Culturedness” (kul'turnost' ) was a central positive value from at least the 1930s on, and a command of appropriated classics was essential to demonstrating it. Appropriation required the translation of literary works and both the performance and the interpretation of musical ones. Translating, performing, and interpreting the classics allowed Soviet culture to expand

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its canon to include Pushkin and Shakespeare, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, even Wagner.32 This expansion and appropriation necessitated displaying and projecting the results, especially to Western intellectuals and eventually to broad Western audiences as well. Display and projection, in turn, transformed Soviet culture. Even in the early 1920s, the Bolsheviks had already begun to develop and institutionalize an elaborate system of cultural diplomacy directed primarily at the West (both the United States and Western and Central Europe, in different keys). Early Soviet cultural diplomacy sought to convince practitioners and audiences alike of the fundamental superiority of the Soviet system, a process that Michael David-Fox has shown entailed altering “not merely the views but also the world views” of the Soviets’ interlocutors.33 The work of cultural diplomacy was often carried out by Soviet artists and other intellectuals, who were mobilized to work with leading foreign intellectuals and, eventually, to appeal to broader intellectual audiences abroad.34 The encounter with Western intellectuals, the cultural heritage that they represented, and their reactions during visits to the Soviet Union shaped the early development of Soviet society in at least two main ways. First, the insistence on Soviet superiority both derived from and reinforced Soviet society’s profoundly hierarchical view of the world. Convincing Western visitors of that superiority contributed to the emergence of the socialist realist mode of perception itself. As David-Fox explains, “many early guides, with their methods of ‘cultural show,’ were involved in an effort not merely to pull the wool over foreigners’ eyes, but to change or convert them. They tried to inculcate a mode of looking at the heritage of the past and the promise of the future that became relevant, even decisive, for Communists and Soviet citizens too.”35 Second, the instrumental co-opting of the Soviet intelligentsia that cultural diplomacy required contributed to a larger rapprochement between the Bolsheviks and the intelligentsia. At the moment that the intelligentsia was subjected to the discipline of emerging Stalinist systems of control in the early 1930s, the party assimilated intelligentsia values.36 The resulting arrangement organized intellectual labor in institutions that were dominated by the party and state even while they remained juridically distinct. This arrangement afforded the Soviet creative intelligentsia an influential, constructive role in Soviet society and a great deal of maneuverability.37 Both Clark’s “Great Appropriation” and David-Fox’s “cultural show” undergirded a claim that the Soviet Union was the most advanced global center of culture in the Western tradition. This claim is key to my characterization of the Soviet system after the war as a cultural empire.38 Already by the mid-1930s, Soviet politicians (bombastically) and intellectuals (somewhat

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more tenuously) had posited the Soviet Union as the center of European culture. They did so as part of, in Katerina Clark’s words, a “drive for greatness” based on a “determination to preside over culture and create a great culture both as the backbone of the system and guarantee of that greatness.”39 The “great culture” with which the Soviets confronted the postwar world combined socialist realism and the appropriated classics in a fusion that sought to democratize a common (Western) cultural heritage by making it more accessible to general audiences (regardless of the taste of those audiences). The Soviets claimed that this democratized cultural fusion was superior to both the banal standardization of commercial popular culture generated by the West (of which Hollywood was the epitome) and the inaccessibly complicated academicism of high modernism (for example, abstract expressionism and the musical serialism of the Darmstadt Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik). Cultural production was thus at the heart of the Soviet Union’s imperial ambitions from the start. After the war, and especially in the 1950s, the Soviets created or reinvigorated institutions that could realize those ambitions, first through the absorption of Eastern Europe into the Soviet cultural empire and then in mainly post-Stalin efforts to project influence into the West and eventually the developing world. Though this ambition was already well entrenched in Soviet cultural diplomacy, propaganda, and ideology before the war, it was not until after the war—or even the late 1950s—that the Soviets had the relative power to try to bring their global aspirations to fruition. They sought to do so through an expansion of cultural diplomacy and closely related “soft power.” The term “soft power” was coined and popularized by Joseph Nye to refer to the plethora of practices that states—in his case, the United States—have used to attract supporters abroad.40 Nye juxtaposes “soft power” with the “hard power” that coerces compliance in the international arena. As the architectural historian Greg Castillo notes, “Unlike hard power, which is concentrated in the hands of those at the source, soft power is dispersed and malleable. The allure of effective soft power lies in its capacity for requisition and reuse by foreign recipients to advance their own interests, but in ways that ultimately benefit the donor nation.”41 Culture is perhaps the most important sphere in which soft power can operate, so deploying it depends in large part on “cultural diplomacy,” a set of practices that states undertake to develop and distribute cultural products that are internationally identifiable as characteristic of that state’s ideal self-presentation.42 Soft power is the uncontrolled result of successful cultural diplomacy. During the Cold War, the United States and Soviet Union deployed both hard and soft power in support of their respective imperial projects.43 Indeed,

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the work of prominent advocates of U.S. cultural diplomacy and soft power since the end of the Cold War suggests that cultural diplomacy as a major component of the clash of empires was, in fact, peculiar to the Cold War. Displaying exemplary Soviet culture through cultural diplomacy in hopes that its ideals would be adopted was critical to constructing the Soviet cultural empire, but when the Soviet Union collapsed, its robust cultural diplomacy did as well. As the Cold War faded, so did both U.S. cultural diplomacy and the effectiveness of what its proponents considered its key soft power constituents.44 Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, American-style culture has become even more nearly globally ubiquitous, but local reuse of those cultural forms no longer necessarily supports U.S. ends. Similarly, U.S. successes even in Western Europe increasingly seem to have been a product of the Cold War’s clash of empires rather than a permanently enduring component of the transatlantic relationship.45 It could well be that this peculiarity is directly related to the centrality of culture in the Soviet imperial project. Faced with Soviet successes on the cultural front, the Americans were forced to respond in kind. The exchange of intellectuals—especially visitors to the Soviet Union—had been key to the Soviet effort in the 1920s and 1930s. Virtuosi performing abroad would be key to the expanded effort during the cultural Cold War.46 In music, the twinned claims of Soviet cultural superiority and global centrality depended on Soviet musicians’ mastery and virtuosic display both of nineteenth-century European and Russian classics familiar in the West and of new Soviet compositions. During each of their initial Western tours, Soviet virtuosi performed a mix of standards of the Western classical repertoire (like the Brahms violin concerto or Beethoven piano concerti), familiar Russian classics (typically a Tchaikovsky or, for pianists, a Rachmaninoff concerto), and new works—often national premieres—by the Soviet composers who were most familiar to Western audiences (Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and very few others). This programming strategy encompassed a two-part argument for Soviet superiority. The first part depended on the appropriated classics, which provided a familiar basis for typically favorable comparisons to Western virtuosi and thereby helped establish Soviet culture’s bona fides to potentially skeptical audiences. Similarly, mastery of the classical repertoire was crucial to the success of international music contestants. The premier instrumental music competition in the world, the Soviets’ own International Tchaikovsky Competition, was designed both to claim the world’s most popular Russian composer of the imperial era as their own and to provide a stage for Soviet musicians to exhibit their superiority. The appropriated classics, Western and Russian alike, were thus essential for demonstrating Soviet

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musical accomplishments because they constituted a familiar, shared culture with the West and a ready measure of comparative excellence. The second part of the claim for Soviet superiority contained in the concert programs of touring virtuosi depended on works by Soviet composers. New Soviet works were implicitly presented as evidence that the Soviets were better at developing the common classical heritage because they were doing so in a way that was accessible to “cultured” audiences everywhere. These performances were meant to show that Soviet culture avoided both the banality of commercialized Western popular music and the overly individualistic academicism of avant-garde modernism.47 Soviet compositions in traditional art music forms, like the Shostakovich concerti, were presented as models that best bridged the gap between the shared classical heritage and a healthy modern culture. The programming of the tours thus posited the Soviet Union as the global center of music in the Western tradition and Soviet noncommercialized art as the best inheritor of that tradition. Music was not, of course, the only cultural field on which the Soviets sought to compete with the West, but it was perhaps the most important during the early Cold War because of its role in explicit formal competition. The Soviet system proved particularly good at preparing contestants, identifying gifted youths at a young age, providing them with rigorous technical training, and honing their skills in high-stakes domestic competitions. The successes of these contestants opened the door for the expansion of other forms of cultural competition later on. International music competitions had close analogues in the sporting world, from the development of a powerful Soviet Olympic movement after the war to the Soviets’ utter domination of international chess competitions.48 In both music and Olympic sport, Soviet competitive engagement with the West entailed adapting to Western-dominated international standards and attempting to manipulate them. In both, the result contributed to globalization. For example, the Soviets had developed an extensive system of workers’ sporting clubs that were meant to be the cornerstone of an international antibourgeois sporting system. After the war, they abandoned that system, choosing instead to integrate into the international system of Olympic committees and international sports federations.49 Once Soviet representatives entered this international system, they pushed for fundamental changes in the way that it operated, opening it up to influence from the Soviet cultural empire and seeking to extend it to the developing, postcolonial world. The “democratization” of Olympic institutions under Soviet pressure transformed the Olympic movement from an aristocratic phenomenon to a truly global one.50 The Soviets also adapted their own sports training system to

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accommodate the appearance of amateurism that Olympic ideals required, encouraged the creation of similarly structured systems in the empire, and innovated practices (like doping) that subverted Olympic ideals but would eventually become widespread (if always scandalous).51 By 1956, just the second Summer Olympics in which they competed, the Soviets already dominated the Games, surpassing even the Americans in medal counts during almost every Olympics until the collapse of the Soviet Union.52 In other fields, cultural competition with the West moved at a slower pace. For example, the Soviets did not win a major award at the Cannes International Film Festival until 1958, and direct Soviet-American film exchanges began only in 1959–1960. Even once Soviet Cold War films did begin circulating more widely internationally, the most globally influential Soviet films still came from the avant-garde of the 1920s, a strain that had been effectively abandoned within the Soviet Union itself by the 1930s.53 In the end, Hollywood’s cinematic diversity proved much more internationally successful than its typically tightly constrained, more carefully ideological Soviet counterpart.54 Musicians and music together thus provide a valuable lens to examine the imperial competition of the cultural Cold War because they typify some essentials of the Soviet cultural empire and its engagement with the West and represent atypical but definitive examples of others. The competitive success of Soviet musicians abroad, for example, was atypical but definitive. Matched only by chess players and some Olympic athletes, it nevertheless provided confirmation of Soviet leaders’ belief in the historical superiority of the Soviet system. Of the arts, music was the most intelligible across cultural, national, and imperial borders. At the same time, musicians were typical members of the Soviet intelligentsia, privileged elites simultaneously constrained and enabled by their proximity to power. Music typified the instrumental, pedagogical function of the arts in an “aestheticized” Soviet society, and the fusion of socialist realism and appropriated classics typified the Soviet claim to a sophisticated arts culture that was accessible to the masses. In a larger sense, musical engagement with the West revealed a typical dynamic of the cultural Cold War, the interaction of competition and integration. Examining the case of music suggests that Soviet culture was especially successful in the West when it excelled according to standards of value that pertained there. That success, in turn, led some Westerners to adopt and adapt select Soviet values and practices, partially realizing Soviet goals of expanding global influence and transformation. But only partially. The result of that adoption and adaptation was not Sovietization (as it was within the Soviet empire, for example), but gradual standardization and eventual globalization.

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For the mutual appropriation of the Cold War to move toward globalization, the Soviets had to integrate into legal and economic systems that were designed and dominated by the Americans. In the long run, the result of the dynamic interaction of competition and integration would turn out to be a dominant American empire that nevertheless exhibits signs of the Soviet contributions to globalization even decades after the Soviet project failed.

Structure of the Book Understanding competition and integration is thus key to explaining how the clash between two modern imperial projects, each pursuing the dictates of its own universalizing ideology and attempting to incorporate the world into its own cultural empire, resulted in a globalization dominated by one but bearing the marks of the other. The chapters that follow investigate three separate topics, revealing that a consistent pattern in the dynamic relationship between competition and integration repeated itself in all three areas. Striking Soviet successes in specific engagements consistently masked the gradual, long-term integration of the Soviet Union into the U.S.-dominated global system. This study spans about a decade, from shortly after the end of World War II until 1958. The war was an exceptional period of desperate, existential struggle for the Soviet Union. Artistic production and cultural exchange were integral parts of that struggle.55 But after its conclusion, Stalin launched a series of overlapping campaigns—known as Zhdanovshchina and anticosmopolitanism—to reinstill ideological discipline. One of the main cornerstones of these campaigns was an attack on real and perceived Western influence, especially in the arts and scholarship. Their ugliest aspect was an antisemitic attack that began with the destruction of one of the most effective wartime exchange organizations, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, and the eventual execution or murder of its prominent members.56 By 1949, the anticosmopolitanism campaign had come to be defined primarily by its attack on Western influence and an intentional but unacknowledged campaign against Soviet Jews in cultural organizations. Viewed from the perspective of these domestic developments, the late Stalin period was an inauspicious moment for cultural exchange with the West. But the disciplinary campaigns at home coincided with the construction of an empire in Eastern Europe.57 Despite the xenophobia of Zhdanovshchina and anticosmopolitanism, cultural exchange abroad expanded rapidly at the end of the 1940s, and the dynamic interaction between competition and integration with the West had already begun. By the time Stalin died in

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1953, a transition from xenophobia to overconfident projection of influence abroad was underway. In 1958, two major developments marked the end of a transition from the cautious beginnings of transimperial engagement in the late 1940s to a regular, institutionalized system of competition and integration. In January, the United States and Soviet Union signed an official, bilateral cultural exchange agreement, the “Agreement between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on Exchanges in the Cultural, Technical, and Educational Fields.” Conventionally known as the Lacy-Zarubin Agreement after the chief negotiators from each side, it codified and normalized the cultural exchange practices that had developed over the course of the 1950s, beginning a period in which regularized exchange between the superpowers was the norm.58 The other major shift was the maturation of the international music performance system that occurred in 1958 when the Soviets hosted their own competition, the International Tchaikovsky Competition. Nineteen fifty-eight thus marked the end point of a period of flux and the beginning of a new era of more stable cultural competition. Chapter 1 explores the Soviet manipulation of international copyright law regarding an American film studio’s fair use of music written by Soviet composers in an anti-Soviet film. At issue was the use of music written by Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Khachaturian in what American film scholars consider the first Hollywood Cold War film, William Wellman’s The Iron Curtain. Soviet objections to the use of the music in the film eventually resulted in two court fights, one in New York and the other in Paris. In both cases, since the Soviet Union was not a signatory to international copyright treaties in effect in the West, the legal issue at stake was the “author’s moral rights.” Though the Soviet effort to stop the release of the film in the United States not surprisingly failed, a strategic adjustment that included assigning distribution rights in Europe to a French publisher resulted in a major Soviet victory when the film was shut down in Paris and subsequent distribution in Europe ceased. But to win that victory, the Soviets had to participate directly in the international legal system of the West, which was ultimately dominated by the United States. The next two chapters explore the system of international music competitions that blossomed from scant prewar beginnings into a pervasive system by 1958. Soviet violinists, pianists, and cellists were famously successful in these competitions, almost always winning them and sometimes displaying stunning dominance by sweeping all or almost all the top spots. In chapter 2, I examine Soviet attitudes toward these competitions and consider how they thought about their rules, their juries, their contestants, and their likely

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outcomes, arguing that Soviet assumptions of superiority led them to call for “objective” judging, which they understood should mean Soviet success. They chose their competitions carefully throughout the 1940s and 1950s while building systems of education, preparation, and reward that made international music competitions an integral part—and a measure—of the domestic Soviet music education and concertizing systems. Chapter 3 focuses on the long-term initiative to create the ultimate international music competition in Moscow. It tells the hitherto unknown tale of an ill-fated Moscow Musical Holiday, proposed in the late Stalin period as an impossibly grand musical festival that would have posited Moscow as the center of global musical culture. When the original proposal’s grandiose vision collided with Soviet financial realities, it was pared down to its core, the International Tchaikovsky Competition. Chapter 3 also enriches our understanding of one of the most famous events of the cultural Cold War, the young Van Cliburn’s triumph in the piano division of the first Tchaikovsky Competition. It traces Soviet officials’ reaction to Van Cliburn’s win, revealing that Soviet officialdom was pleased with the result, and though they undertook reforms of the Soviet music training system to ensure that American victories were not oft repeated, their reaction demonstrates that the Soviet leadership had become so confident of cultural superiority that temporary setbacks were understood as opportunities to display a gracious cultural magnanimity. That confidence, even overconfidence, led the Soviet leadership to overestimate the comparative strength of the Soviet system, with results that would eventually prove disastrous. Though the weight of chapters 2 and 3 is obviously on competition, competition begat integration as setting mandatory repertoire and standardizing judging procedures led to a convergence in performance styles. Whereas the other two major areas demonstrate Soviet integration into Western systems, the stylistic convergence that resulted from international music competitions favored the Soviet soloist style of technical brilliance and precision. The system survived the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the Soviet legacy thus remains an essential characteristic of the global expectations of music competitors. Chapters 4 and 5 analyze the international touring activity of Soviet virtuosi in the West. Here again, highly visible Soviet successes masked a fundamental integration into Western norms and systems, this time financial. Chapter 4 juxtaposes the stunningly successful international mobility of the violinist David Oistrakh with the devastating immobility (to the end of the period covered by this book at least) of the pianist Stanislav Richter. Chasing Oistrakh around the world up through his first triumphant tour of the

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United States in late 1955 and early 1956 reveals that sending their superstars abroad allowed the Soviets to demonstrate one of the most compelling strengths of their system. But I argue that the potential propaganda benefits of displaying that excellence were undercut by a perpetual obsession with control. Tracing how secret police opposition continually thwarted attempts by the Ministry of Culture to send Richter to the West sheds light on one of the most famous aspects of that notorious KGB control over international tours. Examining the relationship between touring and making collaborative recordings also suggests that the transimperial tours further facilitated the ongoing global standardization of orchestral sound. Chapter 5 analyzes the Soviet encounter with the paradigmatic cultural facilitator of the mid-century Western cultural production system, the impresario. Soon after their artists began touring the West, Soviet policy makers realized that the Western impresarios, cultural entrepreneurs operating in a market economy, organized much more successful exchanges than did the system of international cultural diffusion the Soviets had developed within their own empire. The eventual decision to entrust tours to impresarios instead of, for example, old networks of friendship societies in the West resulted in more successful tours but also in outright integration into the U.S.-dominated global economy of music production and diffusion. It was the impresarios’ entrepreneurial pursuit of private material interest combined with genuine excitement about presenting outstanding examples of Soviet artistry in their own societies that often proved the impetus for specific transimperial exchanges. Once Soviet cultural bureaucrats identified reliable impresarios, such as Sol Hurok in the United States, they adapted quite quickly to maximize the propaganda and financial advantages of those partnerships. In a very material sense, the transimperial exchange of musicians created a short term win-win situation even as it required the Soviets to integrate into the U.S.-dominated global capitalist economy. Taken together, these case studies demonstrate that the Soviets were overwhelmingly successful in their competitive musical engagement with the United States. They accepted the terms of competition offered by the West and out-performed their Western counterparts in the resulting contests. But accepting those terms in field after field, arena after arena, gradually led to Soviet integration into the global legal and economic systems dominated by the United States. Prominent successes systematically masked an integration that would eventually give way to submersion when the Soviet Union collapsed three decades later. A brief epilogue concludes the book by tracing the dynamic relationship between competition and integration into fields that became more prevalent in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s and in which

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American success was much more immediately apparent: comparative economic development and popular culture. It suggests that accepting the terms of competition set by the United States and failing to deliver on the expectations that the competition generated at home eventually presaged the collapse of the Soviet Union and the absorption of its successor states into the hegemonic U.S. empire of “globalization” by century’s end.

Ch a p ter 1

Shostakovich and The Iron Curtain Intellectual Property and Transimperial Integration

On 12 May 1948, New York moviegoers picked their way through crowds of protestors and counter-demonstrators to take in a new film announced as a “semi-documentary spy drama,” William A. Wellman’s The Iron Curtain. As the demonstrators outside came to blows and a few of them were hauled away by police, the film’s audience settled in to what contemporaries trying to present an evenhanded account called a slowly moving drama, “competent enough, carefully photographed and directed.” Based on events that took place in Ottawa in 1945, much of the cloak-anddagger story was shot on location in the Canadian capital.1 It centered on the activities of Igor Gouzenko (played by Dana Andrews), a Soviet cipher clerk stationed in Ottawa who defected to Canada in 1945, taking with him a sheaf of documents that revealed Soviet espionage activities and the participation of Canadians in efforts to uncover the secret of the atom bomb.2 Observant members of that first New York audience would have recognized—or would soon come to recognize—a number of tropes common to North American portrayals of the Soviet Union and the cultural clash between the West and the Soviet Union. They would not have been surprised to see the seductive call of capitalism’s material comforts reach Gouzenko’s wife (played by Gene Tierney) in a continuation of a theme that stretched back to one of Hollywood’s first portrayals of Soviets in the West, Ninotchka (Ernst Lubitsch, 1939). They would see it again in a more 20

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dazzling remake, Silk Stockings (Rouben Moulian, 1957), and in countless other Cold War films. Certainly the alcoholic and depressed army officer ominously recalled to Moscow would have struck familiar chords.3 And the film’s dark, shadowy, claustrophobic cinematography was fast becoming a trademark of Twentieth-Century Fox’s crime-thriller collaborations with the FBI, not to mention stock-in-trade for portrayals of the cold, bleak home of communism.4 Perhaps less commonplace was the film’s soundtrack. Arranged and conducted by Alfred Newman, the score consisted largely of music written by the Soviet Union’s most internationally renowned composers: Dmitrii Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, Aram Khachaturian, and Nikolai Miaskovsky. In otherwise bland reviews of the film, the music stood out.5 Otherwise, the film appears to have paled in comparison to the events it docu-dramatized and the struggles over whether it could be shown to the public, first in the United States, then in the rest of the world. Immediately after his defection, the real-life Gouzenko needed nearly forty hours to convince the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that his story—and the documents he carried with him—were authentic. His defection was the first from a Soviet embassy and the first of any sort after the war. It caused an international media sensation, resulted in twenty Canadian espionage trials and a dozen convictions, gave impetus to J. Edgar Hoover’s attack on American leftists, and was later credited with nothing less than starting the Cold War.6 Gouzenko himself went into hiding under an assumed name near Toronto, occasionally making public appearances in a dramatic hood to conceal his appearance. By 1948, he published an account of his defection and collaborated on the film script for Twentieth-Century Fox.7 Gouzenko’s personal story is a dramatic one in which The Iron Curtain plays only a small role. The few film historians who have concentrated on The Iron Curtain have hailed it as “Hollywood’s first Cold War movie” and a “premature anti-communist film,” arguing for fresh evaluations of its place in the history of Hollywood’s political engagement in the struggle against the Soviet Union and suggesting that the history of its overseas reception indicates the extent to which government officials in Washington sought to mold international taste according to their political agenda.8 While the film is certainly important in these contexts, Soviet reactions to the film reveal just as much about Soviet strategies of cultural confrontation in the early Cold War. This chapter analyzes one particular strategy that the Soviets devised and deployed to fight The Iron Curtain. The strategy was one among several, but it is particularly important for understanding the post-Cold War world because

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it suggests how significantly the cultural confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union shaped the development of the international economic, cultural, and legal system commonly attributed to post-1989 “globalization” by revealing Soviet participation—through competition—in the Western system from the very beginning of the Cold War.9 To wit, the echoes of The Iron Curtain affair can be heard in areas as diverse as the nascent development of jurisprudence regulating content on the Internet, the success of universal copyright conventions, and the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. The development of the Soviet strategy for cultural confrontation that was deployed against The Iron Curtain, first in the United States and then in Europe, reveals a surprising reliance on non-Soviet representatives abroad for the interpretation of the terms of cultural conflict, a high degree of practical flexibility in the pursuit of ideological goals, and a hubristic willingness to engage the West in the West’s own terms. The Iron Curtain affair demonstrates that Soviet strategies of engagement were crafted largely through the agency of low-ranking Soviet officials and friends from abroad, and they often proved successful in the short term and in the arena of high artistic culture. But that visible success, here as elsewhere, masked a quieter but eventually more consequential integration into the U.S.-dominated global regime. Accepting the West’s terms of conflict eventually proved fatal.

Terms of Engagement: Soviet Institutions, Helen Black, and Initial Opposition to The Iron Curtain Soviet officials and representatives had ideological objections to The Iron Curtain: it was an anti-Soviet film. They opposed it with political activism, organizing demonstrations against the film in virtually every country in which Twentieth-Century Fox showed it. But the eventually successful Soviet strategy to suppress the film did not depend on these demonstrations. Instead, it hinged on the legal and moral status of the film’s use of music written by Soviet composers. Though the composers were credited in the film, their permission—not surprisingly—had never been secured and surely would have been denied. Representatives of the Soviet Union abroad and Soviet apparatchiki in Moscow sought to suppress the film on the basis of its appropriation of Soviet music. In the United States, these efforts were initially spearheaded by one Helen Black. Soon after Soviet officials learned of the film, Black began directing the first efforts to prevent its release. When those efforts failed, she interpreted for her contacts in Moscow the terms of engagement for this early Cold War cultural struggle and crucially helped to shape Soviet strategy.

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In 1948 and 1949, Black worked for an institution known in the United States as Preslit Literary Agency, Moscow, and in Moscow as Litmuzagentstvo, an affiliate of the All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad (VOKS).10 She imported and distributed literary and musical works supplied to her by VOKS, constituting one of the main conduits into the United States of Soviet artistic production. Black had long been an active proponent of art infused with leftist political ideology, whether or not it was directly connected to the Soviet Union. In the 1920s and early 1930s, she was an active organizer of the leftist literary journal The New Masses, she translated Soviet literature for dissemination in the United States, and she demonstrated interest in populist musical forms. In fact, she apparently wrote the piano accompaniments in one of the first widely distributed songbooks of so-called “cowboy music,” folk music of the American West.11 That Black could play such a crucial role in shaping Soviet opposition to the film was a result of the fact that Soviet institutions of cultural diplomacy in the West were underdeveloped and perpetually starved for resources. In the postwar 1940s, the two institutions that were charged with managing cultural exchange abroad were VOKS and the Soviet government’s Committee on Artistic Affairs. In the West, VOKS typically took the lead and depended on the Committee on Artistic Affairs to provide information about Soviet artists and, increasingly during the late 1940s and early 1950s, to suggest candidates for exchanges and provide logistical support. These institutions’ collaborative activities were supposed to be coordinated with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its overseas diplomatic corps and staff. The whole cultural exchange operation was overseen by an ever-mutating cultural oversight department within the bureaucratic apparatus of the Communist Party Central Committee and, ultimately, the Politburo, which approved virtually every foreign trip throughout the Stalin period and beyond. VOKS was founded in 1925, and over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, it established itself as the most important institution of Soviet cultural diplomacy, concentrating its efforts on attracting “friends” among foreign intellectuals abroad, especially in Europe. It also provided an interface with a diverse range of societies of friends of the Soviet Union. But by the end of the 1930s, Stalin’s shifting priorities and the decimation of the intelligentsia and other Soviet elites with foreign connections abroad during the Great Terror had left VOKS a mere shell of its formerly robust self.12 After the war, VOKS’s raison d’être mutated from primarily cultivating friendly relations with prominent foreign intellectuals to mainly managing the rapidly expanding system of Soviet friendship societies. The nature and distribution of these friendship societies underwent a profound change in

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the postwar 1940s as they became crucial institutions of mass mobilization in the Soviet empire’s emerging East European periphery. A series of unsuccessful requests from the VOKS leadership to increase its number of staff in 1946 and 1947 illustrates the tremendous change in VOKS’s operating conditions after the war. The postwar VOKS leadership claimed that just before the war, VOKS supported a significant volume of cultural ties with only four or five countries. By the end of 1946, it was charged with working in fifty-four countries, coordinating the activities of sixty-two friendship societies with more than four thousand affiliates and almost two and a half million members, supporting regular ties of an additional one and a quarter thousand scholarly and cultural institutions, and managing relationships with nearly two thousand “of the greatest foreign cultural and community figures.” The VOKS institutional system within the Soviet Union was growing as well, with four societies for cultural ties abroad in national republics and a system of clubs for the entertainment of foreign sailors visiting Soviet ports. It attempted to meet these new responsibilities with a small staff and a few dedicated representatives stationed in Soviet embassies abroad.13 By the middle of 1946, it was clear to the VOKS leaders that they simply could not manage, even with a substantial budget increase that they had already received. They repeatedly requested a massive expansion in VOKS’s staff and available resources.14 Instead, in 1947, the VOKS budget was actually cut.15 VOKS’s decreased resources in the face of expanding responsibilities made it vulnerable to attacks from all the other cultural and diplomatic institutions with which it was intertwined. For example, in late 1946 and early 1947, the cultural attaché in the Soviet Embassy in Paris and a former vice consul who had been stationed in both New York and San Francisco each complained to the Central Committee that VOKS was not effectively managing cultural diplomacy in the country they knew. The former vice consul in the United States complained with particular energy, describing VOKS’s efforts as primitive, unsystematic, horribly slow, colorless, and out of touch with American realities.16 Similarly, the Committee on Artistic Affairs sent a delegation of two high-status music professors to Italy to investigate hiring Italian opera singers to teach at Soviet conservatories. These professors included in their final report a familiar complaint about VOKS: it sent few, completely random materials to Italy, three-quarters of which elicited no interest in Italian music circles that were otherwise prepared to be drawn to Soviet culture, thus squandering an opportunity to expand Soviet influence.17 Most damaging of all, the Central Committee oversight department conducted investigations of VOKS in 1947 and 1948, eventually recommending a change in leadership and reorganization of the institution.18 Even

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though it could sometimes counterattack, VOKS was being watched by the party leadership very closely.19 One of the ways that VOKS tried to cope with its poverty of resources while it was subjected to nearly constant criticism was to cultivate its foreign partners. Even though the bureaucratic apparatus that administered cultural diplomacy would change over the course of the next decade, Soviet officials would continue to depend on partners in the West to mediate between the Soviets and the various Western audiences they targeted. In the earliest days of the Cold War, those partners were still linked to VOKS-affiliated and Soviet-funded institutions, like Preslit’s Helen Black. In early April 1948, Black tried to prevent Twentieth-Century Fox from utilizing the music of Soviet composers in the film before its release. She sent urgent telegrams to VOKS starting on 13 April, one day after the New York Times reported Soviet objections to the film, but her contacts in Moscow struggled to decipher them.20 On 15 April 1948, the message finally got through: Black urgently required “a telegram signed by Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Miaskovsky, and Khachaturian . . . [saying] ‘we protest against the use of our music for the film The Iron Curtain and request that immediate steps be taken for its withdrawal.’ ” Black further noted, “in the absence of copyright protection, this telegram is absolutely indispensable for the continuation of efforts to prohibit the use of the music.” Unable to act on its own, the VOKS leadership sent Black’s request to the Communist Party Central Committee and awaited instructions about what to do.21 Twentieth-Century Fox worked faster than the Central Committee’s cultural oversight apparatus. Black sent increasingly curt requests, ending with another urgent telegram on 23 April, this time indicating some irritation that her earlier request had not been fulfilled. She explained that her organization had neither given permission to use Soviet music in The Iron Curtain nor received any money when the music was used anyway. She concluded with some advice and a complaint: “We assume [Fox has] the possibility to turn to ‘Anglo-Soviet Music Press’ with a request for a contract for England and so we urgently advise [you] to warn them about the proposal. The fact that you did not send the requested telegram has made it very difficult for us. Black.”22 Black’s irritated tone when addressing leaders in Moscow is strikingly dissimilar from that typical of bureaucrats in the Central Committee apparatus or domestic cultural institutions. That she adopted it suggests that in 1948 at least, non-Soviet citizens representing the Soviet Union’s cultural interests in their own countries were not acculturated in the manners and practices of Soviet domestic cultural politics. It gives the impression that early in

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the Cold War, leaders in Moscow had less control over their representatives abroad than we might suppose.23 In fact, this lack of control extended beyond oddity of tone. In 1948, an investigation of VOKS revealed an “abnormal” situation: “the initiative in matters of cultural collaboration is in the hands of foreigners, and not VOKS.”24 This general reliance on foreign partners had important ramifications for the response to The Iron Curtain. Black eventually tutored Soviet officialdom on how to engage the West in general—and U.S. film studios in particular—in international cultural competition. The day after that first New York showing of the film, she penned a final letter explaining her efforts to prevent Twentieth-Century Fox from using Soviet composers’ music.25 Black apparently undertook that effort entirely on her own, without instruction or even (irritatingly for her) support from Moscow. She only explained her activities to Moscow after this first fight was lost. According to Black, Hollywood film studios regularly utilized published music by employing agents to hunt down music to fit specific cinematic purposes. Very occasionally, the agents’ jobs were simplified when the studio already had specific pieces in mind, as with The Iron Curtain. The normal practice for acquiring the rights to such music entailed contacting the music’s publisher and negotiating terms of compensation for its use. The publisher would grant the studio a “patent” to use specific excerpts and collect the payment. In the case of The Iron Curtain, a Twentieth-Century Fox music acquisition agent contacted Leeds, a large music publisher, sometime in late 1947 or early 1948 to negotiate terms to use significant excerpts from several Soviet composers’ works for a new, unnamed film project.26 Black had earlier concluded a music distribution agreement with Leeds, so from her perspective this was indeed the proper channel. Based on the agent’s description, Leeds proposed a hypothetical sum of $10,000 for the “patent,” a sum that Fox rejected, noting that the absence of bilateral copyright agreements between the Soviet Union and United States meant that Soviet music was not protected by U.S. copyright law. Since the music was legally in the public domain and could be acquired elsewhere, Fox countered with an offer of $3,000.27 No agreement was made. When Black later ascertained the nature of the film in which the music would sound, she informed Leeds that she was sure Soviet composers would object to this use of their music. Not wanting to appear driven by “political” motivations, Leeds requested from Black a telegram from the composers stating their opposition. The telegram was to counter Fox’s claims in the American press that it had an agreement with Leeds and paid to use the music (Fox reported agreeing to the $10,000 sum, which Leeds—and Black—continued

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to deny).28 Black again expressed her annoyance at not having received the requested telegram. Having heard from Fox that it intended to use the music with or without the “patent” from Leeds, Black hired a Hollywood lawyer to evaluate Fox’s legal claims. She was informed that Fox was probably right; however, Fox approached Leeds with another offer for the patent, this time for $12,000. Black’s lawyer indicated that the studio appeared to be nervous, not about the film’s U.S. release but about its prospects overseas. In fact, a Fox lawyer apparently informed the head of the Fox studios that though their case was strong in legal terms, practical application of the legal theory even in the United States was not assured.29 Leeds declined to provide the “patent,” but the film was released anyway. Black noted that the use of Soviet music in American film could only truly be controlled through a reciprocal copyright agreement with the U.S. government. An intermediary possibility—an institution-to-institution agreement between the Soviet Composers’ Union and the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP)—might provide Soviet composers with some legal protections and an ally. This solution was unrealistic, though, because the Soviet Union did not pay royalties to ASCAP composers when their music was used in the USSR. ASCAP was therefore leery about concluding any such agreement.30 At this point, Black’s active role in Soviet efforts to suppress The Iron Curtain apparently ended. She had not prevented Twentieth-Century Fox from utilizing the music, thwarted by the slow-moving Soviet bureaucracy’s inability to produce her requested telegram and—more decisively—by Fox’s confidence in its legal standing. The Black episode demonstrates that in 1948, cultural competition between the superpowers that took place in the United States was carried out largely by Americans. Those Americans who represented Soviet interests did so not as manipulated agents of a ubiquitous Soviet apparatus but rather as ideologically committed but self-sufficient individuals. Black directed the struggle against The Iron Curtain without the support of her Soviet contacts and without the benefit of a concerted cultural strategy. In fact, as we shall see, her explanatory letter played a crucial role in changing Soviet strategy to combat the film more successfully in Europe.

The First Legal Challenge: Charles Recht and Shostakovich et al v. Twentieth-Century Fox In the United States, Soviet opposition to The Iron Curtain after its release switched to the official diplomatic establishment, the Ministry of Foreign

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Affairs, and its efforts to fight the film in U.S. courts. The Soviet position was argued by an American with long-standing ties to the Soviet Union, Charles Recht. Recht’s legal strategy and the eventual judgment placed The Iron Curtain and the composers whose music it appropriated at the center of a long-term development with global significance: the international legal standardization of intellectual property rights and the global diffusion of artistic production. Evidence that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs took control of the struggle to suppress The Iron Curtain after Black’s failure is twofold: the document trail containing Black’s reports eventually ended at the ministry, and Charles Recht represented the interests of the composers in the subsequent legal fight. The Czech-born Recht was a prominent advocate for World War I-era pacifists and radicals. More to the point, he was an attorney for the Soviet government and the unofficial diplomatic envoy of the Soviet Union in the United States from 1921 until U.S. recognition of the Soviet Union led to the establishment of formal diplomatic relations in 1933. Recht continued to represent Soviet institutions and individuals in U.S. courts until his death in 1965.31 Recht filed a four-part application for an injunction with the New York Supreme Court that was heard on 7 June 1948.32 First, he sought to prevent Twentieth-Century Fox from using Soviet composers’ names and music in the film and any advertising simply because they objected to such use. Second, he charged that by using Soviet-composed music in an anti-Soviet film, the studio had committed libel and violated U.S. civil rights law, so the music should be withdrawn and compensation awarded to the composers. Third and fourth, he accused the studio of “deliberate infliction of injury without just cause” and violation of the composers’ moral rights.33 Recht stipulated that the music was not protected by U.S. copyright law and was, therefore, in the public domain. However, he sought to show that The Iron Curtain was an anti-Soviet film and that using Shostakovich et al.’s music indicated their “ ‘approval,’ ‘endorsement,’ and ‘participation’ therein thereby casting upon them ‘the false imputation of being disloyal to their country.’ ” This argument hinged on the contention that using the composers’ music and identifying them as its composers in the credits “ ‘necessarily implies’ their consent, approval, or collaboration in the production and distribution of the picture because ‘the public at large knows that living composers receive payment for the use of their names and creations in films.’ ”34 The court found in favor of Twentieth-Century Fox, denying Recht’s motion “in all respects.” The court’s reasoning spelled out the status of several theoretical components of the U.S. system to provide legal protections for

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intellectual property and set the stage for a shift in Soviet cultural confrontation strategies—and opposition to the film. The decision hinged primarily on the fact that Soviet composers’ music was in the public domain. The court ruled that “the lack of copyright protection has long been held to permit others to use the names of authors in copying, publishing or compiling their works.” Following the precedent set by an earlier decision to allow sale of a dress copied from an original—but noncopyrighted—pattern, the presiding judge denied the motion to enjoin use of the composers’ names in the credits and marketing for the film.35 The issue of libel required a bit more of his attention. The judge recognized the hypothetical possibility that the court could, in a clear case of libel, grant injunctive relief to “restrain the publication of alleged libelous matter.” However, Recht’s arguments hinged on the contention that use of names and music “necessarily implies” collaboration. The judge rejected the “necessary implication” on the grounds that work in the public domain can be used without consulting its authors. Again, lack of copyright protection rendered charges of libel unwarranted.36 Finally, the judge took the last two points together, suggesting that the only possible “willful injury” the studio could have inflicted was to affiliate the composers with a “moving picture whose theme is objectionable to them in that it is unsympathetic to their political ideology.” Willful injury, according to this logic, led directly to the doctrine of moral right. The presiding judge suggested that the doctrine of moral right, if it existed at all in U.S. law, would apply only if the compositions had been distorted. They had not. Furthermore, notwithstanding the theoretical possibility of restraining reproduction of noncopyrighted work on the basis of the doctrine of moral right, the judge noted that in practice to do so would violate better-established American legal protections for those using work in the public domain.37 Lack of copyright protection was decisive again, but here, the implication of the judge’s ruling was that in a system of regulating intellectual property rights that privileged authors’ moral rights over the public’s access to works in the public domain, the opposite ruling could apply. When the decision was upheld on appeal in March 1949, the presiding judge’s logic was affirmed.38 This implication would prove momentous for the film’s fortunes abroad. Helen Black had indicated that Twentieth-Century Fox was unlikely to lose a legal fight with Soviet interests in the United States. It is no surprise that she was right. Soviet efforts to stop release of the film in the United States were bound to fail. Black’s efforts, however, reveal that in 1948 Soviet cultural officials relied on their contacts abroad not just to execute policies of cultural confrontation but to construct those policies and even to interpret

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the terms of engagement for them, in effect translating conditions in the West into policy recommendations. Charles Recht’s involvement articulated Soviet “moral” opposition to the use of its composers’ music in an ideologically anti-Soviet film. Recht may have lost the legal battle in the United States, but his arguments, the judge’s findings, and Black’s policy suggestions set the stage for a new struggle in Europe in which Soviet strategy changed to combine copyright protection, intellectual property rights and regulations, and a new agreement to disseminate its composers’ works abroad.

Changing Strategy: Chant du Monde and Le Rideau de Fer If Soviet opposition to The Iron Curtain in the United States proved ineffective, such was not to be the case in Europe, especially France. While the hopeless struggle was still being waged in U.S. courts, Soviet officials in Moscow and Paris adjusted their strategy. The new strategy responded to Helen Black’s recommendations and followed her suggestions to remedy the fatal flaw in the Soviet position in the United States: lack of copyright protection for Soviet musical works.39 In what must have been an almost immediate reaction to Helen Black’s last letter, the head of VOKS, Vladimir Kemenov, penned a proposal that constituted a change in Soviet strategy and sent it to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on 29 April 1948. Kemenov suggested transferring publication and distribution rights for Soviet music in France, its colonies, Italy, Switzerland, and Luxembourg to the French publishing house Chant du Monde. Chant du Monde was closely affiliated with the French Communist Party and an obvious ally for Soviet cultural interests in Western Europe. In fact, VOKS had first suggested allowing Chant du Monde to distribute music by Soviet composers in the Francophone world in the fall of 1947.40 That overture had failed, but when Kemenov brought the proposal before the Central Committee in April 1948, the justification for his proposal to transfer copyright to the French firm referred directly to The Iron Curtain: “Right now, this question has taken on an especially urgent and important character. Showings of the anti-Soviet film The Iron Curtain are planned for the immediate future in France. Since the music of Soviet composers has been used in this picture, it may be possible to suppress its exhibition, given an agreement with the firm Chant du Monde, about which we were informed by the representative of VOKS in France and the director of the firm, Jouvenel (a communist).”41 Kemenov concluded with a short proposal that sketched the general contours of an agreement with Chant du Monde.42 Kemenov thus made transfer of copyright the primary strategy for suppressing The Iron Curtain in France,

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and suppressing The Iron Curtain was the only justification for transferring copyright for Soviet music to a French publisher, a justification that apparently precluded even a detailed contract. Soviet actions in France, as in the United States, depended on a resident, non-Soviet intermediary, this “Jouvenel (a communist).” Renaud de Jouvenel was a journalist and, as Kemenov noted, director of the firm Chant du Monde. Like Helen Black, he was friendly to the Soviet Union and sympathetic to its cultural position. Unlike Helen Black, he was not already the main conduit for the distribution of Soviet artistic production in France. That post was filled by one Godunov, the unnamed VOKS representative noted above. Jouvenel stood to capitalize on a change in strategy that transferred Soviet composers’ intellectual property rights to a French firm—his. Like Black, he had the expertise but not the authority to suggest strategy. Even so, subsequent communications demonstrate that as the release of The Iron Curtain in France approached, Black’s strategic advice became more central to Kemenov’s policy justifications than Jouvenel’s self-interested assurances. When Kemenov appealed to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to approve his suggested change in strategy, the reaction was not the speedy permission to proceed for which he hoped. Instead, that reaction suggests that top officials exercised a high degree of caution when discussing even seemingly minor cultural agreements with foreign firms in the early Cold War. Throughout the 1940s, those Soviet intellectuals and bureaucrats who interacted with the West were subject to sharp and sometimes traumatic changes in the official interpretation of their activities as the wartime alliance slipped toward the decisive break that precipitated the Cold War. The most prominent example of this shifting ground and its potential consequences is provided by the so-called K-R Affair, the case of two cancer researchers, Nina Kliueva and Georgii Roskin. Kliueva and Roskin achieved a breakthrough in their research that suggested a potential cancer cure. In 1946, the propaganda value of a Soviet cancer cure was exceptionally high, especially since its lifesaving potential could be juxtaposed with the nearly unimaginable destructiveness of the pinnacle of contemporary American scientific development, the atomic bomb. Kliueva and Roskin—and other Soviet scientists—were encouraged by Stalin and his immediate circle to cultivate ties with their Western counterparts. They did. Then, in 1947, as the superpowers slid toward their Cold War confrontation, those very contacts became the basis of direct and public attack in an “honor court” trial in which the scientists were found guilty of “antipatriotic” behavior. They lost status, prestige, funding, and institutional appointments, and the bureaucrat who shared their research with American scientists was even arrested.43 The attack on Western influence accelerated

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again in January 1949 with the publication in Pravda of an article denouncing a group of mostly Jewish theater critics for kowtowing to the West, an event that launched the mainly antisemitic anticosmopolitanism campaign.44 This xenophobic context helps explain the extreme caution with which even top officials approached Kemenov’s effort to follow Black’s suggested policy shift. Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrei Vyshinsky had no objections in principle to Kemenov’s proposal. However, he did prevent Kemenov from acting quickly because of three technical objections, two of which distanced his diplomatic corps from participating in the proposal. The first objection was the most cursory and least significant: Kemenov should draft a complete contract proposal with specific terms before seeking higher governmental permission. The other two objections showed Vyshinsky’s hesitancy to take responsibility for transferring Soviet intellectual property rights to a foreign entity: he doubted his ministry’s authority to sign off on the proposal without an official act of government, and he suggested that someone in the Soviet Union’s trade mission in Paris would be a more appropriate Soviet signatory than anyone in (his) embassy.45 It took a week for Kemenov to respond, during which time he ascertained that crafting a permanent agreement with Chant du Monde could take a long time. But time was of the essence, so he requested permission to enter into a temporary pact with the French firm. This time, he included the draft text of a short memorandum of agreement that spelled out royalty rates, term (six months, with a more permanent agreement to follow), and mutual obligations. The proposed obligations are particularly interesting because the agreement would have obligated Chant du Monde “to take timely measures to preserve [Soviet composers’] rights in accordance with French law and to stand in the way of every violation of the law that might be committed in connection with the musical works of Soviet composers.”46 Though obliquely, the effort to suppress The Iron Curtain was to be written into the contract itself. Kemenov’s second request also brings Helen Black back into the story. Quoting extensively from Black’s letter of 23 April, Kemenov reported that Twentieth-Century Fox apparently feared that a legal challenge to the film on the basis of its appropriation of Soviet music could succeed in France. Black’s conclusion was heavily emphasized in the copy of Kemenov’s memo that was eventually deposited in the party’s cultural oversight department archives.47 Kemenov was apparently not the only high-ranking official who placed significant stock in the conclusions of those representing Soviet interests in the West. Black, buttressed by Jouvenel and translated by Kemenov, was effectively altering a Soviet strategy of cultural confrontation as it was formulated in Moscow.

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Kemenov’s second proposal failed as well. Chant du Monde would not agree to a mere six-month agreement and countered with a proposal to establish a three-year pact, otherwise keeping the terms.48 And Vyshinsky continued to distance himself from technically participating in the agreement. Again, he did not object in principle but insisted that Kemenov put the proposal up for an official act of government.49 On 31 May, Kemenov did. He summarized the terms of the proposed three-year contract, in which Chant du Monde would also get the rights to Soviet music in Belgium and the Netherlands. He noted the support of the Soviet ambassador to France (Bogomolov) and Vyshinsky’s lack of objection. To explain the expedited decision he hoped for, he cited Helen Black’s analysis of Twentieth-Century Fox and its fears for the film in France.50 Then, on the first two days of June, events in Paris transformed Vyshinsky’s equivocation into outright support for an agreement between VOKS and Chant du Monde, to be concluded as quickly as possible. On 1 June, the newspaper Figaro announced a private showing of The Iron Curtain in a Parisian cinema. Though the exhibition was called off at the last moment “for technical reasons,” Jouvenel reported to his VOKS contact in Paris that a few copies of the film had already made their way into France. The official opening had not been announced, but it could happen any day. Ambassador Bogomolov urgently requested that the agreement with Chant du Monde be concluded quickly.51 Vyshinsky suddenly agreed that time was of the essence. Armed with Vyshinsky’s belated order to hurry things up, Kemenov sprang into action, contacting the VOKS representative in Paris to begin final negotiations with Chant du Monde. Chant du Monde suggested a contract with no time limit that could be canceled at either party’s request.52 Representatives of Chant du Monde undoubtedly sensed—even fostered—their Soviet counterparts’ anxiety about the imminent French release of The Iron Curtain and used the perception of crisis to turn an original six-month proposal into an unlimited agreement in which the French firm would control rights to Soviet music in much of Western Europe and all of the French colonial empire. To underscore the point: according to this latest proposal, Chant du Monde would be obligated to defend Soviet interests against any legal infringement, “including use [of Soviet composers’ work] without their permission in films of an anti-Soviet nature.”53 At this point, the issue was decided very close to the pinnacle of Soviet power. Kemenov obtained permission to proceed from Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers and Politburo member Aleksei Kosygin and from Communist Party Secretary Mikhail Suslov.54 He checked every step with Kliment Voroshilov, who in turn sought opinions from subordinates, including from the Ministry of Finance.55 Kemenov also agreed to have

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someone from the Soviet trade mission—not the embassy—represent VOKS in the contract.56 The fast track worked, and the agreement was signed on 12 June.57 With the agreement signed and copyright transferred, all that remained to determine the success or failure of the new copyright strategy in France was for Chant du Monde to attempt to suppress The Iron Curtain. This copyright strategy was always deployed in tandem with another, more publicly confrontational strategy of mobilization. First in the United States and then all across Europe, sympathetic politicians and members of Soviet friendship societies took to the streets to protest the film. In fact, in Belgium, according to a report filed by VOKS at the end of 1949, a broad-based, multicity strategy of street protest actually proved to be somewhat successful.58 Key to the successful mass action strategy was the quick deployment of well-organized, widespread protests directed by the Society of Belgian-Soviet Friendship. When the society found out on 14 September 1949 that the film was scheduled to debut three days later in Brussels, its leaders scheduled a meeting for the day before the film’s debut with the Belgian prime minister, the socialist Paul-Henri Spaak. The society sought to convince Spaak to shut down the film, arguing that it was libelous and designed to incite hatred and war against the Soviet Union. Spaak was not sympathetic, so the Friendship Society organized a protest at the movie theater itself on opening night. Dozens of protestors distributed thousands of fliers protesting the film, and twenty-five people were arrested. The next day, Brussels Mayor Joseph Van de Meulebroeck refused even to meet with representatives from the Friendship Society, so they staged another demonstration in which thirty-eight were arrested. Over the next three days, the Friendship Society increased its protests and appealed, apparently successfully, to other sympathetic organizations to mobilize a mass protest. Meulebroek banned the action before it happened and mobilized the police in force to prevent it. When the protest proceeded as planned, there were violent clashes between protestors and police, and three members of parliament (all communists) were arrested. Three days later, the protests expanded and moved to Antwerp, where some two thousand protestors greeted the first showing of the film. Police riding motorcycles drove into the crowds, injuring protestors and policemen alike so that the Antwerp authorities canceled both the police action and the last planned showing of the film that day. Demonstrations continued until the theater withdrew the film a few days later. In Ghent, the film opened on 1 October, with the mayor outlawing any demonstrations and providing a strong police security presence at the theater to prevent them. These preventive measures apparently worked, though the Friendship Society distributed

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almost a third of the hundred thousand protest leaflets that it printed for the whole country in that city. In Liège, the scheduled premiere of the film was postponed, initially for a week but then indefinitely, as the Friendship Society, other sympathetic groups, the city government, and the movie theater weighed the negative ramifications of showing or canceling the film. If the film was shown, large protests were guaranteed. If it was not, the theater would be forced to violate its contract. By the time the VOKS representatives reported back to Moscow, it still had not opened. The film then moved to smaller provincial cities, sometimes being shown with little protest, but even in some of these smaller cities, like the old Roman capital, Tongeren, the Friendship Society managed to mobilize five hundred members to protest against it. In the end, the protests limited showings to two weeks in Brussels and one week in Antwerp. The film was simply not released in Charleroi, Mons, or Namur, all of which were identified by the VOKS representatives as working-class centers. In these cities, failing to show the film sometimes even violated distribution contracts. The VOKS report concludes with a self-satisfied chortle at the expense of the U.S. ambassador to Belgium, who they heard had complained to Spaak.59 The experience of the Belgian-Soviet Friendship Society shows that in early Cold War Europe, it was still possible for mass demonstrations linked to Soviet interests to have an effect. Though repeated elsewhere, these sorts of protests were not as successful as the VOKS representatives claimed for this case. The strategy of mass protest was also simply unsustainable. Once the protests ended, movie houses were free to begin showing the film again. A more complete and permanent suppression of the film required a different strategy, like the one recommended by Black and negotiated between VOKS and Jouvenel. Back in France, the opportunity to put the new copyright strategy into action arose in June and early July 1949. The Iron Curtain opened at l’Avenue cinema on 16 June 1949 with the announcement that “the eyes of the world are fixed on The Iron Curtain.”60 As in New York, Belgium, and Italy, the film was greeted by an audience and a protesting crowd. The French-Soviet Friendship Society called on “republicans and democrats” to protest the presentation of the anti-Soviet film to French audiences, and the call was answered. The showing was twice interrupted and could continue only when policemen had been stationed at the theater. One protestor was arrested and later released.61 The protests continued beyond the first showing. On 18 or 19 June, a group of protestors shouted over the film, halting it again. Several were arrested, and later all but one (who was held for assaulting an officer) were released. At this point, The Iron Curtain controversy in France reached

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parliament, when one of its communist members (Fernand Grenier) called for an investigation about how and why the film was allowed to be shown.62 The protests continued. On 21 June, six more protestors were arrested and two of them incarcerated; the next day, the protests climaxed when Grenier called on Parisians to shut down the film themselves, then led fifteen colleagues to the theater, where they led another demonstration that stopped the showing of the film. The protestors, including the communist deputies, harangued the audience, and once again, some were arrested.63 Le Monde recorded no further protests, but the film played on at l’Avenue.64 The protests had certainly raised awareness of the film, forcing it into the newspapers alongside analysis of the German Question and the ongoing revolution in China, rumblings about trouble in Vietnam, and reports from the tennis championships at Wimbledon. But the protests had not prevented Twentieth-Century Fox from showing The Iron Curtain to Parisian audiences. In fact, two weeks later, l’Avenue exhorted readers of Le Monde to see what the fuss was about and watch the film as it entered its fourth week.65 They would not have long to do so. The day the advertisement ran, Paris police shut down the film and seized all copies, not because of the protests outside the theater but for “musical plagiarism.”66 Of course, there was no question of plagiarism, properly defined. The music had been reproduced accurately and credited correctly. At issue were Chant du Monde’s intellectual property rights and the legal status of the composers’ copyright and attendant “moral rights.” The confiscation of the film was a response to a case filed by the publisher, the final step in the shift in Soviet strategy to oppose the film and the culmination of the course of action originally suggested by Helen Black. As the case wended its way through the Parisian courts, it initially appeared that the copyright strategy would backfire. On 31 May 1950, a lower court found in favor of Twentieth-Century Fox, overturned the police’s seizure of the film, and held Chant du Monde liable for some $9,000 (3,000,000 francs to Fox and 500,000 to the owner of l’Avenue) in damages. But Chant du Monde appealed, supported at least in part by the Soviet Politburo, which in September 1950 authorized the composers to join the lawsuit directly and allocated 5,000 rubles in hard currency to cover legal fees.67 In 1953, a more receptive audience in the Paris Court of Appeals overturned the lower court.68 The appellate court’s reasoning hinged on several points. First, it recognized Chant du Monde as the holder of the relevant intellectual property rights, validating the transfer of copyright protection from VOKS to the French publisher. Second, it recognized Chant du Monde’s rights to enforce

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its intellectual property claims in France according to French law, regardless of the status of the Soviet Union or its nationals with respect to international copyright conventions. The right to intellectual property protection could be abrogated only by explicit legislation in French law. Since there had been no such explicit exclusion for Soviet composers, the French copyright law of 19 July 1793 was held to apply to the Iron Curtain case. This second finding was crucial. The 1793 law included far stronger protections for authors’ intellectual property rights than the relevant law in the Anglo-American tradition. The public domain claim that proved decisive in the United States was trumped by Chant du Monde’s intellectual property claims. Third, the court noted that the music of Soviet composers had without a doubt been used in the film without the permission and contrary to the wishes of those composers. Here the decision to add the composers to the appeal may have been decisive, since the court found their “moral rights” to have been violated. Given those three conditions, the appellate court found that Chant du Monde’s request to withdraw the film was legal. Twentieth-Century Fox was forced to pay 2,000,000 francs ($5,000), and the film was suppressed once and for all.69 Belatedly, the copyright strategy had worked.

Intellectual Property at Home and Abroad: Agency, Global Integration, and the Soviet Collapse This fight for Soviet composers’ “moral rights” abroad contains absolutely no record of those individuals’ participation in the struggle or their opinions about it. There is almost no evidence that any of the four composers named in the lawsuit filed under their name by Charles Recht even knew about it, much less participated. Helen Black’s request for a telegram stating the composers’ objection to the film went to VOKS, but nowhere in the following correspondence is there any mention of an attempt to enlist their actual support, even though a brief protest in their name was published by Izvestiia and picked up by the New York Times.70 In international cultural competition, prominent composers could certainly be agents of Soviet policy, traveling abroad, forming and reporting professional impressions, and speaking on behalf of the Soviet cultural system. But they—their names, their reputations, their music—could also be mere tools for others to utilize in their own struggles, as appears to have been the case here. This irony—an international legal struggle to protect composers’ “moral rights” without any record of those composers’ opinions about the use of their music—raises the question of the status of intellectual property within the Soviet Union and the relationship between the domestic and the

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international with regard to Soviet intellectual property at the very beginning of the cultural Cold War. The answer to this question turns out to be a complex one. After the war, Soviet cultural elites pushed for a significant shift toward professionally determined and sanctioned methods of setting the value of artistic labor. This shift was apparent in competing conceptions of justifiable and legitimate royalty earnings. It turned primarily on the relative value of translators’ work in the literary sphere and pitted officials from the All-USSR Central Council of Trade Unions (VTsSPS) and Ministry of Finance against the professional leadership of the creative unions, especially the Writers’ Union and Composers’ Union. At stake were the graduated pay scale for royalties generated primarily by theater, opera, and ballet performances and the status of long-term residuals for works that were especially popular with Soviet audiences. The royalty system that was established in 1928 and remained more or less in force through the Stalin period privileged the amount of labor required to produce literary or musical work. The longer the novel, the more acts the play, the higher its writer’s compensation. According to this system, translators and stage adaptors could earn royalties at the same rates as playwrights and composers producing original work. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, the functional equivalency of translation and original composition was under attack by the creative union leadership. During these struggles, professional composers and writers introduced intellectual property as a legitimate basis for compensation while arguing to reduce royalties for translations and defending indefinite residuals. By the end of the Stalin period, these arguments had been successful enough to enter into drafts for new copyright and royalty legislation that were prepared by the Ministry of Culture, even over the objections of the Ministry of Finance and the VTsSPS.71 As the Soviet cultural elite became more deeply ensconced in material privilege at home, conceptions of legitimate compensation for creative work devalued labor and privileged intellectual property. So intellectual property became increasingly important in domestic Soviet cultural life after the war. It also raised the issue of how the Soviet system to compensate artistic production should extend to art produced abroad. This issue had two components: how should the Soviet Union compensate foreigners for work used or sold in the Soviet Union, and how—or under what circumstances—should the Soviet Union seek to protect Soviet works abroad? Initially, these issues were treated separately. At the upper reaches of the arts administration, the Central Committee bureaucracy, the first was treated as a nuisance to be resolved with the least cost to the Soviet

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economy.72 The second was ignored almost entirely—until The Iron Curtain demonstrated the potential political and strategic value of taking intellectual property seriously on a global scale. When Soviet cultural policy makers engaged Twentieth-Century Fox over The Iron Curtain, they jumped into a fast-changing system of regulating copyright internationally. Copyright emerged along with the nineteenth-century expansion in book publication and was always inextricably tied to market capitalism, tying together notions of intellectual creativity, private property rights, and—through royalty systems—remuneration for creative or intellectual work.73 Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, states and publishing companies alike sought to standardize copyright protections, primarily as a lubricant to international trade in the material product of ideas, books. Policy makers were also motivated by a desire to secure reciprocal protections for their citizens in other states. Their efforts led to the establishment in 1886 of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, a systematic agreement originally signed by only ten countries that remained the fundamental basis of international copyright agreements at the very end of the twentieth century. But markedly different national conventions proved difficult to standardize in an international system of copyright, and a few major powers—including the United States and Russia—refused to accept the Berne Convention, preferring bilateral reciprocity agreements.74 After World War II, the fledgling United Nations, through the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), directed a concerted effort to construct a “universal republic of letters” as part of the emerging postwar capitalist system. Culminating in the 1952 Universal Copyright Convention (UCC), this effort created a common regime of copyright relations that supplemented the Berne Convention and allowed those whose domestic copyright protections still did not fulfill the requirements of Berne nevertheless to enter into a common system of regulations.75 It was only with the advent of the UCC after the beginning of the Cold War that the United States acceded to this system of international copyright regulation. The Soviet Union remained outside it. However, Soviet cultural competition with the West put Soviet officials and artists in contact with this nascent copyright regime. Typical for the institutions of the global capitalist economy, this regime was dominated by the West and encompassed most of the emerging postcolonial world. The agreement between VOKS and Chant du Monde co-opted the Soviet Union into this international copyright regime and left the intellectual property rights of Soviet composers in the hands of a French publisher for perpetuity.76

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Soviet participation in the emergent global copyright system was finally systematized in 1973, when the Soviet Union joined the UCC. Though it had long been eagerly awaited by Western publishers hoping to capitalize on enormous Soviet book sales, this event evoked a nervous, typically Cold War response in the West, twenty-five years after the Iron Curtain affair. Emigres and dissidents wrote opinion pieces and open letters to the American press warning about the possible uses of international copyright to extend Soviet censorship practices to a global scale, silence samizdat and tamizdat, and kill Russian literary culture. Slavicists took to Congress to counteract the possible threat.77 Perhaps that was the strategy in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, and the Iron Curtain affair shows that those fearing Soviet abilities to manipulate international copyright laws to suppress distribution of art for their own competitive advantage had a record on which to rely. But in the event, the global spread of Soviet censorship never materialized.78 In hindsight, this is no surprise. The conflict over The Iron Curtain is an early example of a much larger pattern. Soviet leaders publicly accepted the terms of competition, especially economic competition, proposed by the West. Assuming the grand march of history was on their side and believing their own long-standing claims of Soviet systemic superiority, Soviet leaders confidently awaited the collapse of the capitalist system.79 From the very beginning of the Cold War’s imperial confrontation, the results of direct cultural competition (as opposed to diplomatic negotiation or ideological grandstanding) appeared to confirm this assumption of superiority.80 But as it did in the Iron Curtain affair, engaging in successful cultural competition with the West would time and again require the Soviets to integrate into an aspect of the legal and economic regimes of U.S.-dominated global capitalism, U.S. empire. Soviet leaders never noticed this quiet integration in the midst of nearly uninterrupted competitive cultural success, striking musical examples of which are analyzed in the next four chapters. A decade after the Iron Curtain affair, Nikita Khrushchev would confidently promise to outproduce the West and set the expectations that would eventually help precipitate the collapse of the Soviet empire. Once the Soviets began to participate in the U.S.-dominated system, their attempts to manipulate had consequences that would remain significant in the U.S. global empire even after the Soviet collapse. The Soviet effort to suppress The Iron Curtain remained important to adjudicating conflicts between artists and some who sought to appropriate their art even within the post-Cold War international legal system. The divergent outcomes of the two legal challenges forwarded in the name of the Soviet composers whose music animated The Iron Curtain revealed persistent tensions within

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the international legal regime for regulating intellectual property. Failure in the United States and success in France were partly a result of the Soviet strategic shift described here, which immeasurably strengthened the case for the challenge in France. But the greater weight that the French legal system placed on authors’ “moral” rights was also essential to Chant du Monde’s victory in the Paris Court of Appeals.81 This tension and the Iron Curtain legal battles remained current in the early twenty-first century as legal scholars and jurists sought to iron out principles governing the legal regulation of intellectual property and the Internet, and as musicians sought to prevent security agencies from using their music for purposes that contradicted their original intent, like torture.82 Like those who sued in the names of “Shostakovich et al.” in the early days of the Cold War, Rage Against the Machine and other contemporary performers threatened to turn to the courts and use protections provided by “moral rights” to try to control how their music was used during new American imperial conflicts, the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Soviet success in the Iron Curtain case required participating in a global legal regime dominated by the United States, and that participation itself highlighted one possible avenue for continuing challenges to the dominant U.S. imperial power within the context of post-Cold War globalization. The Iron Curtain affair also suggests something about how Stalinism’s imperial integration operated at the level of the imperial intermediaries who managed the Soviet Union’s integrative dynamics. At the beginning of the Cold War, Stalinist cultural policy makers turned to outsiders—like Black—who were willing to lend their expertise and energies to the Soviet cause by interpreting for their contacts in Moscow the relatively new terrain they encountered.83 This development suggests a structural continuity between the Stalinism of the years leading up to and including the Great Terror and that of the early Cold War years, when the Soviets were imposing imperial domination on the countries of Eastern Europe and engaging in direct conflict with the United States. Even as the Stalinist leadership violently asserted exclusionary control in high politics, it depended on relative outsiders (sympathetic ones) to forge policies of integration in the cultural sphere. This pattern was established domestically through the assimilation of the creative intelligentsia—often through authoritative figures who were not party members—into the Soviet elite in the 1930s.84 The dependence on Helen Black, Charles Recht, and Renaud de Jouvenel shows how that process was repeated internationally after 1948, with intermediaries who were even more clearly outsiders than their prewar counterparts. The Iron Curtain affair also illustrates patterns in the development of Soviet policy making in the cultural sphere after the war. Black’s contacts in

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Moscow and counterparts in Paris worked out the details and implemented the deal with the approval of Soviet foreign policy leaders, party officials, and government decrees. In a hypercentralized political system, the influence of such minor figures—and non-Soviets—on policy formation may seem surprising. However, the role of Helen Black here is perfectly consistent with Soviet decision making in other spheres. Soviet decision making was highly centralized, yes, but with centralization of ultimate authority to decide policy came a similarly high level of delegation, not just for implementation but also for the formation of policy options from which higher authorities could choose.85 After the war, expertise became increasingly important in Soviet governance.86 The Central Committee apparatus underwent significant professionalization and the bureaucrats who inhabited it increasingly relied on the expert opinions of those who reported to them.87 Equilibrium based on division of labor and responsibilities emerged within Stalin’s top leadership circles.88 As a result, policy was routinely shaped at a relatively low level in the Soviet hierarchy, then presented as proposals with supporting evidence. The Secretariat, the Politburo, and the Council of Ministers almost always either stamped those policies with their approval or chose from a preselected, limited number of specific policy formulations accompanied by succinct reports. Extreme delegation, combined with the rising importance and institutionalization of expertise, gave officials outside these top leadership bodies significant influence over the development of Soviet policy. This is not to say that they could control it; ultimate authority still rested at the top. The pressures constricting all Soviet officials were obviously intense, and recognizing individuals’ opportunities to influence policy is not meant to minimize these pressures. In fact, bureaucrats’ jobs and personal security depended on their immediate superiors’ perceptions of their ideological reliability, fitness for the job, and loyalty. Furthermore, when institutions disappointed, they could be reorganized, with responsibility for implementation being transferred to other institutions with previously overlapping charges and relevant expertise. Such was the case with VOKS and the Committee on Artistic Affairs in the late 1940s. Though Vladimir Kemenov was instrumental in translating Helen Black’s strategic proposals into Soviet bureaucratic action, he would not remain the head of VOKS to see the successful policy through to fruition. After a thorough investigation of VOKS earlier in the year, Kemenov was removed from his post by the Politburo on 30 September 1948.89 As Kemenov turned control over to his replacement, the law professor Andrei Ivanovich Denisov, his earlier request for reinforcements was at least temporarily granted,

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as twenty-one experienced cadres from the bureaucracies of the Central Committee and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were transferred to VOKS.90 In the aftermath of the reorganization, the institutional relationships and responsibilities for cultural diplomacy solidified among VOKS, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Committee on Artistic Affairs. VOKS was given the same institutional status as the Committee on Artistic Affairs and required to coordinate its operations with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.91 Over the next few years, a relatively stable division of labor developed. One of VOKS’s main tasks continued to be the preparation and noncommercial distribution of materials about Soviet culture, from books, photographs, and brochures to full-scale exhibits that could be staged by friendship societies abroad. VOKS was also supposed to take the lead in coordinating (and monitoring) the foreign correspondence of prominent Soviet intellectuals. But as cultural diplomacy increasingly emphasized international travel, coordinating that travel became more complicated and required the active involvement of multiple Soviet institutions. A typical case from 1951 illustrates how this relationship operated. In late April 1951, the Austro-Soviet Society informed VOKS that it was planning to hold Austro-Soviet Friendship Weeks later that year. The society’s leadership then met regularly with the VOKS representative in Austria, making sure that he was familiar with their preparations through the spring and into the summer. Sometime that summer, the society wrote to VOKS in Moscow with a specific request—discussed ahead of time with the VOKS representative in the embassy—for the Soviets to send a folk song-and-dance ensemble (they suggested the Ukrainian Folk Ensemble, accompanied by an orchestra of folk instruments) and a few prominent artists (they thought the pianist Pavel Serebriakov would be an especially fine choice).92 In July, VOKS informed the Committee on Artistic Affairs that the Austro-Soviet Society was planning a Soviet Friendship Month that would run from 30 September through 7 November. Then, in August they wrote to the Committee on Artistic Affairs again, forwarded the society’s request, and noted that VOKS recommended honoring it, as it had in years past. The VOKS request noted that a Soviet ensemble of folk song and dance and a group of Soviet soloists touring both in the Soviet occupation zone and the Western zone would be a good idea, but it did not suggest specific ensembles or artists.93 Then, on 1 September, Committee on Artistic Affairs chief Nikolai Bespalov wrote to Politburo member Georgii Malenkov to express the committee’s support for the VOKS proposal and to seek permission and funding for eight prominent Soviet performers (but not Serebriakov) to travel to Austria for three weeks in October. Bespalov also noted that the Voronezh State Russian Folk Choir

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was already in Austria performing for Soviet occupation troops. He suggested that the choir extend its stay for ten days of open concerts.94 This procedure was typical. VOKS, with some support from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, fielded requests and sometimes proposed opportunities for cultural exchange in general terms. The Committee on Artistic Affairs controlled access to the artists and managed the practical details, including payment. It made decisions about whom to recommend for travel and for how long, and it could use that power and its budgetary prerogatives to squelch proposals forwarded by VOKS or by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.95 The Politburo always had the last say. To manage its role, the Committee on Artistic Affairs eventually added a new international affairs department to its bureaucracy. The committee’s first proposals to form such a department circulated in 1949, in the aftermath of the reorganization of VOKS and in the midst of expanded international exchange activity that coincided with the consolidation of the Soviet Union’s East European imperial periphery.96 Those first appeals failed, but in February 1951, the committee rearticulated its request in its annual exchange report for the previous year.97 This time, the request was approved, and a special international department devoted to managing the preparations for foreign travel was created within the committee.98 With this increased administrative capacity, the committee and its 1953 successor, the Ministry of Culture, were in a position to take even greater initiative in cultural exchange, increasingly marginalizing VOKS over the course of the 1950s. Throughout this shift in the administration of the Soviet Union’s cultural diplomacy expertise, one constant feature of the system was that suggested by the cases of Helen Black, Charles Recht, and Renaud de Jouvenel. When they reached across the borders of the Soviet empire, Soviet politicians and officials alike were dependent on the expertise, opinions, and activities of individuals far from the corridors of power in the Kremlin. Finding reliable and efficacious partners in the West would continue to be a crucial consideration for Soviet officials hoping to project Soviet excellence and extend Soviet influence to developing countries and in the West. In the Stalin years, the partners they chose were typically long-standing friends with proclaimed leftist sympathies like Black, Recht, and Jouvenel, but that would not always remain the case. In the Iron Curtain affair, the Soviets pursued a track less prominently covered in this chapter—mobilizing sympathetic crowds in the West to take to the streets in protest—that was typical of the mass-mobilization campaigns at home but required sympathetic crowds to enact. Already ineffective in 1948, this strategy was eventually abandoned, at least in the sphere of high culture.

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The onset of McCarthyism in the United States and its analogues elsewhere in the West minimized the number of Soviet sympathizers in the West and marginalized the few who remained. Instead, the Soviets increasingly turned to more integrative strategies like the manipulation of copyright that proved so effective in the Iron Curtain affair. That larger change in strategy would eventually necessitate a shift in the kind of partners the Soviets chose to act as their imperial intermediaries. But by the end of the 1950s, politically sympathetic friends would be displaced by commercial agents and impresarios as the Soviets integrated more thoroughly into the economy of global capitalism.

Ch a p ter 2

Dueling Pianos Imperial and National Dynamics in Postwar Music Competitions

In 1927, the young Soviet pianist Lev Oborin traveled to Warsaw to compete in the first International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition. Begun that year at the initiative of Polish pianist, composer, and conservatory professor Jerzy Z˙urawlew, the competition would eventually become one of the world’s premier piano competitions.1 It is fitting that the inaugural event initiated a pattern that would characterize international performance competitions throughout the twentieth century. Oborin emerged victorious, the first in a long and unmatched line of Soviet pianists, violinists, cellists, vocalists, and other instrumentalists who traveled abroad, competed, and won. On his return to the Soviet Union, Oborin received a hero’s welcome in the press.2 The 1930s saw even greater success. When David Oistrakh placed second (to the French violinist Ginette Neveau) and Boris Goldstein fourth at the first Henryk Wieniawski Violin Competition in Warsaw in 1935, Pravda crowed about the “brilliant success of Soviet violinists.”3 Two years later, Oistrakh led a group of Soviet violinists that swept four of the top prizes at the first Eugéne Ysaÿe International Violin Competition (later renamed for its patron, Queen Elisabeth of Belgium) in Brussels, and the Soviet press extolled the violinists’ accomplishments with multiple articles announcing the win, including front-page coverage in both Pravda and Izvestiia and a full spread in the latter.4 The laureates returned home to receive their heroes’ welcome, with adoring crowds of friends, 46

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colleagues, and teachers; an admiring press corps, and proud politicians greeting them at the Belorusskii train station, bedecked with enormous bouquets of flowers.5 When Emil Gilels and Iakov Flier nearly repeated the feat at the same event’s first piano competition in 1938, finishing first and third, Izvestiia devoted another nearly full-page spread to the accomplishment, and Literaturnaia gazeta followed up with a more detailed hagiography.6 Soviet performance musicians entered the pantheon of Soviet heroes of the 1930s, right alongside polar explorers and long-distance pilots.7 World War II temporarily disrupted the continued development of Europe’s international music competition system from these auspicious beginnings. By then, though, Soviet musicians had already begun to dominate the system, and their triumphs were trumpeted to domestic and international audiences as evidence of the successes of Soviet cultural production. By the end of the Stalin period, Soviet musicians had competed in seventeen different musical competitions and won a total of sixty international prizes, including seventeen first prizes.8 From the beginning, music competition had geopolitical propaganda dimensions, but in the first decade of the Cold War such competitions became central components of a systemic ongoing cultural struggle between the new postwar empires, U.S. and Soviet. Tracing the emergence of explicitly interimperial competition in an explosion of new international music competitions in the late 1940s and early 1950s demonstrates that for the organizers of these competitions, attracting contestants from both sides of the Cold War’s imperial divide was extremely important. At the same time, national tensions prevalent within the empires, especially the Soviet, found expression in the goals and practices of these competitions as representatives from different countries sought to demonstrate both the superiority of their empire’s cultural production system and the importance of their own national contributions to that larger empire. Soviet musicians and cultural bureaucrats navigated these complicated dynamics in ways that not surprisingly sought to maximize Soviet successes. The effects of selecting which competitions to contest, grooming the competitors that all involved assumed would (or should) win, and measuring the results reached deep into the fabric of the music education and concertizing system at home.

Imperial Competition The early Cold War years saw the reinstatement of the major prewar competitions and a dizzying proliferation of new ones. Warsaw’s Chopin Competition began anew in 1949, the culmination of a year-long celebration of the composer on the hundredth anniversary of his death.9 When the second

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Henryk Wieniawski International Violin Competition took place in 1952, it moved from Warsaw to Poznan, where it would remain. David Oistrakh had won second prize in 1935; his son, Igor, won first prize in 1952.10 The Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels resumed in 1951 after a thirteen-year hiatus.11 The Geneva International Music Competition (Concours de Genève), which was first held in 1939, was perhaps the only major international competition that did not see a lengthy disruption caused by World War II. It continued apace throughout the war and into the postwar period and was one of the few not dominated by Soviet musicians.12 Another major competition actually began during the war. The Marguerite Long and Jacques Thibaud International Piano and Violin Competition (Concours International de Piano et de Violon Marguerite Long—Jacques Thibaud) got its start as a private initiative in 1943, received backing from the government of France, the cities of Paris and Bordeaux, and the prince of Monaco, among others, in 1946, and truly emerged onto the international stage in 1949.13 The Geneva Competition was the earliest to embrace a large host of performance categories, rather than concentrating on just a few particularly prestigious instruments, like violin and piano. This example was followed by one of the first postwar competitions, the Prague Spring International Music Competition, which began in 1947 and introduced a triumphant Mstislav Rostropovich to the world.14 Another festival in the Soviet empire that would become an ever-changing staple of the international music competition circuit also began anew in the late 1940s when the Budapest Philharmonia hosted the Béla Bartók Competition for piano, violin, string quartet, and composition in 1948.15 The competitions at the Prague Spring festival and in Budapest initiated a florescence of new competitions in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The Ferruccio Busoni International Piano Competition began in Bolzano, Italy, in 1949; the Gian Battista Viotti International Music Competition held its inaugural event in Vercelli, Italy, in 1950; in 1951, the International Competition for Young Conductors in Besançon, France, grew out of the Festival International de Musique de Besançon Franche-Comté, first held in 1948; the ARD International Music Competition started in Munich in 1952; and 1954 saw the creation of three major international competitions: the Premio Paganini International Violin Competition in Genoa; the Maria Canals International Music Competition in Barcelona; and the Toulouse International Singing Competition in, of course, Toulouse.16 By the end of 1954, continental Europe was simply full of international music competitions.

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When Soviet competitors participated, they dominated. Table 2.1 shows the citizenship of the laureates who were awarded the top three prizes in the most prominent international music competitions in Western Europe and Poland in which the Soviets participated between 1948 and 1958. This is not an exhaustive list, limited as it is to high-prestige piano and violin competitions that were either located in the West, carried on a tradition established before the war, or both. In these highest-profile competitions, Soviet competitors won nearly 70 percent of the top prizes awarded and were never shut out of the top two. They swept three events and captured 60 percent of all top two prizes awarded. Soviet violinists were especially dominant, Table 2.1  Citizenship of top laureates, select international music competitions, 1948–1958

Competition

Year

Instrument

Top prize awarded

Second highest prize awarded

Third highest prize awarded

Chopin, Warsaw Queen Elisabeth, Brussels Wieniawski, Poznan Long-Thibaud, Paris Long-Thibaud, Paris Chopin, Warsaw Long-Thibaud, Paris Long-Thibaud, Paris Queen Elisabeth, Brussels Queen Elisabeth, Brussels Long-Thibaud, Paris Long-Thibaud, Paris Wieniawski, Poznan Total Prizes Total Soviet laureates

1949 1951

Piano Violin

USSRa USSR

Polanda USSR

Poland stateless

1952 1953

Violin Piano

USSR USSRc

USSRb Francec

Polandb France

1953

Violin

USSR

USSR

USA

1955 1955

Piano Piano

Poland USSRc

USSR Francec

China Hungary

1955

Violin

France

USSR

USSR

1955

Violin

USA

USSR

France

1956

Piano

USSR

USA

Poland

1957

Piano

UK

USSR

Germany

1957

Violin

USSR

UKd

USSRd

1957

Violin

USSR 13 9

USA 13 7

USSR 13 3

Sources: http://konkurs.chopin.pl/en/edition/iv; http://konkurs.chopin.pl/en/edition/v; http://www.long-thibaudcrespin.org/en-gb/laureats/recherche-des-laureats.html; http://perso.fundp.ac.be/~jmlamber/re/re.html; http://www. wieniawski.com/2ivc.html; http://www.wieniawski.com/3ivc.html. Two first prizes and one second prize awarded. Two second prizes awarded. c No first prize awarded; top two awarded joint second prize. d No second prize awarded; second and third highest prizes awarded were called “third” and “fourth.” a

b

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winning five of seven top prizes and five of seven second prizes, over 70 percent of all top two prizes. The dominance of Soviet virtuosi in international competition was perhaps surpassed only by their compatriot chess players.17 International music performance competitions quickly became one of the most successful showcases for the Soviet cultural production system. The official motivation for starting a new music competition usually included providing stimulus for young talent (contestants were almost always limited to those under a specified age, usually the early thirties) and to popularize the works of a composer or composers of the prospective host country’s nationality.18 Just below the surface, however, this system of music competitions was designed—sometimes explicitly—as a forum for competition between the new cultural empires being built by the Soviet Union and United States. The eventually unsuccessful efforts of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien (Society of the Friends of Music in Vienna) to start a new performance competition in 1953 epitomize this tendency. Founded in 1812, the Gesellschaft was one of the most important fixtures of Viennese musical life, the owner of Vienna’s most important performance venue, the Musikverein. In November 1952, the touring Soviet lyric coloratura soprano Nadezhda Kazantseva was presented with a letter from the Gesellschaft’s general secretary addressed to the Committee on Artistic Affairs containing an official invitation to the Soviet Union to participate in a new international competition of pianists, violinists, and vocalists.19 VOKS also received news of the invitation through its network in Austria—in particular, from Otto Langbein, the vice president of the Austro-Soviet Society in Vienna.20 Langbein reported that the invitation passed to Kazantseva invited the Soviet Union to participate in a music competition to take place in the first ten days of June 1953. Specifically, the organizers invited Kazantseva, the pianist Lev Oborin, and the violinist David Oistrakh to serve on juries and give concerts with other jurists during the competition. They also extended a general invitation to Soviet musicians to compete. The Austro-Soviet Society discussed the invitation widely in Viennese musical circles and discovered a great deal of interest in Soviet participation. One of the main reported reasons for that interest demonstrates in clear terms that Austrians friendly to the Soviet Union explicitly conceptualized the competition as a means of furthering Soviet propaganda goals in their country: The participation of Soviet artists in this international musical competition in Vienna would facilitate a break in the boycott against the socialist world, the boycott so desired by the current government. This

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could be done with the help of leading Austrian musicians who are working in the arts; we have the most popular ones, who despite all persecution, are interested in establishing cultural ties with the Soviet Union. Besides that, accepting the invitation would be understood in Austria as proof of friendly feelings from the Soviet Union, which, strengthening cultural ties between peoples, facilitates the task of preserving peace.21 Not surprisingly, the Austro-Soviet Society strongly encouraged the Soviets to participate, and Langbein’s letter sought to push for a positive—and quick—decision. He had met with the director of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien and reported that the Gesellschaft was awaiting a Soviet decision before printing the necessary preliminary materials. The date by which announcements of the new competition had to be disseminated was fast approaching. As a result of Soviet silence, it was increasingly likely that the Gesellschaft could not guarantee the participation of representatives from the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. This unfortunate situation had transpired the year before, and it had resulted in the event having a one-sided, “Western” character. The Gesellschaft very much wanted to avoid that one-sidedness in the future and was therefore willing to postpone the competition to the fall of 1953 or even the winter of 1953–1954 to accommodate the Soviets. At the same time, there would be a major music festival in Vienna in May 1953, and Langbein hoped Soviet musicians would perform.22 Despite the urgency of Langbein’s request, it took nearly three weeks for his memo to make it through the VOKS apparatus to its intended audience in the Committee on Artistic Affairs.23 Meanwhile, even before receiving this prod from VOKS’s international apparatus, the Committee on Artistic Affairs began to prepare its response to the Gesellschaft invitation in late January 1953. That response demonstrates that despite the Austrian side’s efforts to involve its Soviet counterparts in the preliminary preparations for the competition, the Committee on Artistic Affairs, at least, was hesitant to become so entangled. The vice chairman of the committee, N. E. Tverdokhlebov, wrote to Soviet Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs G. M. Pushkin on 21 January to request that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs clarify the terms of the invitation. Tverdokhlebov indicated that the invitation was simply missing the basic information that the Committee on Artistic Affairs needed even to consider the possibility. Specifically, missing was any indication of the competition’s age limitation, application deadline, number of participants from each country in each subcategory (i.e., violin, piano, and voice), and a list of repertory required for

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each round. Tverdokhlebov also wanted to know if the Soviets could substitute personnel for those invited to serve on the jury (in case of scheduling conflict or illness), or if the invitation was limited to Kazantseva, Oborin, and Oistrakh. Tverdokhlebov finished his memo with an implicit rebuke to those pushing for a more rapid decision: “This question has a preliminary character.”24 When he received Langbein’s letter from VOKS, Tverdokhlebov replied with another request, this time to VOKS, for more complete information. He repeated the request regarding the competition that he had already sent through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and, with evident irritation, raised seven additional unresolved issues regarding Soviet participation in the planned springtime music festival. Apparently, Langbein’s letter was the first he had heard of the festival. This list of seven issues provides a concise synopsis of Soviet officials’ preoccupations for international music festivals and competitions, ranging from basic information about the terms of participation to specifics about how the Soviets would be presented by the organizers and in the context of other international participants. These preoccupations clearly derive from the role of the Committee on Artistic Affairs as the organization responsible for handling the mundane practicalities of international appearances and from a concern for managing the image of the Soviet artist abroad. Specifically, Tverdokhlebov requested more information about the organizers, about the genres and forms of the music to be presented (instrumental or vocal music? dance? soloists, ensembles, or whole collectives?), about other potential international participants, about the duration of the festival, about the material conditions provided (housing? travel? performance honoraria? prizes?), and about the total number of Soviet participants envisioned. Considering the number of significant issues about which he required clarification, it is perhaps not surprising that Tverdokhlebov signed off with a rebuke: “I request that you also bring to the attention of your representatives in Austria that sending us invitations without specifying basic and necessary information about one event or another places the Committee in a difficult situation and only draws out resolution of the questions.”25 This irritation would continue to characterize Tverdokhlebov’s attitude toward the Viennese organizers, even as they sought to engage the Soviets more directly in the planning. While Tverdokhlebov was upbraiding VOKS for its inattention to the details of the Viennese proposal, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded to his request for more information by going straight to General Secretary of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde Rudolf Gamsjäger. On 5 February, Gamsjäger met in his offices at the Musikverein with Senior Lieutenant B. Kulchitsky of the Information and Propaganda

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Department of the Soviet Division of the Allied Commission for Austria. Kulchitsky’s report demonstrates that Gamsjäger conceived of the Gesellschaft’s competition as a stage for the larger competition between the Western and Soviet systems. He believed, inaccurately, that the Soviet silence in response to his original invitation constituted a rejection of the competition not just by the Soviet Union but by all the people’s democracies. Without the participation of the Soviets and their East European allies, it would simply be impossible to hold the event. Consequently, Gamsjäger claimed that whether the competition would even take place depended entirely on the Soviets.26 Gamsjäger’s assumptions reveal that the international music competition system that was fast expanding during the early years of the Cold War was constructed according to a logic that required these competitions to have a trans-systemic dimension. By assuming that the Soviet Committee on Artistic Affairs spoke (or pointedly maintained its silence) on behalf of both itself and all the people’s democracies, Gamsjäger reified a cultural world divided into two competing empires. He was apparently not worried about whether or not representatives from the West, including Austria itself, would participate. In fact, he doubted that American contestants could afford to take part, because the U.S. government did not support such things, but that possibility did not bother him. He thought that widespread European participation, and the possible participation of Americans already located in Europe, would mitigate the absence of Americans coming from the United States.27 But he assumed that an international music competition would be considered illegitimate unless representatives from the Soviet empire also participated. There were two main reasons the legitimacy of a competition might be tied to Soviet participation. By 1953, Soviet competitive success was so commonplace that a great deal of international prestige attached to Soviet contestants. A competition simply could not claim to have drawn the world’s best if the Soviets were not there. Second, the presence of Soviet musicians inherently raised the stakes and the prominence of a potential competition by pitting cultural empires against one another. The Soviets were indispensable to Gamsjäger in his effort to create a significant new competitive forum. The disagreement between Gamsjäger and the Committee on Artistic Affairs about what constituted appropriate planning for the competition, expressed entirely through the intermediaries of the Soviet Union’s international cultural and diplomatic administrative apparatus, demonstrates that the Soviets sought to distance themselves from other countries’ planning activities, reserving the right to participate or not depending on the final terms regulating the competition rather than becoming embroiled in negotiations about those terms that could compel them to take part. Thus Gamsjäger

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sought to collaborate with the Soviets, and the Committee on Artistic Affairs rejected that possibility out of hand. This conflict manifested itself primarily as a disagreement about whether the Soviets should (or could) agree to participate, and therefore name members of the jury, before or after the rest of the terms were set. Gamsjäger asserted that the first step in the planning process was to name a jury. Members of the jury would then establish the required repertory for each of the competition’s three rounds, and only then could the Gesellschaft publicize the competition.28 Tverdokhlebov finally received Gamsjäger’s answers through Ministry of Foreign Affairs channels on 20 February.29 He did not immediately render a decision, perhaps awaiting further clarification from VOKS. Indeed, when VOKS reported virtually identical news from its own interview with Gamsjäger on 11 March, he moved quickly.30 Just two days later, Tverdokhlebov’s boss, Chairman of the Committee on Artistic Affairs N. N. Bespalov, summarized the invitation and his committee’s efforts to clarify that invitation for Central Committee Secretary Mikhail Suslov. Bespalov concluded that Gamsjäger and his Gesellschaft “essentially seek to have the Committee on Artistic Affairs take on itself the resolution of fundamental organizational questions for the given competition, a situation that can hardly be considered expedient.”31 Bespalov continued by revealing that his committee’s fundamental objection to the Gesellschaft’s proposal was that agreeing to name members of the jury would obligate the Soviet Union to participate, even though the final conditions for the competition remained undecided. He proposed a solution that, in the eyes of the committee, mirrored typical international practice: the competition prospectus should be finalized and disseminated with a typical note that jury members would be chosen from among the leading specialists of the participating countries. Bespalov concluded, “a personal list of jury members is never ever defined and published ahead of time.”32 When Bespalov’s letter and supporting materials reached the Central Committee apparatus, it took almost no time for the officials of the Department of Literature and the Arts to support his proposed conclusion. They forwarded the materials to Suslov with a note of support on 12 March.33 The Central Committee apparently agreed, and Gamsjäger was informed, through Ministry of Foreign Affairs channels, that the Soviets would be happy to consider participation when the final details of the competition were worked out. Until then, they suggested that the Gesellschaft learn from the experience of organizers of other international music competitions, brochures for which were included in the Soviet reply, and merely indicate that specialists would be named to the jury later.34 Of course, this was exactly

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what Gamsjäger sought to avoid when he invited Soviet musicians to serve on the jury in the first place. In the end, Gamsjäger was true to his word: without the promise of Soviet participation that he sought, the Gesellschaft did not organize an international music competition in Vienna in 1953 or 1954. In fact, Vienna would have to wait nearly a decade for an international piano competition in the city. The International Beethoven Piano Competition joined the World Federation of International Music Competitions in 1958 and held its inaugural competition in 1961. To this day, the Beethoven competition is sponsored by the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien, originally the music school of the Gesellschaft.35 The story of the Gesellschaft’s ultimately unsuccessful efforts to establish an international music competition in one of the most recognized capitals of Western music, Vienna, in 1953 demonstrates several points about international music competitions and the Soviet Union’s role in them at the very end of the Stalin era. First, Gamsjäger’s assumptions about Soviet domination of the state socialist camp and the necessity of the participation of that camp in any international competition show that international music competitions were explicitly conceptualized as forums for rivalry between the Soviets and the West. Second, the prestige of Soviet musicians was so great that the reputation of a new event could hinge on whether or not they participated. Third, even while maintaining the dominant position in these competitions that generated that prestige, the Soviets themselves were reluctant to participate in their planning or execution, seemingly afraid of becoming committed to something they would later regret. In the Viennese case, this reticence seems almost to have bordered on paranoia, since Gamsjäger appeared to all those with whom he met—from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and from VOKS—to be extremely willing to accommodate Soviet interests. In Moscow, that accommodation was interpreted as an attempt to shirk the responsibility of organizing the details of the competition. Just days after Stalin’s death, Soviet arts leaders were clearly happy to dominate international music competition, but they were also nervous about fostering closer ties outside the confines of the Soviet cultural empire.36 Nearly three years later, these dynamics remained largely in place. In the late summer of 1955, the organizers of an international piano competition to be held in Lisbon, Portugal, as Gamsjäger had earlier, sought to attract Soviet participation in their event. The Portuguese organizers had much larger problems than Gamsjäger had encountered nearly three years earlier: they were legally forbidden by the Portuguese government to communicate directly with their Soviet counterparts. Instead, they first had to check with the prefect of the Portuguese international police in Lisbon about whether

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or not “musicians from countries behind the iron curtain” would be permitted into Portugal to participate (they would), and then find an intermediary to communicate their interest to the Soviets. They found such an intermediary in the French pianist Marquis Armand de Gontaut-Biron, writing to him in August 1955 in hopes that he would pass their competition prospectus on to both the “Russian” and Polish embassies in Paris. They even offered to cover any expenses he incurred by undertaking the correspondence.37 The marquis obliged his Portuguese counterparts, but when the materials made their way through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs apparatus to the Ministry of Culture, they met with a much hastier dismissal than the Viennese efforts had. The invitation and prospectus were archived with a laconic marginal notation: “we will not participate; we have received many similar invitations.”38 This incident serves as a reminder of how rigid the political division of the European continent in the early years of the Cold War could be. More interestingly, it demonstrates that even in Europe’s most closed, authoritarian societies, the organizers of cultural life sought to create sites in which representatives of the two cultural systems could be pitted directly against one another. International music competitions were particularly important in that effort. It is not clear whether or not the Soviet refusal in 1955 derailed the Portuguese competition in the same way that it stopped the Viennese competition two years earlier. It seems more likely that the competition was held up by domestic Portuguese considerations. But when the first Vianna de Motta International Piano Competition was held in Lisbon two years later, in 1957, Lev Oborin joined Armand de Gontaut-Biron on the jury that awarded the top three prizes to two Soviets and a Pole: Naum Shtarkman, Gleb Akselrod, and Milosz Magin.39 International music competitions were explicitly designed to foster competition between the Soviet and Western cultural systems in the late 1940s and 1950s, and the Soviets dominated that competition.

National Dynamics in International Competition Within the Soviet cultural empire, these competitions served a variety of overlapping and sometimes contradictory purposes. In addition to promoting young talent, contests typically had two extramusical purposes relevant to the dynamics of empire and Cold War cultural competition. The first, explicit purpose was to popularize the works of a composer or composers of the prospective host country’s nationality. In this sense, competitions had specifically national purposes, bolstering a sense of pride in the national culture

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at home while asserting its relevance internationally. These national purposes regularly mingled awkwardly with the explicitly transimperial competitive purposes that motivated organizers like Gamsjäger. Competitions could easily, therefore, become sites for the interplay between national and imperial dynamics. Such was the case in Warsaw in 1949. On 5–8 August 1949, the Polish Ministry of Culture hosted a conference of Polish composers in the fourteenth-century castle at Ł agów Lubuski. It was at this conference that Polish cultural officials, including high-ranking composers and musicologists, began to exert pressure on Polish musicians to adapt their professional activities to what was considered Soviet-style socialist realism. The key figures at Ł agów Lubuski were Deputy Minister of Culture Włodzimierz Sokorski, the composer and president of the Polish Composers’ Union, Zygmunt Mycielski, and the musicologist and vice president of the Composers’ Union, Zofia Lissa. These three made their points in general stylistic terms, through exhortation to write in specific genres (especially the mass song and cantata), and by example, praising new works that displayed straightforward musical language and identifying and critiquing allegedly “formalist” compositions. “Formalism” was the term that was most frequently deployed in domestic Soviet musical life to attack a piece or composer. It was inexact and perpetually mutable but always connoted music that utilized a complex musical language or sophisticated compositional techniques in a way that allegedly rendered the piece too difficult for general audiences to understand or enjoy. In Poland, as in the Soviet Union itself, “formalist” pieces could sometimes simply be removed from the repertory, as some of them were in this case.40 This imposition of socialist realism by national authorities, with references to Soviet publications or on the occasion of visits from Soviet cultural dignitaries, was common across East-Central Europe in 1949 and 1950.41 Hand in hand with this Sovietization of Polish composers came a vigorous celebration of Polish music, embodied by a lengthy jubilee for Fryderyk Chopin on the centennial of his death. The culmination of that jubilee was the fourth International Chopin Piano Competition. The competition began in September and concluded in October, the month of Chopin’s death. Soviet preparations to send contestants they hoped would continue their prewar winning traditions began more than nine months before the competition itself. The Council of Ministers approved a Committee on Artistic Affairs request to send a delegation in late December, and in late March an eleven-person jury for the final round of a larger selection competition was named.42 In June, the Council of Ministers responded to a Polish invitation to Soviet pianists to serve on the competition’s jury by naming as

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its representatives the piano professors Pavel Serebriakov and Lev Oborin, the latter of whom had won the inaugural event in 1929.43 And on 3 September, the Committee on Artistic Affairs proposed its final delegation of six competitors and two jury members, led by Serebriakov.44 On 1 December 1949, a report about the competition prepared by I. S. Kuznetsov, a bureaucrat in the Soviet embassy in Poland, made its rounds through the Soviet cultural administration bureaucracy, sent from the acting head of VOKS (V. G. Iakovlev) to the chairman of the Committee on Artistic Affairs (P. I. Lebedev).45 This report provides a wonderful glimpse into the tensions between national and imperial dynamics at a crucial moment of Sovietization within Polish cultural life, a moment when leaders of the Polish political establishment sought to assert the predominance of Polish musical life within the Soviet empire while simultaneously trying to advance the cause of the empire as a whole vis-à-vis the West. In this report, Kuznetsov provided a typically bland summary of the competition before switching gears to a sharp criticism of Polish attempts to fix the outcome in favor of a combination of Polish and Soviet pianists. He described the composition of the jury as heavily favoring the Poles, since they accounted for more than one-third of the total spots (actually, it was ten of twenty-three, almost half). In and of itself, of course, this was not necessarily a problem in a Chopin jubilee competition. The problem was that the “line” taken by the Polish jury members, and everything else about the competition, was controlled by representatives of the Polish Ministry of Culture and Arts through Deputy Minister Włodzimierz Sokorski and the director of its Music Department. Even before the competition began, Kuznetsov reported, Sokorski had informed him that jury members had been given instructions to orient themselves “to the complete promotion of Polish and Soviet pianists.” A week later, still before the start of the competition, Sokorski named for Kuznetsov the possible laureates of the competition—in an order very close to their final finishing places. In the same conversation, Sokorski revealed the interplay between national and imperial dynamics in this cultural bureaucrat’s mind. Kuznetsov quoted him as follows: “It is not so important who occupies first place, a Polish or a Soviet pianist,” in as much as “what is most important is to demonstrate the superiority of the entire contingent of Polish and Soviet pianists to all of the other participants in the competition.” Sokorski shared his “doubts”—“how would it be if for the first prize it turned out that two candidates tied.” And then, resolving those “doubts,” Sokorski informed

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me that according to an agreement with the [Polish] authorities, there will be two equivalent first prizes, of one million złotys apiece, but that news about the existence of the second of these prizes would be revealed only if it became necessary to divide the first prize between two candidates. As candidates for these first prizes, Sokorski then named [Halina] Czerny-Stefanska and Bella Davidovich.46 If they are to be trusted, these reported conversations display a commitment to promoting Polish musical accomplishments within the context of a larger promotion of Soviet imperial cultural production. Thus “it is not so important who occupies first place,” but it had to be a Pole or a Soviet. These statements also suggest that Sokorski, at least, was not ashamed of this manipulation and that he expected Soviet officials to share his convictions and support his methods. He would turn out to be mistaken on both counts. The Polish jury members, in contrast, seem to have been more interested in promoting Polish musical accomplishments at the expense of Soviet candidates rather than in allowing Soviets to share in the reflected glory of Chopin’s legacy and the direct praise of contemporary Polish interpreters of his music. Kuznetsov reported that his discussions with the Soviet jury members, Oborin and Serebriakov, revealed that their Polish counterparts constantly asserted, “on the one-hundredth anniversary of Chopin’s death in newly democratic Poland, first place in the competition ought to go to a Polish pianist.” Polish jury members, the Soviets alleged, intentionally lowered their marks for the previously leading Davidovich during the third and final round of the competition, dropping her out of first place, just slightly behind Czerny-Stefanska. In fact, the Soviets thought that the only reason Davido­ vich scored high enough to place second was because all the non-Polish judges—including those from France, England, Brazil, and Mexico—gave her the highest possible marks.47 Though Kuznetsov did not mention it, surely the Soviets had done the same. The result of this scoring pattern was that Czerny-Stefanska should have won the competition, with Davidovich coming second. But the Soviets protested what they, and apparently the other judges, considered the “unfair” lowering of Davidovich’s scores, the Presidium of the Chopin Committee met with Sokorski, and the previously approved plan to award two first prizes was announced. All told, Polish pianists won eight of the thirteen prizes and three of the top four, and Soviet pianists won the other five.48 Sokorski’s original goal had been realized exactly. But neither Soviet jurists nor their cultural attaché in the Soviet embassy were satisfied with this result. From their perspective, Davidovich had been

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robbed of her rightful triumph, and the other top Polish prizewinners were undeserving as well, those at the bottom of the chart scandalously so. Kuznetsov was not the only source of information about the fixing that occurred during this competition. During the competition itself, there was an exchange between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Committee on Artistic Affairs about the possibility of an embarrassing Soviet showing in Warsaw. The Soviet ambassador to Poland, Viktor Zakharovich Lebedev, probably on the basis of Kuznetsov’s conversations with Sokorski, prompted the exchange by expressing fears about a combination of an unprepared Soviet contingent and Polish jury rigging to his superiors at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Moscow. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs asked the head of the Committee on Artistic Affairs, Polikarp Ivanovich Lebedev, to look into the situation.49 Polikarp Ivanovich did so, confirming Viktor Zakharovich’s fears in part on the basis of the latter’s own evidence about Polish jury favoritism and in part on the basis of conversations with musicians at a music festival in Budapest. Those conversations suggested a widespread perception that the Poles were determined to compensate for humiliatingly poor showings at competitions in Budapest and Prague with a triumph at their own competition. Polikarp Ivanovich also strongly denied that the Soviet pianists were ill prepared and attributed any subpar performance to “bias” against them. Having come to the conclusion that the Soviets were in danger of suffering an embarrassing and—the always unspoken assumption should be noted—undeserved defeat, Polikarp Ivanovich suggested that the only remedy seemed to be “diplomatic conversations with our Polish friends.” He suggested that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs instruct Viktor Zakharovich to help Serebriakov and Oborin create “an objective and fair attitude of Polish jury members in the evaluation of Soviet pianists in the third, decisive round.”50 When that apparently failed, or even backfired, Sokorski’s originally planned gambit interceded to forge the final resolution. When all was said and done, the Soviet jury members proved sensitive to the place of the national within the larger imperial dynamics. Despite their frustrations about seeing their own candidates (slightly) under-rewarded, they remarked that the Polish contingent had indeed been the country’s strongest ever in an international competition, and they attributed that strength to the absorption of Poland into the Soviet cultural empire: “The Poles could achieve this [high level] thanks to the new democratic construction of their country, thanks to the care and attention of the Polish government, which provided government stipends to all contestants during their preparation time, which lasted about a year and which took place in conditions in which

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professors, musicologists, and music critics collectively participated in this matter.”51 For Kuznetsov and other embassy personnel throughout the Soviet cultural empire, the goal of any of these music competitions was to demonstrate the superiority of Soviet-style cultural production on a global stage. Despite the shenanigans and the heavy-handed fixing of results, Kuznetsov’s conclusion about the 1949 Chopin Competition shows that he considered it a success in those terms. He wrote that the competition had “graphically demonstrated the victory of the realistic tendency in performance art and had shown the degradation of the formalist Western European school.” The American, English, and French pianists had revealed the “complete hopelessness of their creative principles. Their unabashed distortion of Chopin’s works of genius” forced the jury to eliminate them from the competition in the first two rounds.52 This incident demonstrates that within the Soviet cultural empire in East-Central Europe during the peak of Sovietization, planning and holding performance competitions entailed balancing the imperatives of national cultural promotion and imperial integration. When those sets of imperatives collided, the response from Moscow was to assert Soviet supremacy, especially in ideological terms, but to acquiesce to the development or maintenance of a distinctly national culture, as long as that culture could still be described as “democratic.” The national was permissible (Polish domination of the Warsaw competition) so long as it did not compromise larger imperial goals (demonstration of the bankruptcy of West European cultural forms or practices). Tension between nations within the empire, hinted at by the reports of suspected Polish fixing emanating from musicians gathered in Budapest, seems to have been accepted as a given—provided that it did not threaten imperial goals. Sovietization also created circuits of information exchange that were activated during performance competitions. Soviet bureaucrats in Moscow were deeply embedded in administrative networks that were designed to convey information about the empire to the metropole. The reports from Kuznetsov and the two Lebedevs, which passed through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, VOKS, and the Committee on Artistic Affairs, as well as countless mundane memos detailing Soviet preparations for the competition that flowed primarily within the committee and VOKS bureaucracies provide ample evidence that this administrative apparatus provided a field in which potentially divergent bureaucratic interests could surface and be adjudicated. Officials in all these institutions had the same primary goal: assuring maximum Soviet advantage in international competitions. But if reaching that goal was jeopardized, as it seemed as if it might be during the

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1949 Chopin Competition, the bureaucrats who shared responsibility for achieving it could quickly shift modes, seeking to affix blame elsewhere. The exchange between the Lebedevs, in which the ambassador in Warsaw raised warnings about insufficient preparation of the competitors (the responsibility of the Committee on Artistic Affairs) and the committee chairman in Moscow countered with a call for diplomatic intervention (the responsibility of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) illustrates this potential. This time, the overarching, collective goal was essentially achieved, and neither side escalated the accusations to outright conflict. But the exchange shows that the Soviet empire’s enormous bureaucracy could always fragment even as it extended its reach into the imperial periphery. Finally, these deeply embedded administrative networks could not achieve the overarching goals of Cold War competition on their own. They essentially stopped—or contracted to encompass only embassy personnel—at the border of the Soviet cultural empire. On the other side of the imperial divide, the Soviets were much more dependent on constructing partnerships with friends or, eventually, other Western intermediaries whose interests could align with those of the Soviets. Even within the empire, some activities required less formal imperial interfaces, as well. Jury members were meant to persuade their colleagues of their own evaluations. Other musicians and bureaucrats traveling abroad were meant to report what they observed, including trends that emerged in conversations with their counterparts. Festivals and competitions provided excellent opportunities for this sort of influence peddling and information gathering to take place.

The 1950s: Scandal, Selectivity, Domination Soviet musicians, politicians, and bureaucrats developed, operated, and eventually reformed a complete set of institutions that thrived in the system of international music performance competitions that emerged after the war. Examining Soviet participation in several competitions demonstrates that Soviet arts bureaucrats and politicians deliberated at length about the choice of which competitions to contest. Perpetually confident of the superiority of their musicians, they tried to select only those competitions in which “objective” juries and a favorable (or at least neutral) political atmosphere would allow that superiority to be reflected in the final results. Their expectations were not always justified, and when they were not, Soviet musicians and cultural bureaucrats alike responded to scandal or comparatively lackluster performances by blaming “nonobjective” judging while looking for ways to improve the overall

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system. The irony that axiomatic Soviet superiority required perpetual confirmation from abroad was an essential characteristic of the Soviet understanding of its relationship with the West long before the war.53 International music competitions provided ideal settings for that dynamic to unfold. Just as fundamentally, international competitive success was integral to the music education system and a prerequisite for musicians who dreamed of a solo career at home. It was consequently used as a measure of the effectiveness of those institutions. The Soviet music system, like Soviet culture more broadly, was thus tied to the cultural competition of the Cold War. Soviet competitors and bureaucrats alike hoped and even expected to win the contests in which they competed. Both publicly and behind the proverbial closed doors of secret bureaucratic communication, they valued “objectivity” in the assessment of their competitors but measured that “objectivity” against their expectations of success and self-interested characterizations of one of the least “objectively” measurable forms of evaluation at such competitions, audience response. This perspective was exemplified during and after the 1953 Marguerite Long-Jacques Thibaud International Music Competition in Paris. The competition proved to be both a major success and a scandalous frustration for the Soviets. Analyzing the response of the Soviet delegation in Paris and officials in Moscow reveals their attitudes about superiority and objectivity in international music competitions. It also illuminates the connections between these competitions and the larger imperial confrontation with the West at a pivotal moment just after Stalin’s death and in the midst of the efflorescence of new music competitions that would last until the end of the decade. From its inception during the war, the Long-Thibaud Competition had always been a joint piano and violin competition with the first prizes named for each of the original sponsors, Marguerite Long for piano and Jacques Thibaud for violin. The 1953 competition was the fifth overall, the fourth with an international cast of competitors and jurors, and the first with Soviet participation.54 In June 1953, the Soviet delegation descended on Paris with expectations of triumph. David Oistrakh and Lev Oborin represented the Soviet Union on the competition’s violin and piano juries, respectively, Nelli Shkolnikova and Rafail Sobolevskii competed in the violin competition, and Stanislav Neuhaus and Evgenii Malinin competed in the piano division. The violinists were accompanied in the early rounds by top Soviet accompanist and frequent international traveler, Vladimir Iampolsky. After the competition, the jurors were to give several concerts in France, as would any potential laureates from among the competitors. The delegation was led by the composer Dmitrii Kabalevsky.55

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Soviet cultural elites considered the Long-Thibaud Competition “one of the most serious competitions in which Soviet musicians have participated.”56 Seriousness was measured by the number and international diversity of the contestants, the prestige of the jury members, and the difficulty of the requirements. Long-Thibaud 1953 was serious in all these categories. Kabalevsky noted that there were 120 competitors representing twenty-five countries, including 36 from France (9 violinists and 27 pianists), 15 from the United States (7 violinists and 8 pianists), and 4 from the Soviet Union (2 violinists and 2 pianists). Oistrakh and Oborin were joined on their respective juries by luminaries from all over the Western world, including the pianists Arthur Rubinstein from the United States and Aldo Ciccolini from Italy, the famously influential doyenne of modernism Nadia Boulanger, a host of violinists and conductors, and the directors of conservatories in Valencia, Lausanne, Venice, and The Hague.57 The competition was also very demanding, requiring three rounds comprising three separate concert programs during which the competitors would have to demonstrate their ability to perform what Kabalevsky called “the most . . . complicated works of the violin and piano repertory.”58 The competition began on 10 June with the violin division, and already during the first round, it was clear to Kabalevsky that the Soviet competitors were in a league apart. Shkolnikova established herself as the leader with only Sobolevsky and the French violinist Blanche Tarjus as realistic challengers. During the second round, Tarjus fell back in Kabalevsky’s opinion, leaving Shkolnikova and Sobolevsky to battle for the first and second prizes in the third and final round. The third round presented the most complicated challenge, demanding that the young soloists perform a major concerto with orchestral accompaniment. The performances took place with few or no preparatory rehearsals, and Kabalevsky complained that the orchestra was “very weak.” Nevertheless, Shkolnikova and Sobolevsky acquitted themselves admirably, with Shkolnikova separating herself from the rest, winning the special Ginette Neveu Prize for best performance of a concerto with orchestral accompaniment and thereby winning the competition’s first prize overall.59 Then, according to Kabalevsky’s account, politics intervened when French judges feared embarrassment if Tarjus dropped to third. Unwilling to deny the worthy Sobolevsky second, the jury decided to award two second prizes, splitting them between Sobolevsky and Tarjus (who, even according to Kabalevsky, scored slightly better than Sobolevsky).60 Apparently disappointed that Sobolevsky had to share his second prize, Kabalevsky nevertheless seemed satisfied with the result. He praised all the finalists for playing well in the last round,

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noting that the overall artistic level of the competition was so high that the Soviet triumph was extremely difficult and therefore especially valuable.61 The piano competition did not go quite so well. The division was incredibly crowded, with eighty-nine competitors, nearly three times as many as there were violinists.62 Soviet luck began badly when Neuhaus drew the most disadvantageous performance slot of the entire competition: first. Despite the bad draw, he played well enough—especially the mandatory Chopin sonata—to survive a cut of two-thirds of the competitors and advance to the second round. He was joined there by Malinin, who had dazzled with his rendition of one of Liszt’s Mephisto Waltzes.63 Kabalevsky and Oborin both thought that the two young Soviet pianists played well in the second round and deserved to advance, but a majority of the jury disagreed, sending only Malinin forward to the third and final round. Based on “rumors” that he claimed had already begun circulating during the second round, Kabalevsky attributed Neuhaus’s exit from the competition to discomfort among the judges about a possible Soviet sweep of both competitions. Oborin merely noted that the audience protested when the jury decided not to send Neuhaus to the finals, but Kabalevsky suggested an actual voting conspiracy. The third round was comprised of a “Chopin round” and the performance of a concerto with orchestral accompaniment. Neuhaus had performed the first round’s mandatory Chopin sonata so well that Kabalevsky though he would be a strong contender to win the entire competition if he were to advance. Considering Malinin’s consistently strong performances over both rounds, the two Soviets were poised to dominate just as the violinists had. Kabalevsky insinuated that the jury therefore opted to eliminate Neuhaus before his mastery of Chopin could come into play. Whatever the jury’s motivations, when the finalists were announced, Kabalevsky reported that the audience, including Marguerite Long herself, protested the “nonobjective” decision, either by whistling and shouting or storming out of the hall.64 The scandal had just begun. Kabalevsky thought that in the finals, Malinin established himself as the clear favorite to win: “The public and critics expressed certainty that the Soviet pianist Malinin, who supremely played . . . works by Chopin and, especially, Rachmaninoff ’s Second [Piano] Concerto with orchestra, was the undisputed candidate for the first prize. The success with which his performance was accompanied could not be compared to the success of a single one of his competitors.”65 But it was not to be. When the jury appeared after a particularly long period of deliberation, its chair, Jacques Ibert, announced that no first prize would be awarded at all. Instead, Malinin and the French pianist Philippe Entremont would each be awarded second

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prize. At this point in his tale, Kabalevsky’s report dissolves into a colorful display of indignation. He described a dismayed audience shouting “Down with the jury!” and rhythmically chanting Malinin’s name, concluding: “thus public opinion awarded first prize to the Soviet performer.”66 In addition to this report about the behavior of the audience, Kabalevsky depended on two other factors to condemn the jury’s final decision. First, he used reports (from Oborin?) of the jury’s final vote counts to claim that Malinin had won because he received an overall higher score than Entremont. Second, he reported the actions of the competition’s eponymous sponsors. Long apparently offered to augment the prize money fund by 300,000 francs so that the jury could award joint first prizes instead of joint seconds. When the jury nevertheless voted not to award first, Long and Thibaud dramatically rose from their seats and marched from the hall in protest.67 In a last recourse to “public opinion,” Kabalevsky counted curtain calls at the celebratory concert of champions that took place on 22 June, with Shkolnikova, Entremont, and Malinin accompanied by the Orchestre Radio-Symphonique conducted by Charles Munch. Entremont received six curtain calls after his performance of a Brahms piano concerto, Shkolnikova received eight after her performance of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, and Malinin received ten after his concluding performance of the Rachmaninoff. In a final reference to Long’s ambiguous actions, Kabalevsky noted that she concluded the celebratory evening by pronouncing from her seat in the hall that “I apologize for the distribution of the prizes, but that is . . . a family matter.”68 Whatever the scandalous outcome, Kabalevsky rightly concluded his discussion of the competition by claiming it as a further triumph for the Soviet performance school in the international arena. Three of the four Soviet competitors finished in the top two places in their respective contests, and in a jab that epitomizes the interimperial competition that was a defining characteristic of these events, Kabalevsky pointedly compared that success to the relative failure of the Americans. Of the eight American pianists to enter, none made the final round. Of the seven American violinists, there were but two finalists, each of whom placed below both Soviets. The result was that the French press spoke of two dominant music performance schools: the Soviet and the French.69 Kabalevsky’s treatment of the Long-Thibaud 1953 scandal thus demonstrates that the scandal was generated by a contradiction between the opinion of what Kabalevsky considered a “nonobjective” jury and a combination of his reading of public opinion as sharply favoring the Soviet pianist and the reactions of the French organizers regarding the results. But the absence of any Americans from contention rendered the competition

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a Soviet success regardless of its specific outcome. But how does Kabalevsky’s depiction of the scandal stand up when compared to the French reaction to the same competition, in which a French pianist, already a laureate at the same competition two years earlier, suffered the same indignity as Malinin? French press accounts largely concur with Kabalevsky’s, though the exact nature of the universally acknowledged scandal appears somewhat different from the French perspective. The competition received extensive coverage in the newspaper affiliated with the French Communist Party, L’Humanité and moderate coverage in both the center-left newspaper Le Monde and the conservative Le Figaro. In its comparatively lengthy article about the competition’s conclusion, L’Humanité rehearsed the audience’s disapproval regarding the selection of finalists earlier in the competition. Audience support for Neuhaus was central to this disapproval, but unlike in Kabalevsky’s account, the absence of an American in the final round was also apparently cause for public consternation.70 L’Humanité’s account included a more complete description of the progress of the third round, including the evaluation that Entremont’s rendition of the Brahms piano concerto was marred by “some disappointments.” The competition’s major scandal was said to be the jury’s refusal to award a first prize. The description of Long and Thibaud’s ostentatious departure from the hall and the cries of dismay from the audience upon learning the results in L’Humanité’s version mirror Kabalevsky’s very closely, down to the cries for Malinin in the brouhaha that followed the announcement.71 Finally, like Kabalevsky, L’Humanité tied the scandal to politics by reporting that Thibaud considered such a link inappropriate: “At the end of the competition, Jacques Thibaud said to me: ‘A competition like ours is a musical competition, and politics shouldn’t matter: the best should win whatever.’ There was an undisputed winner: Evgeny Malinin, and he was denied the prize. It seems that the jury did everything that it could so that the two grand prizes did not go to two Soviets. This is a bad policy.”72 L’Humanité, like Kabalevsky but not necessarily Thibaud, would have awarded the first prize to Malinin.73 Le Monde’s coverage, too, confirms that the competition ended in scandal. However, this newspaper’s version reduced that scandal to a simple question of the jury’s decision not to award a first prize. Its first mention of the scandal came the day after the concluding celebratory performances and simply noted popular disagreement with the jury’s decision.74 Le Monde’s coverage of the final concert in the following day’s paper devoted far more column space to a rapturous celebration of Shkolnikova’s performance of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, but like Kabalevsky, it also noted the audience

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response to the two pianists. Unlike Kabalevsky, though, Le Monde did not differentiate between them, noting that Entremont “earned a warm standing ovation” but also that “each of the performers also had many friends in the hall and was no less vigorously applauded.” Similarly, the last chords of Malinin’s performance of the Rachmaninoff were said to have been “greeted by a warm demonstration.”75 Like L’Humanité, Le Monde followed up with one of the organizers, publishing a note from Marguerite Long in which she explained her protest against the jury’s decision after the finals in a way that partly undercuts Kabalevsky’s interpretation of the scandal. In short, Long clarified that she disagreed with the decision not to award a first prize. She explicitly noted that she was not protesting in favor of one pianist or the other but thinking of the contest and its overall efficacy. She expressed her opinion that the concert for the prizewinners left no doubts about the merits of both Malinin and Entremont and reiterated that she thought the level of the competition merited a first prize. That said, she also supported the jury, explaining that her disagreement did not rise to the level of disavowing a group of distinguished musicians whom, after all, she had invited. She concluded by praising Ibert for his “equity, courtesy, and independence of thought throughout the proceedings.”76 That Long’s display was not a show of support for Malinin alone should come as no surprise; after all, Entremont was her own former student.77 Soviet and French observers alike thus expected international music competitions to be judged “objectively,” without contamination by “politics.” Only the Soviets and those on the French far left with whom they had the strongest ties, however, thought that the judging in the Long-Thibaud Competition of 1953 violated that principle. For the others, the real scandal was that the high level of the pianists’ performances, measured mostly by the positive audience response to the performances of Malinin and Entremont during and after the competition, warranted a first prize (perhaps even a joint one, though only Kabalevsky raised this possibility), whereas the jury had awarded none. Despite Soviet displeasure at the outcome, the fact that Malinin was one of those who earned the top prize awarded still allowed official observer and jury member alike to proclaim the competition a Soviet success. This constellation of objectivity, assumed superiority, and expectations of success would continue to characterize Soviet preparation for international competitions throughout the decade. Soviet musicians who traveled abroad to compete in international performance competitions always extended their visits to concertize and record, as well, cementing existing relationships with sympathetic individuals and groups in the West and seeking to propagandize the Soviet cultural system.

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The activities of Oistrakh, Oborin, Shkolnikova, and Malinin after the Long-Thibaud Competition in the summer of 1953 were typical. The competition laureates gave concerts in Paris and other French cities as part of the benefits of having won the competition.78 Oistrakh and Oborin also performed several times each, taking advantage of their visit to impress Parisian high society and to bolster the prestige of the France-USSR Society. In his description of one of these concerts, Kabalevsky revealed deeply entrenched Soviet assumptions about the links among wealth, class, and political affiliation, suggesting that the success of the concert was particularly impressive because “prices for the concert were very high and the public dressed in tuxedos and evening gowns that filled the hall could not in any way be classified as notorious friends of the Soviet Union.”79 Other concerts were organized by exactly those “notorious friends,” the France-USSR Society, which acted as a lightning rod for controversy born of the conditions of Cold War confrontation. One of the society’s concerts was for the competition’s laureates, including the violinist Blanche Tarjus. According to Kabalevsky, Tarjus’s participation was put in jeopardy by the fact that she was under contract to an impresario to tour the United States in 1954. When the impresario learned of her plans to perform under the auspices of France’s Soviet friendship society, he threatened to withdraw her American tour if she participated. Thibaud, her teacher, then threatened to withdraw his patronage from her if she canceled her appearance, placing her in an unenviable position in the aftermath of her competitive success. She opted to perform, and apparently did very well.80 Tarjus apparently also managed the impresario, for she did make her American debut in 1954.81 But the conflict shows just how fundamental interimperial tension was to the cultural display surrounding international music competitions. The appearances of the internationally renowned jury members and the new up-and-coming stars under France-USSR Society auspices were meant to boost the prestige of the pro-Soviet organization in France. Other French “friends” also benefited from the presence of the Soviet musicians in their country. For example, the music publisher and record label Chant du Monde continued to reap the benefits of the close relationship to Soviet officialdom it forged during the Iron Curtain crisis. It held recording sessions with Oistrakh, Oborin, Neuhaus, Sobolevsky, and Shkolnikova. (Malinin missed the recording session, since he left Paris to give a concert in Bordeaux the day it was scheduled.) The established jury members each recorded six LP sides and the contestants each recorded two, waiving their honoraria since, as Kabalevsky put it, Chant du Monde was “progressive.”82 These recording sessions were only one component of the strengthening relationship between

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Chant du Monde and Soviet musicians that emerged in the aftermath of the competition. The publisher’s director, Renaud de Jouvenel, opened a discussion with Kabalevsky in which he complained about the difficulties of propagandizing Soviet music in France caused by the inefficiency of the two Soviet organizations charged with delivering materials to him: VOKS and Mezhdunarodnaia kniga. Establishing a smoother collaboration between these Soviet institutions and Chant du Monde was one of Kabalevsky’s main recommendations in his final report.83 Successful appearances in international music competitions thus supplied the Soviets with a host of auxiliary benefits. They gave Soviet musicians greater international exposure, they provided direct propaganda for the strength of the Soviet cultural production system, and they offered opportunities to build closer relationships with allies and sympathetic groups in the West. For the rest of the 1950s, Soviet policy makers weighed these benefits against the dangers of “nonobjective” judges and inadequate preparation when choosing which competitions to contest. Selectivity, 1950–1955

Throughout the 1950s, Soviet cultural policy makers were selective about where to send Soviet artists to compete. They sought to avoid scandals like that of the Long-Thibaud Competition of the summer of 1953 by ensuring that they sent competitors only to events with “objective” conditions at which they were likely to succeed. This practice was in effect both before and after 1953, so the Long-Thibaud scandal shows that it did not always work as cultural bureaucrats expected. There was always an element of competitive uncertainty, but by selecting competitions that guaranteed a Soviet presence on the jury in cities where the political climate was not too hostile, they hoped to minimize that uncertainty. Underlying this set of practices was an assumption of Soviet superiority, not often articulated but always present just below the surface. The result was that for Soviet policy makers, “objectivity” and likely Soviet victory were synonymous. Active though Soviet musicians were on the emerging international competition circuits, many competitions came and went without Soviet participation. Sometimes, the decision not to participate was easy and quick. For example, in September 1950, the Committee on Artistic Affairs received an invitation from perhaps the most prestigious opera theater in Europe, Milan’s La Scala, which was holding an international competition for the composition of new opera. The competition’s victor would win the Giuseppe Verdi Prize. The problem from the Soviet perspective, quickly noted by committee

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bureaucrats, was that the socialist realism in which Soviet composers were required to compose operas was exceptionally unlikely to win Western competitions. The vast majority of the contestants would write in modernist idioms, and the judges would reward excellence in those idioms. There was simply no point in participating.84 The comparative isolation of Soviet composers compared to their virtuoso instrumentalist counterparts was reinforced by the fundamental lack of competitiveness of Soviet compositions among professional Western audiences.85 A sense of how the Committee on Artistic Affairs perceived Soviet prospects in potential competitions is provided by bureaucratic discussion of the invitation for Soviet musicians to participate in the 1951 and 1952 Queen Elisabeth competitions in Brussels. The Soviet embassy in Brussels received the invitation through official channels sometime in early August 1950 and passed the request on to P. I. Lebedev, the head of the Committee on Artistic Affairs.86 Lebedev apparently considered the proposal and decided to decline, noting that Soviet participation “was not necessary.”87 Two weeks later, however, committee leaders seem to have reconsidered, and they wrote again to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to ask for more complete information. The specific information they requested reveals typical bureaucratic preoccupations about competitions. They wanted more detailed information about the competition itself, including the composition of the jury and the rules governing its work. They also requested information “about the political situation surrounding this competition” as well as “the political attributes of the Belgian music specialists who [were] organizing” it.88 The ministry responded quickly, sending twenty-five copies of the competition’s regulations translated into Russian just two days later.89 Arts bureaucrats took two weeks to examine the regulations, highlighting passages discussing mandatory repertoire and, especially, rules governing the selection of the jury, one-third of which was to be chosen by the competition’s organizing committee on the basis of recommendations from the contestants’ countries. This lack of control over who would serve on the jury appears to have been the stumbling block that hindered Soviet participation.90 At the end of September, the committee reiterated its mild objection to Soviet participation, shifting its opinion from “not necessary” to “impractical.”91 But the Committee on Artistic Affairs did not have the final word regarding any international activities. In February 1951, the issue was raised again, and this time it reached the Politburo. The Soviets would send a delegation after all. Leading violin professors drilled their strongest students on the most difficult repertoire in preparation, and the Committee on Artistic Affairs selected a complete delegation comprising a jury member (David Oistrakh),

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an expert observer (Composers’ Union Secretary Mikhail Chulaki, who, like Kabalevsky in Paris two years later, led the delegation), and four young violinists to compete.92 They dominated. Leonid Kogan won, Mikhail Vaiman placed second, Aleksei Gorokhov placed fifth, and Olga Kaverzneva placed seventh.93 Regardless of the decision about whether or not to compete, the decision making here was typical. When general political circumstances were found wanting, the Soviets did not participate. In 1951, for example, they declined to participate in an “international musical olympiad” in Salzburg because of fears that the olympiad would be a forum to propagandize “reactionary” art.94 When the Soviets were not offered what they considered adequate representation on the jury, they declined. In 1957, they refused to participate in a multidivision competition in Geneva because inadequate jury representation was understood as one sign among many of an unfavorable political situation.95 If a potential competition was plagued by a combination of these factors, such as an unfavorable jury coupled with fears that Soviet competitors could not prepare in time, they did not participate. Such was the case with the 1955 Buzoni Piano Competition in Bolzano, Italy.96 Sometimes, Soviet officials declined to participate in competitions without explaining their motivations at all.97 Concern, 1955–1956

Once they decided to compete, Soviet officials expected to win. Coupled with a general desire to exert extreme central control over all international cultural activities, that expectation produced detailed assessments of Soviet musicians’ performances abroad and consternation when they were not sufficiently dominant. A series of comparatively lackluster performances in 1955 generated a Central Committee investigation of the state of Soviet competitiveness in music that eventually reached the Secretariat. The investigation was initiated by officials in the Central Committee’s arts oversight bureaucracy after they became concerned about a decline in Soviet dominance. Their recommendations and the Secretariat’s instructions to implement them demonstrate that preparation for international performance competitions was a basic structural component of the Soviet music education system, and the Soviet political elite used the results of those competitions to judge the efficacy of that system. Soviet musicians competed in five major competitions in 1955: the Chopin International Piano Competition in Warsaw, the Queen Elisabeth International Violin Competition in Brussels, the Long-Thibaud Competition

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in Paris, the G. Vigan International Cello Competition in Prague, and the complex of instrumental competitions that took place during the Fifth World Youth Festival in Warsaw. The cellists met—or even slightly exceeded—expectations when the three Soviet contestants swept the top spots at the Vigan (Mikhail Khomitser won; Medeia Abramian and Tatiana Priimenko tied for second). The others disappointed. At the Chopin Competition, Vladimir Ashkenazy placed second to the Pole Adam Harasiewicz: not a bad showing considering the importance Polish juries placed on Polish success at the competition. The other Soviet pianists finished further out of contention than usual, in fifth (Naum Shtarkman), sixth (Dmitrii Paperno), ninth (Dmitrii Sakharov), and eleventh (Nina Lelchuk). One (Irina Siialova, the only non-Muscovite in the delegation) even failed to place at all. In Brussels, an American (Berl Senofsky) edged out Iulian Sitkovetsky, but again the other Soviets finished well off the pace, in fifth and eleventh. In Paris, Olga Parkhomenko, Eduard Grach, and Valerii Klimov finished second (to the French violinist Devy Erlih), third, and fifth in the Thibaud violin competition. On the piano side, for the second competition in a row, no first was awarded, and second was split between Soviet (Dmitrii Bashkirov) and French (Bernard Ringeissen) pianists. Gleb Akselrod finished fourth, but the third Soviet competitor finished out of the running.98 This panoply of laureates would probably have been considered a major accomplishment in most countries, and the Soviet officials who reported the results did put a positive face on them, noting that a number of the laureates were “new names.” But they also complained: “However, the general level of preparation of our participants dropped—in the past, Soviet performers, as a rule, came in first.”99 When they noticed this decline, bureaucrats in the Central Committee’s Department of Science and Culture began a thorough inquiry into its causes. They debriefed jury members and competitors, and they spoke with the other experts who had participated in selecting them to compete abroad. They concluded that the work of Soviet conservatories across the board, but especially the Moscow Conservatory, in preparing world-class performers had “weakened.”100 The bureaucrats blamed the declining performance of Soviet competitors abroad on one factor that was endemic to music competitions but external to the Soviet system and five developments internal to it. The external factor was biased judging. Just as Kabalevsky had in 1953, these officials noted that Soviet jurors reported that members of the juries from other countries could not always be counted on to judge Soviet contestants “objectively.” Poles at the Chopin Competition in Warsaw and the French at the Long-Thibaud Competition in Paris were singled out as particularly egregious. The Soviet judges reported that their second-place finishers

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should have won in both competitions, and they complained that the Poles openly celebrated Harasiewicz’s victory over Ashkenazy both as a celebration of their countryman’s triumph and because it came at the expense of a Soviet pianist.101 The sixth-place finisher in that competition, Dmitrii Paperno, remembers the final results as scandalous. According to Paperno’s account, Ashkenazy had established an insurmountable lead in the point totals accumulated in the early rounds. When the final round began, the competitors in places two through ten were separated by minuscule margins, so that any outcome after Ashkenazy’s inevitable first was conceivable. But rumors circulated that the French and Polish judges had formed an alliance to ensure that Harasiewicz would win and the French pianists place somewhere near the top. When Ashkenazy succumbed to nerves and played less confidently, it opened the door for Harasiewicz. Harasiewicz rose to the challenge and played his most outstanding round. Since Ashkenazy’s lead was technically insurmountable, though, Harasiewicz’s victory was still scandalous.102 The Central Committee bureaucrats no doubt heard something resembling this description regarding all the competitions in which the Soviets had not prevailed. Their response at least partly undermined the “objectivity” in judging they typically sought. Their principal suggestion was “to more successfully choose competition jury members from the USSR, keeping in mind those artists who combine artistic authority with the ability to actively defend the interests of our competitors.”103 The ever-present underlying assumption of superiority remains intact in this statement, since “defending” the competitors (as opposed, say, to “promoting” them) assumes the inherent worthiness of the Soviet entrants. But the call to defend them “actively” was just as much a call to participate in exactly the sort of factionalism that officials and jury members alike typically condemned as “nonobjective.” This circular definition of “objectivity,” according to which inherently superior Soviet competitors required defending by active Soviet jurors, was one of the ironies of Soviet cultural competition abroad. The other measure that the bureaucrats suggested was designed to influence the atmosphere outside the jury’s deliberations in order to generate popular pressure for Soviet success. They suggested “sending to the city in which the competition is being held a group of authoritative musicians who are capable of actively constructing popular opinion around the competition’s participants.”104 This suggestion, which resonates so clearly with Kabalevsky’s constant recourse to the comparative audience response in Paris in 1953, is much more compatible than the call to select jurors who would actively “defend” Soviet interests with the declared interest in “objectivity.” If jury bias were to prevent superior Soviet contestants from winning competitions, these officials at least would prefer a popular scandal ensue.105

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In their description of the internal causes of 1955’s comparatively lackluster performance, the officials did not just conclude that preparation for competitions per se had slackened, but that the conservatories’ training of performers more generally had declined. This alleged systemic decline was attributed to five developments that essentially caused a circular, self-defeating feedback loop. First, the incessant multiplication of elite status so that it was concentrated in comparatively few individuals in the Soviet music world meant that the leading professors at the Moscow Conservatory were also the most frequent international travelers.106 Oistrakh, Gilels, and Oborin were singled out for spending little time on teaching and much more on international concertizing. Their students were left under the charge of assistants, who the officials described as having “little authority.”107 Touring abroad was an ideal way to showcase Soviet cultural excellence, but it undermined the reproduction of that excellence. Second, in what was perhaps a subtle criticism of the intense focus on ideological indoctrination that was associated with the late Stalin period, the officials also noted that conservatory curricula had become weighed down by too many mandatory subjects, leaving students little time to concentrate on a specialty.108 The rest of the five deleterious developments concerned preparation for the competitions themselves: contestants were not selected early enough (the Poles were said to have had a six-month head start over the Soviets before the Chopin Competition); the least experienced contestants were not given enough preparation time with leading experts (Siialova, who failed to place in Warsaw, for example, was said to have spent all of her preparation time alone rather than working with Oborin, as she should have); and the Moscow Conservatory had just become sloppy, resting on its laurels in self-satisfaction.109 Despite directly implicating the Moscow Conservatory as the most significant cause of their concern, the officials concluded their memo by suggesting that the conservatory’s leaders convene to discuss how to restore the training system before the next season’s competitions.110 One of the contestants that year confirms what this report suggests about the centrality of international music competitions not just to the music education system but also to the career prospects of the musicians the system produced. Writing from emigration in Chicago four decades later, Dmitrii Paperno explained that success at an international competition was an essential prerequisite for building a solo career at home: “For better or worse, in the Soviet Union a young performer who had not won a competition had virtually no access to the concert stage. No Moscow concert bureau would hire a soloist without this mandatory ‘laureate’s hat’ above his name.”111 Grooming champions of international performance competitions was a basic purpose of the Soviet education and domestic concertizing systems, and international

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results were thus used to measure the success of that system and the individual musicians it produced. Grooming Champions

The Soviet Union had a large system of conservatories dispersed throughout its republics. An extensive preparatory apparatus that spanned this system and culminated in Moscow began to operate as soon as policy makers decided the Soviets would compete in a given international competition. Because of the centrality of international performance competitions in the Soviet music performance system, preparing for a shot at the prize was perhaps the most important activity of an aspiring instrumentalist’s early career. Dmitrii Paperno devoted a long section of his memoirs to a fascinating description of his own efforts, concluding with his sixth-place success in Warsaw and the instant improvement in his career prospects and material comfort that derived from placing in the top ten there.112 Soviet arts officials, conservatory directors, and faculty took the rankings just as seriously as contestants. They created and operated a system that was lengthy and rigorous. It was also heavily slanted toward Moscow, despite vigorous efforts by conservatories outside Moscow to promote their own students, and, especially during Stalin’s last years, at least partly structured by the general ideological campaigns of the day. The selection for the 1949 Warsaw Chopin Competition illustrates this process. The decision to participate in the competition was made in December 1948, and planning for a major domestic selection competition began almost immediately. In January 1949, the Committee on Artistic Affairs decided to hold the selection competition in Moscow that April and to invite the best young pianists from Moscow, Leningrad, Ukraine, Georgia, and Armenia to participate.113 Conservatories in the chosen republics selected students or postgraduate assistants who they thought were likely to be most competitive, then had them prepare autobiographical statements that stressed their artistic training but also included the family histories that were so often used by Soviet officials to monitor the political fitness of applicants of all sorts.114 Then they petitioned the Committee on Artistic Affairs to have them included in the Moscow selection round.115 A jury was chosen, usually composed mainly of leading experts at the Moscow Conservatory, a few prominent Leningraders, and a smattering of officials from the Committee on Artistic Affairs. For the Warsaw 1949 competition, the selection jury was chaired by Aleksandr Anisimov, the head of the Chief Directorate for Music Institutions in the Committee on Artistic Affairs. He was joined by his

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assistant head, the chief conductor of the Bolshoi Theater, a composer from the Soviet Composers’ Union, five Moscow Conservatory professors, and one Leningrad Conservatory professor. Of the ten experts on the jury, nine of them were thus based in Moscow. Five were prominent and accomplished pianists, two were bureaucrats in the government arts oversight bureaucracy, two were composers, and one was a leading conductor.116 At the end of this selection process, the Committee on Artistic Affairs suggested sending six competitors: all but one were students at the Moscow Conservatory, all but one were Russian, and all but two were members of the Komsomol.117 This distribution of finalists reflects both a typical strong preference for Moscow-based musicians that was consistent throughout this period and a particularity of 1949. During the antisemitic anticomopolitanism campaigns that plagued the cultural sphere in Stalin’s last years, it was always extremely difficult for Jewish contenders to advance beyond the finals.118 In the 1950 selection for the Prague Spring Festival’s music and dance competitions, a similar set of preferences was just as evident. In addition to performers from the Moscow Conservatory, the Gnesin Institute, and the Moscow Higher School of Choreography, contestants traveled to Moscow from Leningrad, Kiev, Tbilisi, and Erevan, representing the music and dance education institutions from each of those cities. In a rigorous final round, 107 contestants were judged by a similarly Moscow-dominated jury. The Committee on Artistic Affairs selected twenty participants, including thirteen musicians and seven dancers. Of the six instrumentalists, four were students at the Moscow Conservatory, and two were students at the Leningrad Conservatory. Five were Russian, one Jewish. The seven vocalists were a little bit more diverse, though Moscow still predominated: three Russians were students at the Moscow Conservatory, Gnesin Institute, and Minsk Conservatory; a Buriat-Mongol soprano was a student in the Nationalities Studio of the Moscow Conservatory, a Belorussian mezzo soprano was a student at the Leningrad Conservatory, and a Ukrainian bass and Georgian dramatic soprano each came from their respective republics’ conservatories. Least diverse of all were the dancers: all seven were Russian, six were students at the Moscow Choreography School, and the seventh (described as such) was from the Leningrad Choreography School.119 That Muscovites utterly dominated this list of finalists was typical of the centralization of the institutions that governed Soviet musical life. All-USSR institutions were located in Moscow and controlled by their members who lived in the city. At the same time, the developmentalism that was so central to Soviet ideological understandings of historical progress was materialized

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through the practice of bringing especially outstanding representatives of the musical life of republics arrayed further down the Soviet Union’s cultural gradient to the capital (or to Leningrad) for advanced training.120 Institutional structures and administrative practices thus combined to concentrate talent in the capital, where it was then judged by experts whose own biases led them to privilege that talent even further. That Moscow dominated was profoundly overdetermined throughout the Stalin and early Khrushchev years. That Russians among those Muscovites did in these competitions was at least in part a product of the antisemitism of Stalin’s last years. Even when antisemitism did not directly play a role, the government and party arts oversights institutions vetted potential competitors and occasionally intervened to alter the results suggested by the juries. For example, Dmitrii Paperno explains that in the midst of what he and his teachers alike considered his last, best opportunity to compete internationally (at the 1955 Chopin Competition in Warsaw), he progressed solidly through all the qualification rounds and emerged from the finals as one of the six winners. The competition took place in February 1955, so the Soviet contestants spent the fall in intense preparations. Before they were sent to the Composers’ Union’s working resort outside Moscow, however, Paperno remembers being surprised by the announcement of an additional final round, this time with the contestants performing with a live orchestra for a panel of politicians. He remembers everyone assuming that the purpose was to trim the number of participants, and he and Dmitrii Sakharov were those trimmed. Understandably discouraged and upset, Paperno retreated from practicing altogether until, suddenly, in January, he received a call informing him that he would be competing after all. Out of shape mentally and physically, he scrambled to make good use of the little time that remained before the competition. By finishing sixth in Warsaw and earning the title “laureate,” he ensured himself a solo career.121 The archival record confirms Paperno’s recollections in most respects, with the exception of his memory of the final orchestral round as a surprise. In late October 1954, Georgii Aleksandrov, the minister of culture, reported to the Central Committee about his ministry’s preparations for the Warsaw Chopin Competition. In his report, he noted that in April, the Central Committee had instructed the ministry to select four candidates to send abroad. Two selection rounds had netted six top contenders: Ashkenazy, Lelchuk, Paperno, Sakharov, Siialova, and Shtarkman. A final round of performances by the six finalists with orchestra was scheduled for 10–15 November, but the competition’s organizers in Warsaw were pushing for the ministry to name its delegation sooner than that. Consequently, Aleksandrov

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sought permission to tell his Polish counterparts that the final team would consist of four of the six.122 After a rapid vetting by its Culture Department, the Central Committee assented to the request.123 Missing from this account is an explanation for why the number of contestants was eventually increased, but all six finalists identified by Aleksandrov and hypothetically approved by the Central Committee eventually did participate, with the results already described. These manipulations of the selection process at home contradicted the Soviets’ main complaint—the “objectivity” of the judging—about competitions abroad and demonstrate that commitment to objectivity stopped at the Soviet border. Excluding contestants because of nonmusical criteria derived from the latest ideological campaign, like the antisemitism of anticosmopolitanism, certainly undermined “objectivity” in exactly the same ways that Soviet officials feared that the political context would prevent their superior competitors from winning abroad. Even the somewhat less interventionist vetting of the proposed candidates at the highest levels of political power could potentially weaken the competitive strength of Soviet delegations. But the talent pool in the Soviet conservatory system was so deep that these hypocritical interventions damaged individuals’ prospects without fundamentally jeopardizing Soviet success more generally. As Paperno’s discussion of the psychological pressure inherent in this perpetually competitive system of training, competing, and concertizing suggests, the focus on Soviet success at international competitions took its toll on the students who were—or even would eventually be—involved. In 1953, students at the Moscow Conservatory’s special music primary school studied a full range of academic subjects in addition to receiving intensive training on their musical instruments. The result was a mandatory eleven- to twelve-hour day in the lower grades, and a sixteen- to seventeen-hour day in the upper grades, the main difference being how much practice time was expected. Though this extremely intensive curriculum had produced impressive results, grooming thirty-four all-Union and international competition laureates, the children were overtaxed and their health suffered. With little opportunity to breathe fresh air, let alone participate in sports, and suffering from chronic sleep deprivation, the students were frequently ill.124 Though individual reforms around the edges of the system were attempted periodically, the fundamental importance of competition and the overwork that was tied to it never essentially changed. International competitive success was too integral to the entire Soviet music system. Indeed, this exceptionally rigorous and focused training regimen in music was analogous to the highly selective and intensive training systems that the Soviets developed for potential

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Olympic athletes.125 As it did in music competitions, those Olympic training programs produced exceptional success, demonstrating that the Soviet system achieved particularly dominant results in fields in which talented youth were identified early, given exhaustive technical training, and had their skills honed in high-stakes domestic competition. After World War II, a robust, extensive system of international music competitions grew out of a few prominent prewar beginnings as organizers all over Europe, on both sides of the imperial divide, pitted pianists, violinists, cellists, vocalists, and less frequently other instrumentalists and even composers against one another. Imperial competition was fundamental to this new system from the start, explicitly and intentionally, as organizers sought to ensure that representatives from both East and West would compete and observers all around interpreted the often widely publicized events as moments of direct cultural competition between the systems. At the same time that they were creating clashes between imperial systems, organizers also sought to promote their own national culture, popularizing works by favorite composers by including them on the competitions’ mandatory repertory lists and touting the accomplishments of their most talented young performers, occasionally even going to scandalous lengths to boost their final placings. The music competition system thus generated complicated dynamics between national and imperial concerns and goals. Through the mid-1950s, Soviet arts bureaucrats, politicians, and musicians, budding professionals and established superstars alike, worked to establish systems of selection, preparation, and reward that made the results of these competitions into decisive measures of individual success and institutional efficacy. Musicians could not hope for a domestic concertizing career unless they placed in international competition. But once they won the title of international laureate, such a career was almost guaranteed. These systems were so effective that Soviet musicians were unmatched on the international competition circuit. But when that success flagged even slightly, arts bureaucrats, politicians, and even musicians who were actively involved in high-level music education considered it an indictment of the conservatory system as a whole. International music competitions thus played a profound role in structuring Soviet musical life. International competitions were important to arts bureaucrats and politicians because overwhelming Soviet success provided propaganda advantages. Removed as they were from the intense psychological pressures, the hours of hard work, and the enormous personal stakes that typified the experience of competitors and their teachers, Soviet officials assumed that Soviet musicians

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should win the competitions they entered. This assumption undergirded a perpetual concern about whether or not Soviet competitors would be judged “objectively.” Superiority assumed, objective juries should produce Soviet triumphs. When the Soviet contestants fell a bit short, Soviet observers and officials alike never failed to blame biased judging, at least in part. By the mid-1950s, officials began calling for Soviet jury members to “defend” the interests of Soviet performers as a means to ensure that ideal “objectivity.” The calls for “objectivity” thus demonstrate how confident Soviet officials were in the superiority of their system. But the measures they suggested to ensure that superiority was expressed in competitions’ final results also demonstrate how dependent the system was on the actions of the musicians themselves, especially the established stars who served on juries. Demonstrating Soviet superiority in the Cold War’s cultural competition with the West thus depended crucially on the agency of the cultural elite, who bore the mantle of musical excellence at home and abroad alike. This elite did its job so well throughout the 1950s that by the end of the decade Soviet officials decided at last to stage an international competition at home, a competition that would be the capstone of the entire international music competition system.

Ch a p ter 3

From a Musical Holiday to the Tchaikovsky Competition Moscow as a Global Center of Musical Culture

The fiftieth anniversary of the First International Tchaikovsky Competition in 2008 was celebrated with an outpouring of reflection in the United States about the triumph of the pianist Van Cliburn, a twenty-three-year-old Texan, at that first competition in 1958. Television, radio, and newspaper reports reminisced about the win, and a gala event in Fort Worth brought President George W. Bush and President Vladimir Putin together to reflect on Cliburn’s importance for East-West relations over the years.1 The original competition itself coincided with what was perhaps the high-water mark of the Soviet cultural empire, just six months after the launch of Sputnik catapulted the Soviets into the lead in the space race and a year before the Kitchen Debate articulated the terms of imperial competition over quality of life and consumer goods. The Soviet economy was booming compared to a U.S. economy in relative doldrums, and American morale was decidedly low. Van Cliburn’s surprise win was celebrated on his return by a tickertape parade, and his subsequent recording of the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto no. 1 was the first classical music recording ever to sell a million copies in the United States. Not until the men’s hockey team upset the power­ house Soviets and eventually won gold at the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics would a victory so inflame the patriotic emotions of Cold War Americans. It was seen in the United States as an American victory in the face of apparent

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Soviet invincibility, but it was a victory in which the Soviet public shared as well. Its wildly enthusiastic reception of Van Cliburn’s performances were always key to the lore that grew up around the competition. Examining the prehistory of the First International Tchaikovsky Competition and analyzing in detail the events leading up to and during the competition itself demonstrates that the Tchaikovsky Competition was the culmination of a process that placed Moscow at the center of a competitive global musical culture system. An aborted Moscow Musical Holiday originally proposed for 1952 would have made the case for the centrality of Moscow to global musical culture half a decade earlier. That proposed festival was tabled for financial reasons, so it took until the end of the 1950s for the First International Tchaikovsky Competition to materialize. When it did, the institutionalized competitive apparatus analyzed in the last chapter was extended to touch on all aspects of Soviet musical life, including even the composition and popularization of new Soviet music. The mature system of musical competitions also contributed to the international homogenization of instrumental performance style, triggering an element of global integration that ensured the Soviet emphasis on technical precision would remain a lasting legacy of Soviet cultural success. Coming as it did at the height of Soviet competitiveness in other spheres of the Cold War, the International Tchaikovsky Competition and the official reaction to it reveal that at the end of the 1950s, Soviet leaders were so confident in Soviet cultural superiority that they could appear magnanimous in the face of Van Cliburn’s win, but that they overestimated the comparative strength of the Soviet system, with results that would eventually prove disastrous to them.

Moscow Musical Holiday Notably absent from the last chapter’s discussion of the proliferation of musical competitions in the early Cold War years is any mention of an international competition in the Soviet Union itself. This absence was not the result of a corresponding lack of grandiose visions for the Soviet Union’s—indeed, Moscow’s—place as a global cultural center in the early Cold War. In fact, the leadership of the Committee on Artistic Affairs devised and proposed to hold an immensely ambitious, extremely elaborate international music festival, which they dubbed “Moscow Musical Holiday,” at the very end of the Stalin period. The genesis of this proposal, the vision that it articulated, and its fate demonstrate that Stalinist cultural administrators sought to assert the Soviet Union as the center of a competitive global musical culture, and when

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the original proposal foundered on the rocks of the financial realities of the late Stalin years, that piece of the Moscow Musical Holiday that survived was explicitly competitive—the International Tchaikovsky Competition. Just three months after ascending to the chairmanship of the Committee on Artistic Affairs in 1951, Nikolai Bespalov wrote to the Central Committee to seek permission to stage a grand musical festival in Moscow the following year.2 Bespalov’s suggested title for the event, Moscow Musical Holiday, captures the grandiosity of his vision, in terms of both its scope and its intended significance. His proposal asserted a justification for holding the festival couched in the language of Moscow’s importance as a global cultural center seeking to expand its influence: “Moscow—the capital of the USSR is the global center of musical culture. Holding an international festival should facilitate the strengthening of the influence of Soviet arts on the development of progressive musical creativity abroad.” Bespalov’s vision also figured Moscow as the leader of a cultural empire that stretched from Central Europe to East Asia and at least theoretically extended globally, to “all countries.” His festival was meant to consolidate Moscow’s leadership of that empire and to demonstrate its superiority in a global context: “The objective of the festival is to show the indisputable superiority of socialist culture, the high ideological level of Soviet art, the excellence of the best Soviet performers, and the accomplishments of Soviet composers. Holding the festival should facilitate the cohesion and integration of progressive musicians of all countries according to the principles of realistic and democratic art, and also help the musicians of the people’s democracies, China, the GDR [German Democratic Republic], Korea, and the Mongolian People’s Republic in the business of further developing their creativity along the path of socialist realism.”3 This remarkably blunt and revealing statement contains the language of competition (superiority) and of a modern cultural empire (cohesion and integration, help . . . further developing) with geographical parameters but built on a cultural ideology (realistic and democratic art), socialist realism. The implications of competition and imperial display were apparent in the specifics of the proposal as well. Much of Bespalov’s proposal circled around demonstrating and displaying Soviet cultural accomplishments to the world. He proposed inviting both outstanding established musicians and young talents from all over the world to try to ensure that an invitation to participate in the Moscow Musical Holiday would be seen as confirmation of a top international reputation with professional and general audiences alike. Within that general goal, Bespalov divided the world into those friendly to the Soviet Union, both within its emerging cultural empire and in the competing capitalist camp,

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while drawing a sharp distinction about how prospective participants from each camp would be selected. He suggested that the people’s democracies, China, the GDR, Korea, and Mongolia ought to be able to choose their own participants, while personal invitations would be extended from the Soviet Union to “progressive musicians and performers from capitalist countries.” Lest there be any doubt about the extent of these invitations, Bespalov suggested inviting musicians, singers, dancers, conductors, composers, and figures in the other arts, in addition to ten to fifteen music and dance collectives from abroad.4 Of course, the Holiday would not just bring outstanding musicians from abroad to perform. Its main goal would be to display the accomplishments of Soviet culture, propagandizing the “peaceful creative activities of the Soviet people,” represented in part by the “high level of musical culture among the broadest circles of workers and youth.” Thus participants would be expected to familiarize themselves with Moscow’s museums and tourist attractions, as well as attending concerts and the theater and visiting factories and collective farms. Meetings with Soviet musicians would also allow them to become familiar with the principal issues in the development of music from a Soviet perspective.5 It is hard to imagine a proposal in which displaying cultural achievements was more central. Bespalov also sought to assert as a basic organizing principle, both of the festival and of Soviet musical life, that leading composers, artists, and musicians—not just the institutions in which they worked and that organized Soviet cultural life—would have to be involved from the beginning. This assertion stressed the professionalization of the arts and the integration of professionalized artists in the administration of the arts in the Soviet Union. Individuals, in this case cultural elites, from outside the corridors of political power would be key to realizing the Soviet imperial vision. Having established these basic principles, Bespalov provided a more detailed plan for the festival, with five distinct components. First, he proposed that each day, there ought to be three or four concerts in which Soviet and foreign participants performed together or shared programs. Second, he envisioned the Bolshoi Theater performing six operas or ballets (four classic Russian works and two Soviet ones). Third, he suggested concerts by Moscow’s leading orchestras (the State Symphony Orchestra of the USSR), folk choirs (the Piatnitsky) and song and dance troupes (the Red Army Song and Dance Ensemble and the State Folk Dance Ensemble), and of the visiting music and dance groups. Fourth, he proposed the creation of an international piano and violin competition in honor of Tchaikovsky. Fifth, he sought to have three or four additional concerts with programs composed entirely of

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new music written for the festival. Chosen by a special festival committee from submissions around the world, this new music would reflect a wide range of genres: symphonies; symphonic poems and suites; choral works; overtures; oratorios; cantatas; solo pieces for piano, violin, and cello (the last possibly with piano accompaniment); concertos for the same instruments with orchestral accompaniment; string quartets; and string trios. Of course, it would also reflect the “realistic and democratic” art of socialist realism. Not surprisingly, Bespalov expected Soviet composers to play the most active role in writing this new music.6 In addition to providing this significant stimulus for the composition of new work, Bespalov suggested what existing music ought to be displayed. The Russian classics, the music of the diverse nationalities of the Soviet Union, and established work by Soviet composers would take a leading role. But Bespalov also sought to popularize other “Slavic composers,” including Chopin, Smetana, Dvorˇák, and Moniuszko, and select works by contemporary composers from the Soviets’ cultural empire. Soviet performers, according to Bespalov, could display their mastery by performing Western classics, including works by Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Berlioz, Liszt, Rossini, and Verdi. To accomplish this grandiose vision, Bespalov suggested inviting nearly one thousand participants from abroad for a twenty-two-day festival encompassing eighty concerts and six Bolshoi Theater productions. Participants would include fifteen to twenty musical collectives and two to three hundred individuals, including sixty performing musicians, fifty to sixty-five contestants and seventy to eighty jury members for the Tchaikovsky Competition, along with three to five composers of the aforementioned premieres. He figured that Soviet participants would number about one hundred, including fifty soloists, eight contestants, and forty members of the festival’s organizing committee and competition jury. In addition to these specially designated participants, all of Moscow’s performance ensembles and theaters would participate in the concerts and productions during the festival.7 Finally, Bespalov hoped to continue the display of Soviet cultural supremacy by providing for seven- to ten-day tours by select participants, including the large performance collectives. The cities he suggested for the tours demonstrate that although the Holiday would take place in Moscow, he sought to emphasize that Moscow was the center of a large, multinational, multicultural empire. Tours would include the Slavic capitals of Leningrad, Kiev, Khar'kov, Minsk, Stalingrad, Sverdlovsk, and Saratov; the Transcaucasian Tbilisi, Baku, and Erevan; the Baltic capitals of Riga, Tallinn, and Vilnius; and the Central Asian Alma-Ata and Tashkent.8

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An essential component of the Moscow Musical Holiday would be a new international music competition, the Tchaikovsky Competition for pianists and violinists. The organizational committee for this competition would be chaired by Dmitrii Shostakovich and encompass twenty-five of the Soviet Union’s most famous performers and composers, including such superstars as David Oistrakh, Lev Oborin, Evgenii Mravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, and Iurii Shaporin. Not surprisingly, the competition committee was also to include the composer who had come to both symbolize and dominate official, institutionalized musical life as head of the Soviet Composers’ Union, Tikhon Khrennikov, and Deputy Chairman of the Committee on Artistic Affairs Nikolai Tverdokhlebov. This committee and the juries that it would create were to hand out well over a staggering half million rubles in prize money.9 Had it been realized when it was originally proposed in 1951, the Moscow Musical Holiday thus could have been the logical culminating development in the emerging global imperial system that placed culture, and music in particular, at its center. Explicit competition between the Cold War superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States, animated this system and motivated Bespalov’s proposal. But it was not to be. When Mikhail Suslov received Bespalov’s proposal in the Central Committee, he immediately passed it down to the Central Committee’s Department of Literature and the Arts for review. That initial review was decidedly noncommittal. P. A. Tarasov and P. V. Lebedev merely noted that they had determined that the Committee on Artistic Affairs needed to rework some aspects of its proposal. Most significantly, “the Committee does not provide any financial accounting whatsoever for holding the proposed ‘Moscow Musical Holiday.’ ”10 But the proposal was not dismissed out of hand. Instead, Bespalov was told to resubmit a more detailed proposal, complete with a financial plan. In February 1952, he did. The new proposal retained the basic contours and a good deal of the specifics of the original, but it was even bigger. This time, Bespalov proposed putting on 150 concerts in twenty-three days, from 30 August to 21 September 1952. He set the number of international participants at 1,250, including ten to fifteen musical collectives (900–1,000 people) and roughly 60 performers, 60–65 young violin and piano competition participants, 120–130 jury members and guests, and 10–15 composers of the new musical works to be premiered at the festival. This time, Bespalov provided a more complete accounting of the number of Soviet participants: roughly twenty-five hundred all told, including fifty soloists, eight competition participants, and twenty-four hundred members of seventeen folk ensembles and five symphony orchestras. The Bolshoi Theater’s

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troupe was central to the performance plan but not calculated in the total numbers. Bespalov’s vision thus had grown to include nearly four thousand participants in 150 concerts over twenty-three days. The cost: more than 20,000,000 rubles, including more than 500,000 rubles in hard currency.11 This proved simply too great a cost. The Central Committee apparatus received Bespalov’s modified proposal, and a final report to Malenkov was penned on 25 February 1952. Georgii Malenkov circulated the report to his colleagues on the Secretariat, Panteleimon Ponomarenko and Nikita Khrushchev, two days later.12 Oddly, the concluding report from the Central Committee apparatus was signed by Mikhail Suslov (a member of the Secretariat), Bespalov (the author of the original proposal), and Vladimir Kruzhkov (the head of the Central Committee Department of Science and Culture). Typically, this report would have been written by Kruzhkov, usually with the aid of an assistant, so the presence of Suslov (the Secretariat member who had immediate responsibility for ideology and the arts at this time) and, oddest of all, Bespalov himself, suggests that the final assessment was hammered out in close negotiations among Bespalov, Suslov, and Suslov’s apparatus, headed by Kruzhkov. The final assessment was not a mere rejection; in fact, it was not expressed as a rejection at all: “Supporting Comrade Bespalov’s proposal to hold an international musical holiday in Moscow, we consider it advisable to limit its program to holding an international competition of pianists and violinists named for Tchaikovsky, with invitations [to participate] in it to leading foreign composers and conductors, in addition to violinists and pianists.” The expected date of the competition was pushed back to May 1953, and Bespalov was charged with drawing up yet another proposal.13 Despite signing the memo, Bespalov does not seem to have tried again. The Moscow Musical Holiday was dead, and the Tchaikovsky Competition would remain on the back burner until being revived again by a newly configured Ministry of Culture in the mid-1950s. The tale of the ill-fated Moscow Musical Holiday demonstrates that cultural administrators in Moscow thought of the Soviet capital as the center of global musical culture and sought at the end of the Stalin period to demonstrate that status by hosting a massive international festival. The proposed festival was designed to demonstrate Soviet cultural excellence; exhibit the Soviet conception of good music, past and present, foreign and domestic, high and middle-brow; and provide a stimulus to create new music according to that vision. In the early Cold War years, each of these goals was implicitly competitive. That competition was at the heart of cultural production and display in the minds of Moscow’s cultural administrative elite is emphasized

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by the fact that when financial concerns forced the original proposal to be pared down to its core, that core was the only explicitly competitive component of the proposed Moscow Musical Holiday: the International Tchaikovsky Competition.

The First International Tchaikovsky Competition, 1958 By the early Khrushchev years, Soviet arts administrators had become especially interested in the propaganda value of hosting a prestigious and authoritative competition in Moscow. The Tchaikovsky Competition from Bespalov’s Moscow Musical Holiday was revived as an opportunity to claim Moscow as the definitive center of a competitive global musical culture. Despite the surprising conclusion of this event in 1958, the triumph of an American pianist, the Soviets considered the competition a major success, and in its aftermath, the Ministry of Culture institutionalized a competitive musical apparatus at home that reached even farther into all areas of Soviet musical life. Preparations

Preparations for the First International Competition of Pianists and Violinists in Honor of P. I. Tchaikovsky, henceforth the Tchaikovsky Competition, began in 1956 and took nearly two years to complete. In late June 1956, Minister of Culture Nikolai Mikhailov wrote to the Central Committee to resurrect plans for the Tchaikovsky Competition that had been dormant since Bespalov’s proposed Moscow Musical Holiday was tabled in 1952. Mikhailov noted that holding regular competitions had already become a “good tradition” in many European countries. He emphasized those with the longest-established and most prestigious competitions: France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, and, to a lesser extent, the GDR and Italy. The positive effects of those competitions, Mikhailov claimed, were “stimulation of the development of performance culture, popularizing the work of native composers, strengthening cultural ties between countries.” Mikhailov notably left off this list the most obvious goal of competitions: demonstrating the virtuosity of the contestants. That he saved for a particularly pointed remark that linked the success of Soviet performers to the propaganda benefits that the Soviet Union derived from that success: “The participation of Soviet musicians in international competitions in the majority of cases has been the overflowing triumph of the Soviet performance school and has played a serious role in propagandizing socialist culture. In these same competitions,

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the superiority of the Soviet system of education has been demonstrated very persuasively.”14 Despite constant Soviet success abroad, Mikhailov complained, the Soviets had never held their own international competition. In a likely reference to Bespalov’s efforts earlier in the decade, Mikhailov also noted that the Soviet music community had long ago expressed its interest in organizing a competition on Soviet soil. This assertion was unlikely to attract the attention of the political elite, but Mikhailov concluded with a claim that would, indicating an international cost for not having held a competition and suggesting a major political benefit from remedying that absence: “It is well known that the rich creative output of classic Russian and Soviet composers is performed abroad extremely insufficiently. The organization of international competitions in the USSR would play an important role in popularizing [our] native music. This competition would undoubtedly have a serious political meaning.”15 Considering this benefit, Mikhailov proposed holding a competition for pianists and violinists in March and April 1958 and drafted the resolutions that would make that competition a reality.16 In 1952, the 20-million-ruble price tag had proven too great for the Central Committee to support. In 1956, by trimming the earlier Moscow Musical Holiday to its essential component, the Tchaikovsky Competition, Mikhailov placed the price tag for the promised “serious political meaning” at just over 1 million rubles, including 57,400 rubles to select the Soviet contestants, 511,600 to support the visiting contestants from abroad for thirty-two days, 425,000 to run the competition, and 229,000 rubles in prize money. This 1.25 million ruble expense tally would be partially offset by 150,000 rubles in predicted income.17 The Central Committee apparently approved the request, for the competition’s Organizational Committee (Orgkom), chaired by Shostakovich, began work at the end of August. Though Mikhailov had shown, and would continue to show, a great deal of enthusiasm for the competition, the event itself was primarily planned and administered by the Soviet Union’s most prominent musicians, for the musical side, and by the Ministry of Culture’s bureaucrats, for the practicalities. This pattern was established from the first meeting of the Orgkom, in which Shostakovich, Emil Gilels, and David Oistrakh gathered with Boris Vladimirsky (a pianist and head of the Ministry of Culture’s Department of Music Institutions) and one A. I. Kholodilin (another arts official in the Ministry of Culture), who arrived late, only to discuss the design of posters for the contest. Most of this first meeting was spent finalizing pre-prepared repertory lists for the competitions’ three rounds. Shostakovich, Gilels, and Oistrakh did almost all the talking, and

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the issues were almost purely professional. For example, all three considered the preliminary lists too lengthy, but in paring them down, Gilels wanted to ensure that the first round contain a mandatory polyphonic composition (a Bach fugue plus one by Taneev, Tchaikovsky, or Shostakovich was deemed essential). His colleagues agreed.18 A polyphonic piece, one in which two or more melodic lines sound simultaneously, as in a round or a fugue, was probably required, because complex polyphonic pieces pose particular technical challenges to performers. But there may well have been another unspoken reason that stemmed from the shared assumptions of the Orgkom members. That is, polyphony and homophony (music with a single melodic line supported by harmonic accompaniment) together formed the bedrock of the Western musical culture to which they considered Soviet music the most progressive—the best—global successor.19 This predominance of professional priorities in the Orgkom’s discussions was typical, but Mikhailov’s ultimate political goals (which they no doubt shared) were never far even from the musicians’ minds. When Gilels worried that including Skriabin and Rachmaninoff on the mandatory program might disadvantage competitors from abroad, where those two composers were not as well known, Shostakovich reminded the committee that the point of the competition was to popularize Russian music. Contestants would have to learn works by both. At the same time, Shostakovich sought to emphasize that the propaganda value would not apply just to the Soviets. The Orgkom decided that during the second round, contestants ought to perform one piece by a composer from their own native land (among many other requirements). When concern was raised that there might be some countries without great piano works, Shostakovich remarked, “This competition should have a propagandistic character. We are propagandizing Russian music at the competition.” The implication was that other contestants would have the opportunity to do the same, if only on a much more limited basis. Finally, for the final round, contestants would be obligated to perform a newly commissioned work by a Soviet composer, a requirement intentionally designed to popularize works by Soviet composers.20 The logic of this repertoire plan as it was arranged across the three rounds stamped the competition with the ideals of Soviet culture in the broadest sense. Soviet culture was constituted in part by the appropriation of the classics of the Russian canon and of select strains of Western culture.21 Contemporary Soviet culture was supposed to be the inheritor and ideal extension of this combined tradition. Starting with a first round comprising technical works, progressing to a second round in which national traditions (dominated by the Russian classics) were presented, and concluding with a third

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round that combined Tchaikovsky with new Soviet music cast Soviet culture as the pinnacle of a universally inclusive musical tradition with origins in the West but with global relevance. The repertoire plan itself thus inscribed the competition with the Soviet claim to be the center of a global culture. Days after the first Orgkom meeting in 1956, Mikhailov issued a wide-ranging decree that set parameters and assigned tasks for preparing for the competition, including naming another organizational committee to oversee the selection of Soviet participants. Chaired by the Ministry of Culture bureaucrat V. V. Tselikovsky, this organizational committee, too, was dominated by top Soviet performers, including Sviatoslav Richter, Gilels, Oistrakh, and Lev Kogan.22 In this decree, selection of competitors was essentially delegated to experts while responsibility for managing the practical preparations for the competition was distributed throughout the ministry’s bureaucratic apparatus. The Central Committee received regular updates on the preparations and sporadic requests to approve decisions. For example, at the end of a short progress report submitted in October 1956, Mikhailov asked the Central Committee to approve the number and level of prizes.23 Central Committee approval was followed quickly by a minister’s decree ordering the preparation of the medals, pins, and certificates.24 The design of the prizes was an exception to the usual division of labor: the Orgkom spent a startling amount of time debating their appearance.25 When preparations accelerated in 1957 and 1958, the issues that most concerned the Orgkom, ministry officials, and the Central Committee circled around the selection of the international jury and the Soviet contestants. In these two key areas, organizers at all levels shared the sense that Moscow was the center of a cultural empire of global significance, deserving of an international music competition with authoritative foreign participants and a first rate, if not dominant, cast of Soviet competitors. Potential threats to either of these self-imposed requirements caused a good deal of anxiety for the organizers and led them to reveal their own prejudices about the superiority of the musical culture of the Soviet capitals. In May 1957, the Orgkom met to discuss the juries and selection procedures for the Soviet contestants. Except for Orgkom members seeking unsuccessfully to remove themselves from the lists of Soviet jurors, the jury selection discussion was uneventful. All involved wanted an authoritative jury of experts and expected to get one. The response from around the Soviet Union to the call for participants in the Tchaikovsky Competition, in contrast, already worried some members of the Orgkom, angered others, and prompted still others to simply shrug about the superiority of the capital cities. Tselikovsky was apparently outraged at the apparent lack

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of preparation—and dismissive attitude—evident at conservatories in the national republics. He feared international embarrassment: “If it turns out that the Soviet delegation at the Tchaikovsky competition is the least numerous and skilled, it will be an international scandal. It is not essential to win all the first prizes, but the USSR must be sufficiently represented.”26 Other participants were less concerned, though sometimes puzzled. Senior Moscow Conservatory piano professor Aleksandr Goldenveizer, in particular could not understand the lack of preparation in Tbilisi, because he had served as a jury member for a republican competition to perform Tchaikovsky’s works in 1956. Perhaps the worst response came from the Erevan Conservatory, which proclaimed the program too difficult and informed Moscow that it would not be participating. This bit of information prompted Goldenveizer’s dismissive response: “And that outrageous answer from the Erevan Conservatory is of course difficult, but that’s a national problem.” Later Goldenveizer made the extent of his Moscow-centric chauvinism even clearer, dismissing the idea of mandatory qualifying competitions in the national republics. While conceding that Tbilisi, Erevan, and Baku ought to be able to produce qualified candidates, Goldenveizer had little faith in the quality of conservatory students in other republics: “but in Kishinev, in Minsk, where there are only two and a half pianists at the conservatory, how can there be a competition?” At the end of the discussion, Goldenveizer amplified others’ somewhat more temperate and cautiously stated concern that the Soviet Union would be represented only by musicians from Moscow and Leningrad by dismissing “the periphery”: “We on the jury will with absolute objectivity admit to the second round those who deserve it, and out in the field it will seem that we are promoting our own, Muscovites and Leningraders, and rejecting those from the periphery.” Shostakovich finally cut off the discussion by asking ministry officials to activate preparations outside the capitals.27 Goldenveizer was not the only participant in the discussion who assumed that republican conservatories could not produce competitive pianists, but he was the one who stated that assumption most clearly and in the center-periphery language of cultural empire. This discussion demonstrates that ministry and Orgkom officials alike were concerned to avoid the perception that Moscow and Leningrad would unduly dominate the eventual Soviet delegation, implicitly undermining claims about deep and widespread cultural accomplishment throughout the Soviet Union that were essential components of the raison d’être for the competition. Some were more concerned about this issue than others, with Goldenveizer in particular apparently resigned to the inevitability of central domination.

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By September, the early anxiety about a Moscow- and Leningrad-domi­ ated Soviet delegation had given way to concern that the selection process n could place the Soviets at a competitive disadvantage vis-à-vis their foreign counterparts and that it would disrupt instruction at the two capitals’ conservatories. The solution: mandate a single all-USSR final round, to be held in Moscow in mid-December. The Moscow and Leningrad conservatories would implement internal selection procedures, and all past international competition laureates would receive free passes to the finals in Moscow.28 At its 21 September meeting, the Orgkom was more concerned about international participation. Members heard a report about the ministry’s efforts to spread the word abroad. Prospectuses had already been sent to eighty-seven conservatories, music schools, and education ministries in fifty-eight countries, to Soviet friendship or cultural exchange societies in forty-eight, and to Soviet embassies in thirty-nine. Recruitment in some countries was to be spearheaded by leading musical figures, thirty-two of whom had received letters from Mikhailov asking them to spread the word about the competition. Foreign laureates from the Sixth World Youth Festival’s music competitions received personal invitations. The results of this impressive outreach had been terrific in a few places (Japan and Mexico each scheduled national competitions to select participants) but generally disappointing elsewhere—especially in the United States, where news of the competition had been reported only in a Soviet-backed newspaper, presumably with low readership. Goldenveizer’s contribution to the discussion demonstrates that his Moscow-centrism was not limited to the Soviet Union. He did not worry about drumming up enough participants but about finding good enough participants. He hypothesized a winner of the piano competition in Portugal looking at the Tchaikovsky Competition and deciding there was no point traveling to Moscow to finish eighth; instead the losers in Portugal would decide to come to Moscow, utterly unprepared to compete. Gilels concurred, fearing that unfamiliarity with the Russian- and Soviet-heavy mandatory program was depressing interest.29 But popularizing Russian and Soviet music was the point. The anxiety is palpable, even fifty years removed and through the lens of a transcript. This anxiety seems to have grown out of an otherwise unspoken assumption that direct competition with the West was a paramount goal of the competition. That the Soviet Union’s allies in Eastern Europe would send competitors had already been decided. China, too, had committed to sending talented pianists, though not violinists. Although there was some worry that Hungary’s contingent might not be as strong as it should be, ministry officials clarified that the prospective Hungarian participants constituted a

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preliminary list of those who had contacted them directly, not an officially generated product of the Hungarian cultural establishment. In this sense, a large international competition with first-rate performers was already assured. Potentially missing were only worthy rivals from the West, including the United States. The conclusion of the discussion sought to address that problem by focusing recruitment efforts on countries known (or assumed by the Orgkom) to have large numbers of talented performers and positive prevailing attitudes about Tchaikovsky: the United States, Spain, England, France, and, almost as an afterthought, Turkey.30 Happily for the organizers, this anxiety was resolved by November, when internal Ministry of Culture reports exhibited confidence that “there is every reason to predict that the performance level of the competition will be very high.”31 September’s anxiety about international participation extended to the composition of the juries. In late August, Mikhailov had sought Central Committee approval for two juries, along with guarantees that the prospective jurors would receive visas to participate in the competition.32 Even before the Central Committee responded, this list had to be augmented because several of the prospective jurors proved unable to adjust their schedules. The resulting discussion in September revealed that the Orgkom and the ministry encountered some tension between assembling an authoritative jury and a friendly one. The ideal of all participants, not surprisingly, was to have both. The officials’ discussion began by suggesting artists known to be friendly to the Soviet Union and Soviet music, and citing that friendliness as a chief qualification. Marguerite Long, for example, was described as a major French musical figure and a past visitor to the USSR who thought highly of Soviet culture and routinely supported Soviet contestants at the Parisian competition in her name. The Dutch pianist Cor de Groot attracted attention as the best pianist in Holland and a past member of international competition juries, but also because he paid attention to young Soviet pianists in Paris and Brussels and had indicated an interest in visiting the USSR. The pattern was typical. However, other participants in the debate, especially P. I. Savintsev (the Central Committee representative at the meeting), feared that such considerations would result in a jury with “insufficient weight.” His primary concern was that the jury should be comprised of “the greatest musical figures of foreign countries, in order to elevate the authority of the Tchaikovsky Competition.” A comparative discussion ensued, especially around the question of which Italian pianist to invite: Guido Agosti (who was included in Mikhailov’s original list), Arturo Michelangeli, or Carlo Zecchi. Those who participated agreed that Zecchi would be “magnificent” but assumed that he

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would be unable to fit the event into his schedule. Gilels, in particular, held out against Michelangeli, “a very grand artist” but a strange person, difficult to deal with, who was unlikely to come in any case. He continued to push Agosti as a respected individual with a lot of jury experience. Of course, availability would eventually trump the other considerations, and the Orgkom decided to send feelers to all possible candidates before making a final decision.33 In the end, none of the Italians served on the jury. Still, the mild disagreement between Gilels and Savintsev is instructive, because it demonstrates that the two had slightly divergent priorities. Savintsev sought to maximize the authority of the jury, while Gilels sought to maximize the compatibility and potential working relationship of those who would assemble under his chairmanship in April. The Central Committee’s decisive opinion dovetailed with that of its representative at the 21 September meeting, Savintsev. When the Department of Culture finally responded to Mikhailov’s August request to approve the jury on 27 September, it reiterated Savintsev’s concern that assembling a jury without the “greatest foreign musician performers (for example, R[obert] Kazadezius, Carlo Zecchi, [ Jascha] Heifetz, [Heinrick] Schering, and Z[ino] Francescatti) would lower the authority of the competition.” The department concluded by silently endorsing the decision taken by the Orgkom at its 22 September meeting: leading figures should be contacted, availability determined, and a final list drawn up and submitted for Central Committee approval only when it could, indeed, be considered final.34 Authority proved more important than working relationship, though both were inevitably trumped by the availability of the world’s finest, and busiest, concertizing musicians. While those responsible for arranging the artistic side of the competition fretted about and eventually solved problems concerning the prestige and artistic quality of the competition, the Ministry of Culture concentrated a great deal of attention on organizing the practicalities. This effort turned out to be immense—ranging from the mundane, like negotiating with Intourist for hotel rooms and qualified translators for the participants from abroad, to the fundamental. These preparations demonstrate that the ministry sought to maximize the opportunities presented by the Tchaikovsky Competition to realize many of the goals Bespalov had originally articulated in 1951. Though these practical preparations began in 1956, it was constant activity throughout 1957 and early 1958 that brought the competition to fruition and made it an occasion for the Soviets to demonstrate their accomplishments in areas much broader than the performances of the competition itself. In mid-October 1957, the head of the ministry’s Department of Music Institutions, Boris Vladimirsky, presented Mikhailov with a plan of the activities

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that would be offered to participants and other foreigners who traveled to Moscow for the festivities. The basics were settled by then: contestants would stay at the Hotel Moskva, jury members in the high-rate rooms of the hotels Metropole and Sovetskaia. All would take their meals at their respective hotels. Rehearsal rooms were to be set aside for the contestants in the newly opened right-hand wing of the Conservatory, and pianists would be given a choice of piano: Steinway, Blüthner, Bechstein, or Bösendorfer. The extracurricular activities Vladimirsky described demonstrate that an important goal of the competition in 1958, as it had been in 1951, was to position Moscow at the center of global musical culture by an overwhelming presentation of opportunity, if nothing else. Moscow opera theaters were scheduled to perform six different productions of operas or ballets written by Tchaikovsky (Iolanthe, Evgenii Onegin, Mazepa, The Enchantress, Swan Lake, and The Nutcracker) between 15 March and 15 April. Concert halls would be filled with Tchaikovsky’s symphonic and chamber music performed by the Moscow Philharmonic, State Radio Orchestra, the Bolshoi Theater orchestra, and leading soloists. Perhaps most impressive (and unrealistic, considering the demands of the intense competition itself), participants would be treated to (or shepherded through) excursions to the Tchaikovsky House Museum in the Moscow suburb of Klin, the Kremlin and its museums, the Scriabin House Museum, the Tretyakov Gallery, the Palace of Culture of the Likhachev Automobile Factory, and the Moscow House of Pioneers.35 There would be general city tours; meetings with composers, professors, students, and young musicians at the Moscow Conservatory, the Gnesinka, and select regional music elementary schools; and special performances at the Stanislavsky-Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theater and at the smaller, more experimental Filial of the Bolshoi Theater. If that should not prove sufficient, additional opportunities would be provided to go to concerts of leading Soviet soloists, dramatic performances at the Moscow Art Theater or the Malyi Theater, and lessons at the Bolshoi’s Choreography School.36 The audience for this exhibition of an extensive musical life would be not just contestants but tourists and official visitors from abroad, including from countries in areas to which the Soviets sought to extend their cultural influence, like Egypt. For example, the Ministry of Culture invited the Egyptian composer and founding dean of the conservatory in Cairo, Abu Bakr Khayrat. When it became clear that Khayrat could not attend, the ministries of Culture and Foreign Affairs combined to propose that the government official Hussein Fawzi take his place. Fawzi had attended the competition in Budapest in 1956 in a similar capacity. The Central Committee approved the request.37

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The impulse to exhibit the musical life of the capital was also reflected in plans to extend the international show around the Soviet Union by sending the top prizewinners on tour. The first-prize winners were to give fifteen concerts—three each in Moscow, Leningrad, Riga, Minsk, and Kiev. Second-prize winners were to tour the Transcaucasus, giving one concert in Moscow and three each in Baku, Tbilisi, and Erevan. Third-prize winners would give six concerts, two each in Gor'kii, Saratov, and Kuibyshev (the piano laureate) or in Khar'kov, Stalino, and Odessa (the violin laureate).38 This tour plan reiterates Moscow’s assumed internal cultural hierarchies, which placed Moscow, Leningrad, the Slavic capitals, and the Baltics at the top, the Transcaucasus next, and provincial Russia and Ukraine after that. Always at the bottom of the Muscovite cultural hierarchy, Central Asia would not experience the Tchaikovsky Competition firsthand. Practical plans for the Tchaikovsky Competition also included a massive publication plan. Early attention was understandably paid to ensuring that proper editions of the mandatory repertory for the competition were available in sufficient quantity to provision Soviet aspirants and foreign contestants alike.39 Later, producing materials for broad dissemination to the competition’s audiences became a priority. In November 1957, these publications included six full-length books and brochures to be published by Muzgiz on topics ranging from studies of Tchaikovsky’s work in specific genres to a full biography written by the Central Committee’s resident musicologist, Boris Iarustovsky.40 Preparations also included starting or continuing major cultural diplomacy initiatives, especially to extend or formulate cultural collaboration agreements between the Soviet Union and capitalist countries, including the United States. In early 1958, the Ministry of Culture accelerated its efforts to finalize existing draft agreements, think up measures to extend cultural cooperation where it did not already exist, and set time tables for finalizing specific cultural exchange measures for 1959.41 The Tchaikovsky Competition was clearly supposed to be a cornerstone of the Soviets’ international cultural diplomacy. During the Competition

On 18 March 1958, the two years of planning and preparations came to an end, and the First International Tchaikovsky Competition opened with a grandiose ceremony attended by Nikita Khrushchev and eight other top Soviet politicians as well as the Muscovite cultural elite. An all-Tchaikovsky concert program followed speeches of welcome and introduction delivered

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by Minister of Culture Mikhailov, Chairman of the Moscow City Council N. I. Bobrovnikov, Shostakovich, the Russian-born American violinist Efrem Zimbalist, and the Bulgarian violinist and conductor Sasha Popov.42 The next day, the violin competition began. The outcome of the First Tchaikovsky Competition is well known as one of the defining events of the cultural Cold War during the Khrushchev years. The Soviets dominated the violin competition. Soviet violinists swept six of the top eight prizes, including first (Valerii Klimov), second (Viktor Pikaizen), fourth (Mark Liubotsky), fifth (Viktor Liberman), sixth (Valentin Zhuk), and eighth (Zarius Shikhmurzaeva). Only the Rumanian Stefan Ruha (third) and American Joyce Flissler (seventh) could break into the top eight.43 But it was the piano competition that resonated both within the Soviet Union and around the world, when the American Van Cliburn won over Muscovite concertgoers and supposedly rode their acclaim to a resounding victory. He returned to the United States hailed as a national hero, winning on Soviet soil in a manner that restored American self-confidence after the setbacks dealt to national pride by Sputnik and other Khrushchev-era Soviet accomplishments. His picture adorned the cover of Time magazine, with the caption “The Texan Who Conquered Russia.” His Kennedy Center biography still notes that he was the first musician ever honored with a New York City tickertape parade and that his recording of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto with Kirill Kondrashin in the aftermath of the triumph in Moscow was the first classical album to go platinum in the United States.44 It has long been assumed that Van Cliburn’s triumph must have been an unwelcome shock to the Soviets, his popularity with the audience forcing an otherwise reluctant jury to check with Khrushchev before awarding him the honors he deserved. The Central Committee and Ministry of ­Culture archives, however, reveal that Van Cliburn’s victory was not remotely controversial among jurists, and it did nothing to dampen Mikhailov’s bubbling enthusiasm for the competition. On the contrary, it was the unseemly domination by Soviet violinists that caused more internal consternation. Van Cliburn’s deserved victory was merely part of an overwhelmingly successful international event. Over the course of the first two weeks of the competition, Mikhailov submitted no fewer than four separate reports to the Central Committee, enthusiastically seeking credit for the successful propaganda it generated and requesting more resources for his Ministry of Culture to expand its efforts in the future.45 One of the most striking characteristics of these reports is Mikhailov’s palpable excitement about how successfully the competition

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was fulfilling its goals. Just four days in, he enthusiastically reported that the ongoing competition had already demonstrated the tremendous interest that existed in the Soviet Union and all over the world for the great Russian composer it honored. He reported that many musicians thought that the competition could easily be expanded to include sections for cellists, vocalists, and orchestral conductors. He proposed to expand it and asked Central Committee permission to issue a statement that the Tchaikovsky Competition would become a periodic event, occurring every three years and encompassing those five sections in the future.46 The Central Committee’s Department of Culture tried to temper his enthusiasm, agreeing that the competition should become a periodic event but suggesting that Mikhailov needed to think through the details more completely before issuing a decree. In particular, holding major competitions in five musical disciplines simultaneously seemed unrealistic to the bureaucrats of the Central Committee apparatus.47 In his next report, Mikhailov reported the results of the first round of the violin competition, but to his third report he again appended a request. This time, he sought to arrange for the participants and official guests to visit the Kremlin and be received by the Soviet government.48 Again the Department of Culture sought to calm Mikhailov down, noting that even laureates of analogous competitions were not typically congratulated by heads of state. More appropriate would be for Mikhailov himself to host a gala celebration at his own ministry’s expense.49 In the end, that celebration did take place in the Grand Kremlin Palace.50 With his lengthy fourth report, Mikhailov provided a sort of midcompetition summary, continuing to cast the event as a runaway success. He informed the Central Committee of the results of the violin competition and relayed the positive appraisals of both Soviet and foreign observers. The utter domination of the Soviet contestants was greeted with general approval as reflecting the comparative strengths of the contestants. Nevertheless, Mikhailov reported that several participants and observers suggested that some changes could be made in future competitions. These changes reveal some embarrassment about the depth of the Soviet triumph. First, the program could be expanded to include more work familiar to non-Soviets, especially by adding works by Mozart. Second, several Soviet observers suggested sharply reducing the number of Soviet contestants in the future. At the same time, “our friends from abroad,” Mikhailov noted, “unanimously confirm that such a decision could be disputed, for one must not blame Soviet musicians for the fact that they turned out to be the strongest.”51 Even the potential reservations thus contained a strong undercurrent of self-congratulation.

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Having thus summarized the results of the violin competition, Mikhailov moved on to report progress on the effort to display Soviet cultural achievements to the participants. The visit to Klin was apparently a huge success, and the competition as a whole was gaining worldwide attention. As evidence for the latter point, Mikhailov noted that a French freelance journalist told him that it would take him several days to respond to the flood of requests for articles that he had received since arriving in Moscow. The famous Italian violin maker Orlando Archimide offered one of his handmade violins to the winner of the Tchaikovsky Competition, Queen Elisabeth of Belgium attended the competition three times and remarked on the high quality of the contestants and the organization of the competition alike, and general interest in Moscow was not flagging: all tickets to subsequent rounds had been sold out. Finally, all the polled participants unanimously supported the idea of making the competition a periodic event, pleas for repetition providing evidence of its overall success.52 During the competition’s earliest days, Mikhailov thus presented it as a grand triumph. He repeatedly emphasized the international interest it generated and the perception of guests from abroad that the artistic level was very high. This enthusiasm does not seem to have been quashed by Van Cliburn’s triumph in the piano competition. Indeed, the transcript of the jury’s final deliberations, together with Mikhailov’s concluding report to the Central Committee, show that there was nothing internally controversial about the result. In his final report, Mikhailov related just one irregularity in the piano jury’s deliberations: Sviatoslav Richter apparently scored the second round in a way that unduly weighted his own opinion in determining the finalists. On a twenty-five-point scale, he awarded all but his top seven zero points. This practice elicited objections from the other jurors, who, according to Mikhailov, pressured Richter to adopt more typical voting practices in the final round. There does not appear to have been any national bias in Richter’s objectionable method. His zeros were distributed to both Soviet and foreign contestants.53 The transcripts of the piano jury’s deliberations do not shed further light on Richter’s odd second-round voting behavior because those transcripts are missing. The extant final round transcripts, however, demonstrate that Van Cliburn was extremely unlikely to have been an intended victim of Richter’s scoring strategy. In fact, Richter thought that Van Cliburn was so dominant that he voted to award him first prize and then opined (and voted) that no second prize should be awarded at all. The result would have been to make Cliburn’s triumph even greater by communicating that he had no rival at

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the competition. The jury’s discussion reveals that that would have been an accurate impression. On the first ballot, Van Cliburn was the unanimous first-prize choice of all seventeen jurors. The only anomalies were that the British conductor and composer Sir Arthur Bliss voted to split the prize between Van Cliburn and the Chinese pianist Liu Shikun, and the Hungarian pianist Lajos Hernadi sought to split it between Cliburn and the Soviet Tbilisi-born, Moscow Conservatory-trained pianist Lev Vlasenko, winner of the 1956 Liszt Competition in Budapest.54 Hernadi’s gambit provides further evidence of the complicated national, imperial, and transimperial dynamics that so often characterized international music competitions. It would have had the result of elevating the prestige of his own national piano competition by providing a common winner between it and the Tchaikovsky Competition. In the event, the gambit was a mere blip in a first ballot devoid of controversy. The last round’s second ballot contained the only major split in the jury members’ opinions, as six voted to award second prize to Liu, four to Vlasenko, and six sought to split it between them. Before the voting had begun, the jurors had decided to allow two prizes to be awarded at one level since they had eight available prizes and nine deserving contestants. That decision paid dividends in achieving an amicable result of this split second-prize vote. Liu Shikun was awarded second prize on the strength of twelve votes on the first ballot. A second ballot was held to determine whether or not Vlasenko should also receive a second prize; he won fourteen votes, and the final results included both as second-prize winners. Having sat out the second-prize voting, Richter announced that he had wanted to award third prize to the two who had just won second. Consequently, he did not know how to vote moving forward. If he voted his original slate, he would “fall out of the game.” Other jurors noted that he could vote however he liked but suggested that he take into consideration that his colleagues had already awarded second prizes to Liu and Vlasenko. He could either be irrelevant or adjust his strategy. He agreed to adjust his strategy, and though multiple ballots were required to determine sixth prize, there were no further significant disagreements.55 These results proved universally satisfying. The figure most likely to be bothered by Van Cliburn’s dominance, Mikhailov, effusively praised the young American pianist in his assessments of the competition’s results. Mikhailov would have had nothing to gain and much to lose by appearing anything but gracious in the press, but even in his concluding report to the Central Committee, Mikhailov enthused, “The brilliant creative individuality of this pianist, his multifaceted mastery in performance, allowed him to break far away from his competitors in the battle for supremacy at the competition.” There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Mikhailov’s enthusiasm here,

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especially since it was consistent with his earlier embarrassment about the absolute dominance of the Soviet violinists earlier in the competition. Still, Mikhailov was eager to claim Van Cliburn, “in the final analysis,” for the Russian piano school, noting that he was trained by Rosina Lhévinne, piano professor at Juilliard and prerevolutionary graduate of the Moscow Conservatory class of Vasilii Safonov.56 The claim was subtly repeated in public when the concluding articles about the competition that appeared in both Pravda and Izvestiia noted Van Cliburn’s training and Lhévinne’s connection to the Moscow Conservatory.57 Results

That Van Cliburn’s victory did not dampen Mikhailov’s positive assessment of the competition does not mean that he was eager for the Soviets to fall to an American again in the future. In the weeks that followed, Mikhailov issued a series of reports and decrees that drew concrete lessons from the Tchaikovsky Competition. Explicitly designed to address the “shortcomings” in the Soviet music system that Mikhailov thought the competition revealed, the decrees and reports brought to maturity an apparatus designed to produce competition winners, then broadcast the prestige that winning conferred to audiences at home, in the empire, and in the West. The resulting system reached even farther into all the major aspects of Soviet musical life than had been the case earlier in the 1950s. Soviet musical life would be even more thoroughly geared toward imperial cultural competition. Mikhailov’s concluding report to the Central Committee reiterated and expounded on the positive international effects of the competition that he had been emphasizing all along. It had gained an international press, attracted an unparalleled set of highly qualified contestants (half of whom were already international competition laureates), and earned praise for its high artistic and organizational level from international participants, jury members and contestants alike. The competition also met its goal of exhibiting Soviet cultural accomplishments to visitors from abroad: the Klin trip was a success, as were meetings with leading Soviet musicians, students, and other artists and exhibits at the Glinka Museum of Musical Culture and in the conservatory foyer. After recounting the familiar results of the competition, including the absolute Soviet dominance in the violin competition and strong showing in the piano competition, Mikhailov shifted gears to note that the competition had revealed numerous shortcomings in Soviet music education and performance life.58 As they had earlier in the decade, international music competitions still provided the measure of Soviet domestic institutions.

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The shortcomings fell into three categories: conservatories paid too much attention to technical proficiency at the expense of developing young performers’ individual creative personalities, musical pedagogy at the conservatories in the national republics was said to be simply deficient and in the capitals to be complacent, and the concertizing and competitive energies of performers (especially young ones) needed greater organization. Mikhailov sought permission to address each of these areas with a set of systemic solutions. After giving Mikhailov a bit of a slap on the wrist for allowing conditions in both republican and central conservatories to fall to their current level, the bureaucrats of the Central Committee apparatus met with the Collegium of the Ministry of Culture and later reported that the ministry was proceeding with its plans.59 The result was a lengthy Ministry of Culture decree issued on 5 May 1958 that even more thoroughly institutionalized the centrality of competition to the entire Soviet music system.60 Mikhailov first gave a brief summary of the competition leavened with the usual assertions about its “worldwide significance” and comparative difficulty even for the most artistically gifted and experienced participants. He then touted nearly all the participants for having demonstrated such high levels of artistic mastery that the leading lights of the jury had been forced to appeal for more awards, a reference to the double second prize. The Soviet contestants were praised for their extreme success, but the United States, North Korea, Romania, France, Japan, and Bulgaria also came in for specific praise. Organizers and jury members were thanked, then Mikhailov turned to the real business of the decree: addressing “serious shortcomings in the matter of educating young Soviet performers and in the practice of their participation in international music competitions.”61 The decree put in place measures that prepared the Soviet Union to host a second international competition in 1962, created new institutional structures intended to govern and administer Soviet participation in international music competitions, and set out a series of principles and specific measures meant to guide that administration. The first track was relatively straightforward, establishing May 1962 as the date of the next competition, expanding it to include cellists as well as violinists and pianists, naming Shostakovich the permanent chair of the Orgkom for the competition, and ordering the ministry’s Department of Musical Institutions and its director (Zaven Vartanian) to take two months to prepare drafts of the rules, charter, publication plan, and program for the second competition.62 As we have seen, this decree set in motion preparations for a much smaller Second Tchaikovsky Competition than Mikhailov originally hoped for, adding a cello competition but not vocalists and orchestral conductors. The conductors’ competition never came

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to pass, but Mikhailov would not give up on the vocalists, proposing in October to spin off an International Glinka Vocal Competition. The Central Committee apparatus’s Department of Culture demurred, citing the likely cost of holding an international competition every year or two, until after the results of the Second Tchaikovsky Competition could be assessed.63 Though the Glinka Competition eventually did win approval, becoming another component of the Soviet infrastructure for international cultural competition, it has never been as prominent as the Tchaikovsky Competition. The second track created a new, more developed institutional framework to organize and manage a Soviet concertizing life with competitions at its heart. It institutionalized a multilayered system of competition within the Soviet Union, creating (or recommending that its republican counterparts create) a series of local and republic-level competitions in 1958–1959 that would lead up to an all-USSR competition to be held in Moscow in 1960. Belarus and the Baltic republics were to hold their competition in December 1958, the Central Asian republics in April 1959, and the Transcaucasian republics in December 1959. Central Asian competitions were supposed to cover only pianists and violinists, while the rest of the USSR included the newly added cellists as well.64 The establishment of this competitive infrastructure directly addressed Mikhailov’s complaint, rearticulated and emphasized by the Central Committee apparatus, that there were not enough contestants from outside the capitals who were prepared to compete in 1958. The decree also set up a new Directorate for Musical Competitions charged with organizing Soviet participation in future Tchaikovsky competitions, all-Union and republican competitions, and other international music competitions. The new directorate would be formed within the main concert touring institution, the State Concert Agency (Goskontsert). Competition preparation and planning thus found a permanent institutional home. The decree also connected competition planning with the professional provisioning and management of competition winners by transferring all Tchaikovsky Competition winners into the Goskontsert apparatus. Goskontsert was obligated to take control of the international and domestic concertizing of Tchaikovsky laureates. This control extended to foreign laureates: Goskontsert was ordered to try to organize concert tours of the Soviet Union by the foreign winners during the 1958–1959 concert season.65 Another new institution, a special commission within the Ministry of Culture, was created to oversee and approve all proposed international tours by young performers.66 These new governmental organizations provided a permanent institutional structure for managing international music competitions both within the Soviet Union and abroad. If in practice a concertizing career had been

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all but impossible for those who had not been named international laureates before 1958, afterwards the connection between competitive success and future concertizing was made official and institutionalized. Perhaps the most important parts of the decree laid out the principles by which this more completely institutionalized system was supposed to operate. These components of the decree tied international competition to the rest of the Soviet Union’s musical life by establishing principles that governed Soviet soloists’ concertizing and provided a stimulus for Soviet composers to write new works for leading Soviet instrumentalists. The first set of principles governed who could participate in which competitions. Mikhailov decreed that Soviet contestants in future competitions would be limited to those young musicians who had either differentiated themselves at all-Union competitions or who already had significant concertizing experience.67 In practice, this decree merely rearticulated existing procedures since no Soviet delegation could be formed without an all-Union selection round, but the rearticulation itself emphasized the principle: all Soviet contestants must be experienced enough to have a realistic chance to finish at or near the top. Responding to a complaint first expressed in his concluding report to the Central Committee, Mikhailov also sought to regulate which competitions the Soviets would contest in the future. This regulation essentially ensured that the Soviet definition of “artistically valuable” competitions would set the international hierarchy of prestige for competitions in general. He noted that the proliferation of international music competitions meant that some had limited programs and consequentially little artistic merit. Preparation for these lesser competitions placed a marked stress on the Soviet music education system, disrupting students’ studies and making professors’ jobs more difficult.68 So Mikhailov decreed that Soviet musicians would henceforth compete only in international competitions that “have actual high artistic value,” and he charged the ministry’s Department of Musical Institutions with the task of drawing up a list of such competitions in two weeks’ time.69 Restricting Soviet participation to events with “high artistic value” as determined by the ministry created a circular determination of prestige. If the Soviets proclaimed a competition insufficiently “artistically valuable” and therefore did not participate, that contest would not be taken as seriously, thereby reducing its “artistic value” even further. Because of their musicians’ unmatched competitive success and this selectivity, Soviet notions of “artistic value” thus became central to determining which competitions would become the world’s most important. Other measures enacted by the 5 May decree extended the competitionbased system into broader spheres of domestic Soviet music life. Mikhailov

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decreed into existence a new system for young performers and competition laureates that sought to establish controls over all concertizing activities of young musicians. Students and graduate students at the conservatories were required henceforth to submit their performance programs to the leadership of their conservatory for approval. They also had to get conservatory approval before they gave any concert at home or abroad. Mikhailov also recommended to conservatories that they institute mandatory run-throughs for students who were about to embark on a concert series or tour.70 Young conservatory graduates who were employed in the Soviet Union’s system of philharmonics also had to submit to greater oversight of their concert activity. Mikhailov required philharmonics’ leadership to monitor the state and quality of their young performers’ repertory. Furthermore, in a measure that extended beyond concert life per se to stimulate the creativity of Soviet composers, Mikhailov required philharmonics to institute a system whereby each concertizing soloist had to prepare no fewer than two distinct concert programs per year with mandatory inclusion of new works by Soviet composers.71 If this measure could be implemented, it would provide a laudatory stimulus to reinvigorate potentially stale repertoire lists and diversify the music that audiences could hear on Soviet concert stages. Mikhailov also sought to address the joint problems of complacent and absent conservatory professors by attacking the existing practice of sending leading professors on lengthy concert tours abroad without consulting the conservatory leadership and Ministry of Culture Department of Higher Education. He ordered the latter to draw up a new international concertizing plan that drastically cut the number and duration of tours during the academic year.72 This measure reveals significant tension between crucial aspects of the Soviet Union’s competitive music system. International concertizing soloists were essential agents of cultural diplomacy, a continual source of propaganda for the achievements of Soviet culture. Leading conservatory professors like David Oistrakh were in constant demand internationally. Keeping them at home in an effort to cultivate younger and as yet unproven musicians’ creative individuality would prove to be difficult. Finally, Mikhailov’s 5 May decree implemented a host of specific measures designed to capitalize on the Tchaikovsky Competition’s achievements or address the problems it revealed. Noting that the trip to Klin was so successful, Mikhailov tried to reward both the Tchaikovsky House Museum and the Klin music elementary school by charging the Ministry of Culture of the RSFSR to devote the resources necessary to support annual birthday celebrations in Klin and Votkinsk, form a children’s choir and children’s orchestra

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around the elementary school, and allocate two high-quality grand pianos to the House Museum and one to the school.73 Several other measures were meant to popularize Tchaikovsky’s music or respond to Mikhailov’s perception of an unmet popular demand for it. In what was undoubtedly the decree’s most overbearing provision, and one that worked directly at cross-purposes with the earlier effort to diversify the concert repertoire, Mikhailov required every philharmonic in the Soviet Union to program a subscription cycle of Tchaikovsky’s music. More reasonable popularization measures included releasing recordings of laureates performing Tchaikovsky, publishing books on Tchaikovsky and his music intended for a general audience, and producing a full-length feature film about his life.74 Probably the most significant of this last set of measures again brought international music competitions into the heart of the Soviet music education system. Mikhailov ordered an investigation of the conservatories in the national republics and called on republican ministries of culture to meet with conservatories in May 1958 to discuss the results of the investigation and the lessons of the Tchaikovsky Competition. These initial meetings were to be followed by a major conference of leaders of institutions of higher music education and performance institutions to discuss the problems facing young musicians and their training.75 Mikhailov offered a few carrots, too, suggesting that the ministry build a new concert hall in Moscow and dachas outside the city specifically for young musicians to use while preparing for competitions. He also volunteered to help the ministries of culture of the national republics build dormitories for their conservatories.76 Building a competitive infrastructure thus sometimes literally meant capital construction. Throughout the postwar period, international music competitions had been fundamental mechanisms for the Soviet Union to display its cultural achievements abroad. By the 1950s, competition was sewn into the fabric of Soviet musical education and concertizing. Mikhailov’s energetic response to the successful Tchaikovsky Competition in 1958 brought it even deeper into Soviet musical life than it had been before, using competitions, preparation for them, and rewards after them to stimulate the composition of new Soviet music, to extend the system geographically in an effort to bolster the activities of republican conservatories, and to institutionalize thoroughly those aspects of the competitive system that had been informal up to that point.

Standardization If international music competition had become a thoroughly institutionalized, fundamental aspect of Soviet musical life by the end of the 1950s, it

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was also having a profound effect on an increasingly globally homogenized musical performance style. One of Mikhailov’s most vigorous complaints about the performance of the Soviet contestants at the festival was a lack of individuality: “Thus we can draw the conclusion that a serious shortcoming of many of our young performers is a well-known leveling of performance style, the absence in their performances of striking, original characteristics.”77 He thought the explanation for this absence was simple: Soviet performers were being trained in ways that emphasized the perfection of technique at the expense of an individualized artistic voice.78 Though Mikhailov considered this pursuit of technical perfection a potential obstacle to continued Soviet success on the international competitive circuit, the very logic of international competitions contributed to an international standardization of classical music performance practices that privileged exactly that technical perfection. Technical brilliance in instrumental performance was not an exclusively Soviet characteristic, but it was one at which the Soviets excelled, to the point that it remains a lasting legacy of the Soviet performance system in the post-Cold War global world. International music competitions contributed to the global standardization of performance style in two main areas, repertoire and judging. International music competitions always announced mandatory repertoire so that contestants’ performances of the same pieces could be compared directly. We have seen in the last chapter how that requirement was commonly used to popularize the compositions of a favored composer or national tradition, whether Tchaikovsky and new Soviet music in the USSR, Chopin in Poland, or Ysaÿe in Belgium. Even when the promotion of a particular national tradition was not a central goal, as in the unrealized Viennese competition discussed in the last chapter, the logic of setting mandatory repertoire led inexorably to the formation of a global musical canon. Of course, by the mid-twentieth century, the classical music world already shared a basic canon that was rooted firmly in the Germanic tradition from Bach to Brahms. International music competitions affirmed this basic canon and expanded it while still enforcing an increasing homogenization. When Rudolf Gamsjäger sought to pit different musical traditions against one another in 1953, he stipulated that jury members from each country should submit lists of mandatory pieces.79 Taken together, the mandatory repertoire for the competition would thus combine or juxtapose multiple national traditions, which all competitors would have to master. Similarly, when the Soviets set pieces by Taneev or even Tchaikovsky that were not familiar in the West as mandatory repertoire for the Tchaikovsky Competition, the Poles set specific Chopin études, and the Belgians set show pieces by Ysaÿe, those pieces gradually entered an expanded, but

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internationally homogeneous canonical repertoire. Competition thus begat global integration. Judging international music competitions, too, necessitated global standardization, a standardization of value. The Soviets shared with their Western counterparts the expectation that judging at international music competitions should be “objective.” In general, judging requires the articulation of standards to which all participants agree to adhere. Objective judging is simply the application of those standards without bias (usually assumed to be political favoritism, nationalism, or bloc voting in international competitions, whether musical or athletic) or personal taste. Judging music is particularly difficult because of the importance of the emotional response that it provokes. When non-experts listen to music, they judge it on the basis of how it makes them feel, which often depends on familiarity—a fundamentally subjective judgment.80 Expert evaluation combines that sort of response with a judgment about how precisely the performer has executed the demands placed on the instrument by the composition, the performer’s technique. Living up to the objective standards that they typically shared required jury members at international competitions to privilege their evaluation of technique. Technical perfection led to competitive success. Soviet instrumentalists’ emphasis on technique, so lamented by Mikhailov in the aftermath of the Tchaikovsky competition, was nevertheless one of the factors that positioned Soviet competitors to do so well. Mikhailov was not the only observer to note that Soviet performers were known for their technical brilliance—as opposed to his “individual style” or others’ “interpretive depth,” for example. Indeed, one of the clichés of American music critics’ evaluations of Soviet musicians from the late 1950s on was to praise their technical brilliance while questioning their interpretive creativity.81 This cliché was part and parcel of the American critique of the Soviet system writ large, a critique that emphasized American individuality (or individualism) over Soviet technical virtuosity. Nevertheless, American musicians had to comply with the global pursuit of technical brilliance at which the Soviets excelled or suffer even more constant defeat. Music competitions were not the only source of the standardization of performance practice and the constant drive throughout the twentieth century for ever greater technical precision in instrumental performance. Another source was the global circulation of elite musicians and the transnational, transimperial musical collaborations that resulted from that circulation. Collaboration increasingly begat homogenizing standardization. Another, crucial contributor to the quest for technical perfection was the advent and rapid global circulation of musical recordings. The ability to

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manipulate multiple performances to produce a single, technically perfect (or nearly so) recording raised the standard for live performance as well.82 But it was in international music competitions that these two factors most clearly united to privilege a homogenous, technically brilliant performance ideal. In the mid-twentieth century, Soviet violinists, pianists, and cellists best realized that ideal. The First International Tchaikovsky Competition institutionalized and at least partially realized the Soviet claim that Moscow, the Soviet capital, was the center of a global musical culture. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, an international music competition system grew rapidly out of prominent but sparse beginnings in the relative periphery of the European 1920s and 1930s, Brussels and Warsaw. As competitions sprang up all over Europe, they became explicit cultural battlegrounds between the new postwar empires. From the beginning, Soviet performers dominated this competitive system, sometimes nearly to the point of absurdity. In the early 1950s, when new competitions were rapidly springing up all over Europe, the Soviet Committee on Artistic Affairs drafted a proposal for a Moscow Musical Holiday that explicitly claimed Moscow as the global center of a mode of cultural competition that its musicians were already dominating. The decision to table the Moscow Musical Holiday meant that between 1952 and 1958, other competitions in East (Prague, Warsaw, Budapest) and West (Brussels and Paris) remained crucial proving grounds of this most explicitly competitive feature of the cultural Cold War’s musical front. When the First International Tchaikovsky Competition finally took place in 1958, the dominance of what was referred to as the Soviet performance school was already well established by international superstars (and earlier competition winners) like David Oistrakh, Emil Gilels, and Mstislav Rostropovich. These early winners of international competitions abroad embodied links to the Soviets’ own competition: Oistrakh and Gilels chaired their respective juries in Moscow in 1958, and Rostropovich would chair the first cello competition during the Second International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1962. But in the aftermath of the first Tchaikovsky Competition, the Soviet minister of culture put the finishing touches on a competitive apparatus at home that was designed to produce winners, then broadcast and distribute the prestige that winning conferred through systematic concertizing at home, throughout the Soviet empire, and in the West. This apparatus reinforced and even extended the role of international competition in all aspects of Soviet musical life, from the conservatories that were to retool to continue producing international laureates to the concertizing of

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those laureates and the composers who composed new music for them. The new requirement that performers had to develop two new concert programs every year and include new works by Soviet composers provided both a stimulus to composition and a perpetual engine of refreshment for concertizing repertory. Considering the dominant tastes of a global classical music audience, the tie-in to competition provided a multiplier for the prestige of the Soviet cultural empire. Indeed, music competitions had also become mechanisms for the global standardization of music repertoire and performance practices. The logic of the system tied success to “objective” judging, which privileged technical accomplishment. Soviet domination of these competitions ensured that an emphasis on technical perfection would remain a lasting Soviet legacy. Furthermore, the repertoire plan for the Soviets’ own Tchaikovsky Competition enacted a typical pattern of the particularly Soviet mode of integration that was central to its imperial culture. Encouraging contestants to showcase works from their own national musical traditions but framing those works within a common heritage, juxtaposing them with Russian classics, and following them with music by Soviet composers symbolically appropriated those nations’ traditions into a Soviet global standard. The surprising conclusion to the First Tchaikovsky Competition also demonstrated that all those superlatives, all the political meanings of music competitions and their results, were open to multiple, contradictory interpretations. To Americans Van Cliburn’s win was a national triumph. By 1958, the Soviets’ Sputnik, growing economy, chess Grand Masters, violinists, and impressive Olympic team seemed unnerving, possibly justifying Khru­ shchev’s brash proclamations of superiority. It was a welcome revelation that Soviet pianists could, after all, be vanquished by a skinny young Texan. To the Soviets, though, the competition was also a national triumph, a full-fledged demonstration that Moscow was a, perhaps the, center of a global musical culture with broad appeal to audiences everywhere. An American (claimed for the Russian school, anyway) might have won the piano competition, but the Soviets utterly dominated the violin competition, showed well in the piano competition, and, most important, hosted perhaps the most difficult and authoritative music competition of them all. Besides that, they were retooling their music system to guarantee that Soviet dominance would continue into the future. That dominance was as sure a sign as any they knew of the superiority of the Soviet cultural empire. This appearance of cultural superiority coincided with other aspects of what in retrospect was the high tide of Soviet empire. Soviet technological development had put the first artificial satellite in orbit six months earlier,

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and mass mobilization for Khrushchev’s signature Virgin Lands campaign would fuel dramatic economic growth for another year or two. When Vice President Nixon arrived in Moscow the next year to accompany the celebration of U.S. consumer goods in a Moscow park, Khrushchev was confident enough in the overall superiority of the Soviet system to rejoin the battle over quality of life tied to consumer goods as well. Though Soviet musicians would continue to dominate international music competitions, that was a battle the Soviets, in the end, could not win.

Ch a p ter 4

Oistrakh on Tour, Richter at Home Display, Control, and the Style of Global Empire

Philadelphia. The Academy of Music. Eugene Ormandy and his world-renowned Philadelphia Orchestra. Two superstar violin soloists, David Fedorovich Oistrakh and Isaac Stern. On Christmas Eve, 1955, this collection of musicians and the technicians who recorded them set about turning the Cold War’s most visible direct competition—a battle of cultural accomplishment between hegemonic empires—into what was already becoming a cultural synthesis that would eventually result in the global standardization of one of the great cultural institutions of the pre–World War I  European empires, the symphony orchestra. Though surely none of the participants thought about what they were doing in anything like those terms, their herculean efforts that day were worthy of the process. Described by the author of liner notes for a reissue of some of the recordings decades later as “a positively Stakhanovite burst of energy on one long day in the studios [sic] that must have tested everyone’s stamina,” it was an exceptionally busy day.1 The session included recordings of Oistrakh playing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, the Mozart Fourth Violin Concerto, and the Bach Violin Concerto in E Major (BWV 1042).2 It also included Stern playing the Bach Violin Concerto in A Minor and, in an apparently improvised decision at day’s end, a recording of both stars performing an arrangement of Antonio Vivaldi’s Concerto in A Minor for Two Violins.3 As a reviewer of the recordings crowed when they were released in the United States a few months later, the Oistrakh-Stern 114

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collaboration was “a wonderful illustration not only of two schools of violin playing but also of two schools of musical philosophy.”4 Oistrakh and Stern represented to this reviewer at least—and surely to many, many others—a rare chance to witness and evaluate the results of two competing cultural projects through a still rare moment of cooperation. But the Oistrakh-Ormandy collaborations were also harbingers, arguably more significant ones, of a global synthesis that had already begun. When Soviet artists began concertizing in the West, they became vehicles to demonstrate the accomplishments of Soviet culture in the most potentially hostile environments of the Cold War. Their visits provided opportunities to publicize a peaceful and civilized view of the Cold War’s cultural competition for hosts and guests alike, and those visits were understood on both sides as lenses that refracted competition in addition to providing moments for art to transcend politics. Most studies of Soviet concertizing activities in the West stress the competitive aspects of the tours, their propaganda value in the Cold War clash between East and West.5 And so they most definitely were. But they were also more than that. When Oistrakh made those recordings with Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, as well as others in the weeks that followed with Charles Munch and the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Dimitri Mitropoulos and the New York Philharmonic, he was in the midst of the second major concert tour by a Soviet artist to the United States since World War II. His visit was a major international event, and his brilliance on the concert stage was widely celebrated in the U.S. and Soviet press.6 More intimately, his elegant hotel rooms allowed him to receive visits graciously from East Coast cultural glitterati, some of whom quietly expressed their appreciation for how he had avoided a scandal that threatened the beginning of his tour. This chapter analyzes Oistrakh’s first American tour after chasing him around the world in the postwar 1940s and 1950s. It also examines the reverse side of the coin of transimperial travel, observing the pianist Sviatoslav Richter stuck inside the Soviet empire over the same decades. Investigating Oistrakh’s mobility and Richter’s comparative immobility in the 1950s makes it possible to wrestle with the complex and sometimes contradictory interplay between the Soviet efforts to display artistic excellence in the West as part of the Cold War cultural battle while exerting extreme control over the transimperial travel required to do that and the much subtler processes of cultural integration that accompanied the louder propaganda clash. These early tours implicitly traced the larger structures of Soviet culture for Western audiences through a concert programming strategy that established bona fides through performances of well-known Western works, showcased Russian classics, and

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introduced new Soviet music, tracing the “Great Appropriation” of prewar Soviet cultural construction and implicitly making the case that Soviet music was the best continuation of shared Western traditions.7 The tours achieved many of the Soviets’ goals, allowing enthralled audiences in the American cultural empire to experience the exceptional accomplishment of elite Soviet artists. But despite these successes, Soviet officials always tried to maintain stringent controls over who could tour, when, where, and under what conditions. This obsession with control, most clearly exhibited by Richter’s case, at least partially undermined the image of cultural accomplishment the musicians’ performances produced. But the most lasting legacy of these politically charged tours may have been less obvious at the time: they facilitated a longer-term globalization of musical performance style that eventually transcended the imperial boundaries crossed by the touring superstars.

Displaying Excellence: David Oistrakh’s Tours of the Capitalist West By the end of the Khrushchev period, Soviet musicians and ballet dancers touring the West had become a regular component of the international music performance system, their appearances regularly hailed as artistic achievements and their much rarer defections attracting such international attention as to produce a major lasting image of the Cold War’s cultural confrontation in the popular imagination.8 But Soviet concert tours abroad started relatively slowly after World War II, as Soviet musicians initially toured the countries that would soon be absorbed into the Soviet cultural empire during the Stalin period, and were sent farther west (and to the capitalist East—Japan) only in the years leading up to and especially after Stalin’s death.9 Touring musicians were chosen carefully from among the most prominent and privileged musicians in the Soviet Union. Concert tours in the capitalist West were arranged only after musicians had proven themselves in international performance competitions and toured successfully artistically, politically, and in terms of what was deemed to be appropriate behavior) within the Soviet cultural empire. This trajectory is epitomized in the touring career of the violinist David Oistrakh. Oistrakh splashed onto the international music scene before World War II, when he won second prize at the 1935 Henryk Wieniawski Violin Competition in Warsaw. He cemented his reputation as one of the world’s finest young violinists two years later as the top prize winner at the inaugural Eugène Ysaÿe (later Queen Elisabeth) Violin Competition in Brussels, where he was the best of four Soviet violinists to place in the top five.10 His

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international success quickly made him one of the most prominent violinists within the Soviet Union, earning him the title Honored Figure of the Arts of the RSFSR in 1942, a Stalin Prize in 1943, and an Order of Lenin in 1946.11 It should be no surprise, therefore, that along with the pianist Emil Gilels, Oistrakh was one of the first Soviet musicians to begin giving concerts abroad within a year of the war’s end. In May 1946, he took his first postwar international trip as part of the Soviet delegation to the Prague Spring Music Festival.12 Oistrakh and the pianists Lev Oborin and Abram Makarov were also scheduled to make their first visits to the West in 1946, traveling directly from Prague to Vienna; however, final permission for that trip did not come in time, and the group returned to the Soviet Union directly from Prague.13 During the Stalin period, Czechoslovakia was to be a regular destination for Oistrakh (he returned in 1947, 1949, and 1950), and he would not travel outside the emerging Soviet cultural empire until he toured Finland in 1949.14 This restriction to the Soviet empire took place despite repeated plans to send Oistrakh touring elsewhere in the West, including to Italy in 1947 or 1948 and to Sweden and England in 1949.15 When that first proposed tour of England did not materialize, another proposal to send Oistrakh, Oborin, or even Sviatoslav Richter to England along with the conductor Evgenii Mravinskii in 1950 developed out of a British communist request to send sympathetic English musicians to the Soviet Union.16 That request, too, came to naught, but in the early 1950s, Oistrakh (and other Soviet musicians) did begin touring Western Europe more regularly. For example, from the end of April until early June 1951, Oistrakh served on the jury of the Queen Elisabeth Violin Competition in Brussels, where he was part of an eight-person Soviet delegation that also included the competition’s eventual winner, Leonid Kogan.17 Three of those eight (the others were the pianist Vladimir Iampolsky and one Solovev) continued on to Italy to take part in that year’s Florentine May festival (in June!).18 After Stalin’s death in March 1953, Oistrakh’s international tours increasingly focused on the capitalist world. He finally made it to England in 1954, where his performances garnered wide attention and acclaim. One critic even credited him with saving a concert from the embarrassingly poor accompaniment of the London Symphony Orchestra.19 In the next two years, performances in Belgium (where he again served on the Queen Elisabeth jury) and a tour of Japan were organized.20 More complicated—and revealing—proved to be efforts to have Oistrakh appear in West Germany in 1954 or 1955. In September 1954, the Soviet embassy in Berlin received a proposal from the West German impresario Ulbrich Wallner that reveals how intertwined with Cold War politics these

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first Soviet tours of the West could be. Wallner reported that he had been upset when the West Berlin authorities had prohibited Oistrakh from performing in the city in February 1954. As a result, he organized a public concert in May at which he played some of Oistrakh’s recordings, to great success. After the concert, Wallner further reported, there was a gathering of music lovers who insisted that he attempt to arrange a live concert for Oistrakh as soon as possible. The letter to the Soviet embassy constituted his formal invitation.21 In fact, the Soviets had been approached by another figure from the West German music world earlier in the year. In May, Cologne-based composer Kurt Driesch met with the head of the Soviet Ministry of Culture’s Foreign Relations Administration, V. S. Pereslavtsev, to discuss Soviet-West German musical ties. Driesch was visiting the Soviet Union as part of a cultural delegation, and he had met Aram Khachaturian at the reception for the cultural delegates at the Grand Kremlin Palace. Thinking about the possibilities of making Khachaturian’s latest compositions more readily available to West German audiences led Driesch to develop a series of ideas about possible tours of Soviet musicians to West Germany. These ideas and Driesch’s responses to Pereslavtsev’s questions about them together demonstrate the power of intraimperial circuits of cultural flow, even for the arrangement of concert tours that crossed boundaries between the empires, creating a new and eventually significant interimperial circuit. Driesch started the conversation by recommending three main routes of musical exchange. The first route was performance, by both Germans and Soviets, of Russian and German classical works. The second involved performance of contemporary Soviet and German works by the leading performers in both countries. The third would be for the Soviets to hold an international music festival and invite delegates from the entire world. Driesch also noted that such an exchange would require a great deal of planning and “delicate approach to the selection of repertoire and the composition of the concert delegations.” That “delicate approach” essentially amounted to programming Soviet composers whose work was already familiar to German audiences: Prokofiev, Khachaturian, Shostakovich. But Driesch also considered it desirable to mix in compositions by Soviet composers from the national republics (Armenia, Tadzhikistan, and Uzbekistan got special mention), suggesting that they might “interest” German audiences.22 In one of his two most revealing statements, Driesch also suggested that artists touring West Germany could then move on to tour the GDR. Pereslavtsev asked the obvious follow-up question: what about artists already touring the GDR stopping over or continuing on to West Germany?

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Driesch’s negative reaction to this logical question suggests that even Westerners sympathetic to Soviet culture conceptualized—or at least observed a Western conceptualization of—a circuit of proper interimperial cultural flow that moved from west to east, from capitalism to communism, from Anglo-American to Soviet. He considered that rather than have musicians touring the GDR go to West Germany, it would be “more tactically correct” to send Soviet artists to West Germany directly from England, Belgium, or other Western countries, because Germans living in the western zones “relate to the GDR with even greater distrust than to the Soviet Union.” Furthermore, Driesch recommended against having Soviet musicians appear in West Berlin altogether because the complicated political situation in the city might cause direct interference with the concerts. He cited the suppression of Oistrakh’s concerts earlier in the year as a demonstration of his point.23 More important, this statement presaged the complete and momentous shift in the Soviet strategy for organizing Western tours analyzed in the next chapter. Driesch suggested that the Soviets rely on Western impresarios. In particular, he warned against having Soviet musicians appear in West Germany under the auspices of East German institutions, citing the unsuccessful effort to organize concerts for Oistrakh in West Berlin, “which were virtually prohibited.” Instead, Driesch recommended using West German impresarios, notably Cologne-based Gustav Finemann and his Westdeutsche Konzertdirektion Bestzer (WKB). Driesch assured his Soviet interlocutors that the WKB was an authoritative organization that could successfully manage Soviet artists’ concerts in West Germany. It enjoyed the support of West German governing circles, and before Driesch left for Moscow, Finemann had expressed a strong desire to send an invitation to Soviet artists to tour West Germany under his company’s auspices.24 As we shall see, finding partners who wanted to represent Soviet musicians, who enjoyed support and authority within their own societies, and who had the resources (symbolic and financial) to organize successful tours would prove essential to the Soviet strategy for expanded tours in the West. Central to that strategy, too, would be sending Soviet musicians on tours to the very center of the capitalist world, the United States. The 1955–1956 concert season saw U.S. tours by three Soviet virtuosi—Gilels, Oistrakh, and (somewhat successfully, at least from a practical standpoint) the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. In October 1955, Gilels became the first Soviet musician to tour the United States during the Cold War. The tour was a remarkable success. His premiere in Philadelphia was hailed as a “triumph,” and the musician himself proclaimed “a great pianist,” a “master of the keyboard,” and “a little giant” by ecstatic critics in every city he visited.25

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“He can make the piano sing and he can cause it to thunder; it bends to his will,” wrote one.26 “Put down this Boston debut concert as one of the most exciting within memory, and you will not be guilty of exaggeration,” wrote another.27 High-society writers noted that the Soviet embassy threw its first black-tie reception since World War II in connection with the tour, and yet others kept close watch on what the Soviet pianist might purchase during his visit.28 Of course, the political aspects and diplomatic details of the visit were not neglected either, as some critics worried about the balance between the political and the artistic issues involved in cultural exchange while others recorded the “good wishes” the Gilels tour was meant to inspire.29 The Soviet press, too, covered the tour intently and glowingly, announcing the beginning of the tour in Pravda and reproducing the praise of the American press periodically throughout his stay in the United States.30 The First American Tour

Oistrakh’s first American tour followed right on the heels of this Gilels triumph, and in terms of its influence on future policy and unintended consequences, the Oistrakh tour was even more eventful. It started with a potential controversy that revealed to Soviet officials the inadequacies of the cultural exchange infrastructure and personnel in the Soviet embassy in Washington, and it ended with the beginnings of a notable shift in Soviet strategy for U.S. tours. The Oistrakh tour showed Soviet cultural bureaucrats that their existing institutional interface with the capitalist West required work before it would allow them to realize the propaganda advantages that derived from their international music superstars. Successful though this early tour was from every point of view, it nevertheless convinced the Soviets that maximizing propaganda benefits and financial profits might depend on their choice of capitalist partners. The tour thus marked a turning point on the way to Soviet integration into an international economy of musical exchange that was very different from the system that had been built within the Soviet cultural empire. Furthermore, the recording sessions and collaborative musical endeavors that characterized both the Gilels and the Oistrakh tours had more global resonance in Oistrakh’s case precisely because of the different interactions between soloist and orchestra typical of the piano and the violin. The eventual globalization of orchestral sound depended on standardizing strings more than pianos. Just as he did in Europe, Oistrakh attracted a great deal of interest from concert organizers in the United States. In January 1955, the Soviet embassy in Washington forwarded a selection of proposals or invitations

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from American impresarios and artistic management companies offering to arrange exchanges between Soviet and American musicians. Included in this selection was a query from Fritz Reiner about Oistrakh’s availability to perform with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and a short memo from Frederick C. Schang, the head of Columbia Artists Management, a major U.S. company. Schang proposed to exchange the violinist Yehudi Menuhin for David Oistrakh, the operatic bass George London for Gilels, and the prima ballerina Maria Tallchief for her Soviet counterpart, Galina Ulanova.31 The other proposals were not brought to fruition, but Schang’s would prove to be the beginning of the first two American tours by Soviet artists: first Gilels, then Oistrakh. The return component of the originally proposed exchange did not materialize, but by the fall, negotiations between Schang and the Soviets were far enough advanced that Schang produced a contract which provided for Oistrakh’s tour to start at the beginning of November in New York with an appearance with the London Philharmonia under the direction of Herbert von Karajan.32 Publicity photos were requested and provided in September and October.33 Programs were proposed, vetted, and agreed upon.34 The implications of a Soviet violinist appearing in the United States with a British orchestra conducted by a German conductor are striking: this was to be a demonstration of the globalization of Western art musical culture. But it was not to be—just yet. Audiences greeted the announcement of Oistrakh’s schedule with a great deal of excitement. When tickets for his two Carnegie Hall recitals scheduled for 20 and 23 November went on sale in New York on Halloween morning, an almost unprecedented crowd queued up to try to purchase them. Two hours before the box office opened, a line four abreast extended down the block and around the corner. Despite being limited to two tickets for each of the two recitals, between seven and eight thousand people sought the fifty-five hundred or so available seats. The recitals were sold out in two and a half hours.35 Demand was so great for his Orchestra Hall recital in Chicago scheduled for 28 November that a second recital with an entirely different program was added the next night.36 Even in cities in which Oistrakh would not appear newspapers reported on the minutiae of his preparations.37 Included in the general excitement were reports of his repertoire and exact concert schedule. Most newsworthy was the leaked announcement that Oistrakh would appear in New York with von Karajan and the London Philharmonia for two concerts in mid-November.38 Not everyone in the United States was happy about this development. On 31 October, embassy officials met separately both with Howard Fast, a one-time member of the

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American Communist Party and author of Spartacus, and Theodore Bayer, the secretary of a Soviet-American friendship society, both of whom relayed an “urgent request” that Oistrakh not appear with von Karajan.39 The objection stemmed from von Karajan’s activities in Germany during the war. According to reports which filtered back to the Central Committee in Moscow by way of the embassy, the Ministry of Culture, and the bureaucrats in the Central Committee apparatus, von Karajan was considered “politically compromised” because he had openly expressed pro-fascist views and even been given the title of baron for his services to Hitler’s Nazi state. U.S. communists and some others friendly to the Soviets apparently thought that it would be a major political error for the first Soviet violinist to tour the United States since the war to appear with such a “compromised” German artist—and they threatened to demonstrate during the concert if it continued as planned.40 After meeting with their American friends, embassy officials immediately changed tack and recommended that Oistrakh cancel his first New York engagements, giving as his excuse that he was ill. The Ministry of Culture supported the proposal, suggesting that Oistrakh remain in Moscow and continue his teaching duties at the Moscow Conservatory, but otherwise not appear in public.41 The bureaucrats in the Central Committee arts oversight apparatus agreed to this course of action, and Oistrakh’s late arrival was announced in the United States.42 Even Soviet bureaucrats tasked with making Oistrakh’s travel arrangements took as a given that Oistrakh was indeed ill.43 Publicly, this stunt appears to have worked. The Soviets were able to avoid the controversy of having Oistrakh appear with von Karajan without his withdrawal becoming a major controversy. When Oistrakh finally did arrive on 16 November, he was greeted with fanfare, and his statements about being “completely recovered” and disappointed to have missed the opportunity to perform with the London Philharmonia seem to have been taken at face value.44 Outside the glare of publicity, the tight brush with controversy proved far more consequential. Soviet cultural policy makers in Moscow took a dim view of their Washington counterparts’ role in allowing a potentially embarrassing situation to develop. In his first memo about the controversy to the Central Committee, Minister of Culture Nikolai Mikhailov stressed that the embassy had recommended the original pairing of Oistrakh and von Karajan and been involved with the minute details of the planning until the 31 October meeting. In this way, even while rushing to resolve the situation, Mikhailov sought to lay responsibility for the situation entirely at the feet of the embassy personnel.45

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Central Committee bureaucrats Dmitrii Polikarpov and Boris Iarustovsky agreed when they summarized the events for their superiors and made the following stern recommendation: “At the same time, it would be a good idea to direct the most serious attention to the irresponsible attitude of the workers of the Soviet Embassy in the USA to the organization of international cultural exchanges.”46 Polikarpov and Iarustovsky went on to describe two other incidents in which the embassy had either passed along information that later turned out to be erroneous or failed to move in a timely enough manner for a potentially positive opportunity to be realized. In both cases, they complained, Soviet prestige had been damaged.47 The next day, Mikhailov wrote a longer summary of the incident and complaint about the embassy personnel assigned to cultural exchange. His document reveals that the narrowly averted von Karajan controversy was merely symptomatic of the disarray created by these first artistic tours in the United States. Mikhailov began his memo to the Central Committee by charging the embassy with assigning “unqualified” workers who operated “without sufficient study of the circumstances” of cultural exchange between the United States and Soviet Union.48 One example of this insufficient study was the embassy’s suggestion that Oistrakh appear with von Karajan. Mikhailov again detailed the embassy’s involvement in planning the details of the joint appearance, this time listing exact dates of communiques the ministry had received from the embassy. In a passage that particularly interested the memo’s readers, Mikhailov again explained von Karajan’s politically compromised status but then quickly moved to a charge that emphasized the incompetence of the embassy cultural staff and their insensitivity to the main goals of cultural exchange. He wrote: “Besides that, the Embassy, for incomprehensible reasons, recommended to begin Oistrakh’s performances on 25 November of this year in Philadelphia, turning down the solo concerts on 20 and 23 November of this year in New York, for which the tickets had already been sold. This led to serious difficulties in conducting Oistrakh’s tour of the USA, and to the failure of the first New York concert.”49 If the embassy staff ’s insufficient study and incompetence hindered the Oistrakh tour, its lack of punctuality prevented other potential tours altogether. Mikhailov reported that on 29 October, his ministry received a letter from the embassy in which an American concert company proposed to arrange tours of the Soviet Union for several artists, including the violinist Yehudi Menuhin. The problem: the proposed tour was to start on 8 November. The original proposal had been dated 7 October. That it took the embassy three weeks to relay it to the Ministry of Culture combined with the fact that embassy personnel did not investigate any of the logistical

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requirements of the proposal in the interim, according to Mikhailov, prevented the ministry from even considering the proposal.50 To be fair, even the extra three weeks would have been insufficient, and the proposal would surely have been doomed in any case. Regardless of the original proposal’s (lack of) viability, Mikhailov used the embassy’s delay to propose that the Soviet embassy in Washington increase its attention to cultural affairs: “In connection with the above, we ask you to direct the attention of the Soviet ambassador in Washington, Comrade Zarubin, to the necessity of improving the embassy’s work regarding questions of cultural exchange between the USSR and the United States.”51 Increased cultural exchange required increased institutional attention to managing the Soviet Union’s interface with the capitalist West, starting with the personnel already charged with representing the Soviet Union’s political interests abroad: the foreign service. Despite the narrowly averted mess at its start, Oistrakh’s tour of the United States was a tremendous success from an artistic standpoint and from the perspective of Columbia Artists Management. The New York Times heralded Oistrakh’s debut recitals at Carnegie Hall in November as a triumph, and the music critic at the Chicago Daily Tribune was so impressed with Oistrakh’s Orchestra Hall recitals a week later that words nearly failed him. In the end, he resorted to “miracles” and “glorious” and claimed that “if the Russian violinist were to spend a week here, music reviews would have to be sung in a public street owing to a shortage of vocabulary.”52 Indeed, Oistrakh would stay longer, extending his tour in December to perform, then record, the American debut of Shostakovich’s new Violin Concerto with the New York Philharmonic.53 This extension allowed Oistrakh’s first tour of the United States to fully embody a programming pattern typical of early tours of the West by Soviet virtuosi. These tours implicitly put forward a claim that the common Western classical music tradition was best developed by Soviet music. By the early Cold War, this claim had become so ingrained in Soviet patterns of thought that it was not even explicitly articulated in the Ministry of Culture or Central Committee discussions of the tours. It was, nevertheless, inherent in the selection of repertoire the virtuosi performed while on tour. During the 1930s, Soviet cultural orthodoxies were established through a complex process that subjected the Soviet intelligentsia to domination by the Communist Party but elevated many intelligentsia values to Soviet ideals. At the same time, engagement with Western intellectuals and artists and a thorough reconsideration of the classics of the Russian imperial heritage resulted in the extensive appropriation of both Western and pre-Soviet artistic traditions.

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The fusion of these appropriated traditions with contemporary Soviet culture created what was presented as the superior culture of the world’s first socialist state.54 When the musical exemplars of this socialist culture were displayed in the West, they reproduced that original appropriation, then introduced the Soviet innovation in three phases. The first phase entailed establishing the performer’s virtuosic capabilities through performance of a standard work from the common Western canon, usually a Beethoven or Brahms concerto. Oistrakh’s standard fare for his mid-1950s Western tours included the Brahms D Major Violin Concerto and the Mozart Violin Concerto no. 5 in A Major, though he also held in ready reserve concertos for violin and orchestra by Bach, Beethoven, and Sibelius.55 When Emil Gilels toured the United States in the fall of 1955, he prominently included Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 3 in C Minor, op. 37. Mstislav Rostropovich’s first U.S. tour in the spring of 1956 featured his performances of the Brahms Cello Sonata no. 1 in E Minor, op. 38, and Bach’s Suite no. 6 in D Major for Unaccompanied Cello, BWV 1012.56 The second phase entailed showcasing the Russian musical traditions of which the Soviets were assumed to be the natural inheritors. This goal almost always meant performing Tchaikovsky, though for pianists, Rachmaninoff was also a staple. Oistrakh was typical in this regard, including the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto in D Major almost whenever he played abroad and ensuring during his preparations for the U.S. tour that American audiences would hear his interpretation of it as well.57 The Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto no. 1 in B-flat Minor was even more central to Gilels’s appearances in the United States than the violin concerto was for Oistrakh. In fact, the first performance of a Soviet musician in the United States since the 1920s was Gilels’ rendition of the Tchaikovsky concerto with Eugene Ormandy’s Philadelphia Orchestra on 3 October 1955. So was the second, when the two collaborated again in New York the next day. A month later, Gilels and Fritz Reiner’s Chicago Symphony Orchestra recorded the piece.58 Often these first two phases went together, especially since the Russian classics could be as familiar to mid-century Western audiences as the German ones. Gilels performed his Beethoven Piano Concerto no. 3 along with the Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto during the same New York concert in mid-October. Oistrakh managed an impressive trio of appropriated concerti—the Mozart, the Brahms, and the Tchaikovsky—all accompanied by Dimitry Metropoulos’s New York Philharmonic in a single concert two months later.59 With bona fides established and the Russian cultural heritage displayed, the third phase of the implicit argument for Soviet superiority entailed the

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performance of a work by a contemporary Soviet composer. In these early years, these Soviet pieces were frequently receiving their national premieres, though Oistrakh had in his regular rotation a number of Soviet pieces that were already known in the West, including Aram Khachaturian’s Concerto for Violin in D Minor (1940) and Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto no. 1 in D Major, op. 19 (1923).60 This entire claim was embodied in a single piano recital that Gilels performed at Carnegie Hall on 11 October 1955. He started with sonatas by Mozart (B-flat Major, K. 570) and Chopin (B-flat Minor). Then he gave Shostakovich’s Three Preludes and Fugues, op. 87, its American premiere and concluded with two familiar Prokofiev show pieces, “Visions and Fugitives” and a flashy Toccata.61 Rostropovich, too, played the Shostakovich Sonata for Cello in D Minor, op. 40, typically coupling it with Brahms on the first half of his recital program.62 Oistrakh’s extended visit allowed him to complete the pattern as well. His premiere performance of the Shostakovich concerto was greeted with more “tumultuous” applause, though the New York Times critic was less taken with the piece than with its virtuosic performance. His description of the new concerto noted its dark, introspective tone, technical difficulty, and emotional intensity but concluded that it lacked inventiveness. Even so, he thought that Oistrakh performed the concerto phenomenally, rendering a technically explosive piece so accurately, clearly, and with such purity of sound that it seemed more a personal work than a show piece.63 This mixed reaction was typical: American critics stretched their limits to praise Soviet performers in superlatives but remained decidedly reserved in their assessments of new works by Soviet composers. The Los Angeles Times critic, for example, raved about Rostropovich’s dazzling recital performance but reported his suspicion that the soloist made the Shostakovich cello sonata seem better than it really was.64 Shostakovich’s Three Preludes and Fugues, too, elicited a dryly positive description from the New York critic who otherwise waxed eloquent in florid praise for Gilels when he performed it.65 Even though the clamorous critical acclaim almost drowned out the coolness toward new Soviet works, this American reaction constituted a rejection of the last part of the Soviets’ implicit claim to cultural superiority. Critics readily acknowledged a characteristically Soviet technical brilliance, but they also consistently questioned the capacity for a Soviet cultural system that they understood to be relentlessly repressive to produce genuine creativity.66 This juxtaposition of technique and creativity in the American reaction to Soviet musicians was part of a larger argument for the superiority of the Western system. That argument hinged at least in part on material abundance. Not surprisingly, the press paid a great deal of attention to the Soviets’ reactions

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to that abundance. The New York Times published a comparatively lengthy account of a jovial meeting between Oistrakh and the New York press corps that took note of his translator’s preference for New York pinstripe suits. Both the New York Times and the Chicago Daily Tribune also ran stories on the same day about the shopping activities of Oistrakh and Gilels, and the Washington Post and Times Herald reported on lavish musical receptions at the Soviet embassy in the U.S. capital.67 In addition to advancing the goals of increased understanding that were more explicitly articulated by all involved, Oistrakh’s tour provided an opportunity to glimpse the juxtaposition of these two claims of superiority. Especially because both sides were continuing to foster the “Spirit of Geneva” that had emerged from the Geneva Summit in 1955, it should be no surprise that the tour ended with public calls from interested parties on both sides to expand exchanges between the United States and Soviet Union.68 Oistrakh wrote favorably about the orchestras with whom he performed in the United States, and both Oistrakh and Gilels, the New York Times was led to believe, were encouraging the Ministry of Culture to organize a Soviet tour of Eugene Ormandy’s Philadelphia Orchestra.69 Dorothy Chandler went to Congress to press for an increase in cultural exchange between the superpowers. Convinced by her own recent visit to the Soviet empire that the best way to propagandize the American lifestyle was to invite Soviets to witness it for themselves, she suggested a dramatic increase in the number of Soviet ensembles invited to tour the United States.70 The tour was publicly declared a grand success, and both Soviet and American elites recognized the propaganda possibilities that cultural exchange provided. Less publicly, those directly involved also considered Oistrakh’s tour to be a major success, largely because of the public praise it generated. In the draft of a Ministry of Culture report about Soviet tours to the Americas, the authors quoted from the glowing reports in the Philadelphia press, which called Oistrakh “the best violinist in the entire world” and suggested that he played his Stradivarius better than anyone in the more than two-hundredyear life of the instrument.71 The report concluded that American audiences had a “very great” interest in Soviet performers. Gilels had already received invitations to return in 1956, and the authors were sure that Oistrakh would too. Consequently, they proposed as a general principle that performers who met with success in a country should return for subsequent tours to the same country. Having established that Soviet tours had been and were bound to continue to be perceived as successful, the Ministry of Culture bureaucrats suggested that more attention ought to be paid to the financial side of the exchange as well. Even after these successful tours, they began questioning

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the wisdom of continuing to use Columbia Artists Management and raised the question of searching for a “more progressive” company. In any case, they also suggested that future tour leaders from the Soviet side or a representative from the Ministry of Culture who accompanied Soviet artists should “familiarize themselves in more detail with the system of paying honoraria to performers and the system of taxation on honoraria,” so that future tours could be “brought up to date” regarding this issue.72 Oistrakh himself would play a role in realizing this last goal. Almost a year after his first tour ended, he met with Ministry of Culture officials to discuss the results of the tour at length.73 Like virtually everyone else, Oistrakh thought that the tour was carried out at a very high level. In particular, he cited the “interest and speculation” that accompanied his tour and the “good atmosphere” created by Gilels’s successful tour, which helped make his own arrival in the United States “a sensation.” He also noted that Columbia Artists Management was an “experienced” firm that organized his concerts very well, and Columbia had not needed to spend the funds budgeted for advertisements since newspapers covered the concerts in every city of the tour to such an extent that all concerts were sold out. Not surprisingly, Oistrakh was very satisfied with the interest—and the critical acclaim. As did almost every report about the tour, the conversation with Oistrakh contained a lengthy summary of praise in the U.S. press. Oistrakh reported reading sixty articles about his performances and the tour, and he characterized the general tenor as “ecstatic,” a characterization that would be hard to dispute.74 Important as the evaluation of the musical aspects of the tour always were, Oistrakh probably provided little or no new information about these aspects to his Ministry of Culture interlocutors in December 1956. He did, however, provide extensive detailed information regarding two of their other major concerns: the American organizers and finances of U.S. tours discussed in the next chapter and the politics and propaganda with which this chapter began. Even a year later, the von Karajan controversy, the scandal it could have caused, and Oistrakh’s feigned illness that averted that scandal were issues important enough to be raised in the conversation with Oistrakh. In a formal sense, Oistrakh was never far from the machinery of Soviet diplomacy in the West. He reported that Ambassador Zarubin was present at each of his many concerts and that the Soviet embassy in Washington hosted a reception for him, with representatives from the U.S. Department of State and the director of a “special department” of Soviet affairs in attendance. Less formally, too, Oistrakh was on the lookout for “provocations,” an expectation he apparently developed from the earlier experiences of Soviet journalists in the United States. There were none. Finally, Oistrakh noted that U.S.-based

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musicians, especially those who had fled Nazi Germany and immigrated to the United States in the buildup to the war, retained a “great antipathy” to Germans. Those, reported Oistrakh, “do not want to hear anything about either the GDR or about West Germany.” When his appearance with von Karajan was canceled, he was told, five hundred tickets to the London Philharmonia performance were returned. A number of musicians asked him: “ ‘Tell me honestly, you weren’t really sick.’ I answered, ‘No, I was really ill. ‘Well it is good that you fell ill,’ they told me.”75 With that laconic implicit justification of the Soviets’ von Karajan dodge, the notes of the conversation come to an end. When the Soviets committed to international concertizing as a mode of cultural diplomacy, they entered terrain in which transimperial musical collaboration and social intermingling and hospitality were important to both sides. Politics and a propaganda advantage were never far from the forefront of participants’ and observers’ minds. Like Oistrakh’s first U.S. tour, international concert tours always combined interest, cooperation, collaboration, and good will with thinly veiled cultural competition. Even after the novelty of Soviets on tour in the United States had worn off, the exceptionally high level of the Soviet superstars’ musical accomplishments continued to impress. The tours therefore realized the goals the Soviets set. But in the long term, that success was tempered by conflicting priorities at home, a typically Soviet preoccupation with control, and an unintended consequence of sending superstars abroad. Those countervailing tendencies partially undermined the tours’ runaway successes.

Balancing Priorities: Display, Control, and Sviatoslav Richter Important as it was to the Soviets to display their internationally renowned instrumentalists in the West, that goal sometimes conflicted with other priorities. Examining the checks that the Central Committee or Ministry of Culture placed on touring in the West in the mid-1950s demonstrates that despite the success of the transimperial tours and their increasing integration into a global music performance system, the Soviets sought to maintain some of the essential features of the Soviet music system, including those that were considered most onerous by Soviet musicians and most reviled by audiences abroad. Sometimes international travel was restricted when it was seen to conflict with domestic priorities. At other times, the Soviet bureaucracy’s penchant for control of its citizens outweighed even the considerable propaganda advantages that international cultural exhibition might have brought.

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Perhaps the clearest type of conflict in priorities was between the domestic and international uses of leading performers. If Oistrakh was touring Japan or serving on a competition jury in Paris, he was not overseeing his students at the Moscow Conservatory or entertaining audiences in Ufa. This fundamental and ever-present conflict was brought before the Central Committee explicitly in late 1957. In September, the head of the Central Committee Culture Department, Dmitrii Polikarpov, and the head of that department’s music sector, Boris Iarustovsky, wrote to the Central Committee to raise the issue of “improper practices of the use of the country’s leading concert ensembles.”76 Polikarpov and Iarustovsky reported that the Central Committee received letters—the implication was that it was a lot of letters, but they did not provide details—complaining that the most important regions of the Soviet Union were being badly served by the country’s top ensembles and soloists. The Moiseev Ensemble and Piatnitsky Choir, Oistrakh, Gilels, and the operatic bass Ivan Petrov were singled out by name.77 These performers were some of the most active internationally. Oistrakh, Gilels, and the Moiseev Ensemble were always among the first to tour the West, the Piatnitsky Choir was perpetually making the rounds of the empire, and Petrov (in 1954) was the first Russian bass since Feodor Chaliapin to appear with the Grand Opera in Paris, which made him an honorary member the same year.78 Prompted by these letters, the Culture Department examined the activities of the Moiseev Ensemble, the Sveshnikov Choir, the Piatnitsky Choir, and the Berezka ensemble and discovered that they were “obviously ignoring their concertizing activities in the country. These collectives spend almost all of their time either in Moscow or on international travels.” In fact, in 1956 and 1957, the sum of these ensembles’ domestic touring amounted to a total of a month and a half for Berezka and the Piatnitsky combined, a few concerts in Leningrad by the Sveshnikov and Moiseev, and a brief trip to Talinn by the Moiseev and to Nal'chik by the Sveshnikov. Though their exact movements were not catalogued in the memo, the leading soloists were said to have similarly abandoned domestic appearances outside Moscow.79 The Central Committee bureaucrats did not suggest cutting back on Moscow appearances. Indeed, they tied the paucity of domestic travel explicitly to international concertizing, noting that the Piatnitsky had canceled its planned 1957 tours of the Baltics and Central Asia because of an “ ‘unexpected’ international trip.”80 Even less visible ensembles sought to displace domestic tours with international ones: the Omsk Folk Choir apparently skipped a planned tour of its own region—Irkutsk and Angarsk-Bratsk— to appear in East Germany.81 Even when ensembles did tour domestically, their artistic directors accompanied them only if they felt like it. Thus,

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when Berezka toured Central Asia in 1956, its founder and artistic director, Nadezhda Nadezhdina, remained in Moscow, and with the exception of one trip to Leningrad, whenever the Sveshnikov Choir toured domestically, Aleksandr Sveshnikov himself did not participate. At the same time, none of them would miss any international tour.82 Clearly, leading Soviet artists found the prospect of touring abroad in the mid-1950s far preferable to tramping about the far reaches of the Soviet Union, and the Central Committee bureaucrats thought they knew why: “Particular attention is drawn to the fact that frequent international trips have become a source of enrichment for the artists of the USSR Folk Dance Ensemble [i.e., the Moiseev—KT.], Berezka, and individual performers. Financial interest in trips abroad motivates these artists to decline domestic travels on a variety of pretexts.”83 Distrust of high earnings by the artistic elite had long been characteristic of Soviet cultural bureaucrats, and one can sense from the tone of their memo that Polikarpov and Iarustovsky considered illegitimate the levels of compensation that international travelers received for their performances abroad.84 But they did not argue against those earnings per se or suggest any reduction in international earnings, at least at this point. Instead, Polikarpov and Iarustovsky condemned this practice for violating a major domestic priority articulated by the Central Committee: the necessity of creating “normal conditions for the life of the population, intelligentsia, and specialists” of the great industrial regions and areas of new construction in the Soviet periphery.85 After the fiery language and lengthy descriptions of shirking what they asserted was a fundamental domestic responsibility, one might expect that Polikarpov and Iarustovsky would suggest a sharp curtailment of international concertizing. They did not, for displaying Soviet cultural accomplishment in the West was also a high priority with significant potential for propaganda victories and financial gains. Instead, they suggested that the Central Committee instruct the Ministry of Culture to increase the number of performers available to travel abroad in order to achieve a better balance between the domestic and international touring activities of all these most elite performers.86 Controlled Immobility: The Case of Sviatoslav Richter in the 1950s

Balancing conflicting priorities and managing a dizzying tour schedule was a common feature in the high-profile and extremely small world of internationally mobile concertizing musicians. Oistrakh, Gilels, Moiseev, and the other most prominent Soviet musicians thus faced analogous challenges to

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those experienced by Stern, Heifetz, Rubinstein, and other Western stars. Even if the latter did not have to worry about trips to the Soviet Far East, the sort of balancing act required of the former was not necessarily distinctive to the Soviet system. Far more particular to the Soviet empire was an almost paranoid obsession among the highest-ranking Soviet politicians with exerting tight control over who could travel abroad, where, and when. This far less common but more spectacular and more peculiarly Soviet phenomenon cannot be better illustrated than through the case of the pianist Sviatoslav Richter.87 Richter began recording in the Soviet Union extensively in 1948.88 Requests from abroad for Richter to tour began almost immediately and quickly won the support of bureaucrats, first in the Stalin-era Committee on Artistic Affairs and then in its post-Stalin successor, the Ministry of Culture. In September 1948, representatives of the Czech Philharmonic in Prague requested that either Gilels or Richter tour during the 1948–1949 concert season.89 Richter did not go, although he did make his first appearance outside the Soviet Union at the 1950 Prague Spring Music Festival.90 That April, the Committee on Artistic Affairs inserted a Richter tour of Germany into their plan for international tours that year.91 The tour did not take place, but the invitations continued to pour in. Even before these two events, in November 1949, a series of English communists had proposed an exchange of sympathetic musicians for the 1950 concert season.92 After a good deal of internal discussion, the Committee on Artistic Affairs included Richter on the list of those they proposed to send to England.93 Again he did not go, but his reputation—and the demand for his appearances abroad—continued to grow. In March 1953, one of the leading institutions in Viennese musical life requested his presence on the jury for a planned music competition.94 The competition never took place, but Richter would not have served on the jury even if it had. Through the end of the Stalin period, Richter toured abroad extremely rarely, and then only within the empire. After Stalin’s death, as Soviet concert touring in the Soviet cultural empire expanded markedly and tours in the West began in earnest, Richter began to go abroad slightly more frequently. Still, he stayed within the empire, touring Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland in 1954.95 Meanwhile, the Ministry of Culture continued to field multiple proposals for Richter to tour in the West and to record with Western artists and in Western studios. In October 1956, Frederick Schang sought to follow up (or salvage?) his rather unsuccessful management of Rostropovich’s first tour of the United States with an invitation to Richter. His memo to the Ministry of Culture shows awareness of the repeated failures of Western companies to bring Richter abroad and

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hope that the situation had changed. It also confirms the existence of a sort of rumor mill surrounding the pianist, whose absence from international tours was noted almost without fail in countless record reviews of the midand late 1950s and sometimes speculated about by the Western press by the end of the decade.96 Schang prefaced his proposal by indicating that he had heard that Richter was concertizing outside the Soviet Union with increased frequency and even that he was soon to appear in England and Denmark. He then proceeded to make a direct request: Richter to the United States for a five- to six-week tour immediately following his appearances in London, on the same terms provided for Gilels and Oistrakh. Schang assured the Soviets that “there exists a universal opinion here that his appearances will be held with the same if not greater success as those of Gilels.”97 This proposal did not accomplish its ends. Richter did not tour England or Denmark that year, and even if he had, it is doubtful that Schang could have persuaded the Ministry of Culture to grant him a Richter tour. The Ministry of Culture was already in the process of switching to the flamboyant impresario Sol Hurok by that fall. Still, the rumor that Richter was preparing to tour England did have some basis in earlier events of 1956. In March 1956, Mikhailov reported to the Central Committee that Walter Legge of Columbia Records had proposed a recording session in England with Richter. Legge was willing to pay Richter an advance of £3,000 sterling, to cover all transportation costs, and to organize two concerts with a symphony orchestra for an additional 400 pounds.98 Though Mikhailov did not mention and may not even have been aware of it, Legge was one of the most influential record producers in the West. In addition to his exploits in the recording studio, he had also founded the Philharmonia Orchestra.99 If Legge were to produce a Richter recording, the result was bound to be a hit in the West. Mikhailov and his Ministry of Culture recommended agreeing to the proposal and sending Richter to England for four weeks in November 1956.100 The Central Committee nixed the proposal in a way that demonstrates that even while Soviet exchange with the West was expanding in 1956, the peculiarly Soviet exertion of control and extension of repression across generations affected who could participate. The Central Committee’s preoccupation with security concerns outweighed the material and propaganda advantages a Richter-Legge recording session would provide. In their internal report on Mikhailov’s request, Polikarpov and Iarustovsky had extremely high praise for Richter’s artistry, calling him “one of the greatest performing musicians in the world” and relaying the more precise praise of “a host of authoritative musicians.” According to these expert sources, Richter had

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“the same rich technical abilities as E. Gilels” but “even more meaningfully and deeply reveals many works, especially the Russian classics.” They also noted that he had traveled in the empire in 1954 with Central Committee approval. This portion of the report sounds like a ringing endorsement of the ministry’s proposal, but the conclusion contradicted that expectation: “Performances by Richter in England would be a grand success; however, sending him to capitalist countries seems inadvisable.” The reasons for this seemingly contradictory evaluation and conclusion come in the memo’s decisive discussion of Richter’s personal background and family history. Richter is described as a German bachelor, unaffiliated with any political party and without relatives in the Soviet Union. Worse, sometime in the early months of World War II, his father, Teofil Danilovich Richter, a theater organist and Odessa Conservatory piano instructor before the war, had been sentenced to execution by firing squad by the military tribunal of the army that organized the defense of Odessa. His mother, Anna Pavlovna Richter, had remained in Odessa during the German occupation and, according to what sound like limited sources, fled to Germany when Soviet forces recaptured the city.101 Richter’s proposed trip to England thus threw two priorities into direct conflict. On one hand, his stature as an internationally acclaimed musician was universally recognized, his earnings potential and propaganda value unequivocally acknowledged. On the other hand, his family background could scarcely have been worse, even several years after Stalin’s death. The Central Committee gave the matter fuller deliberation than was typical for cultural questions, and six members eventually signed off on the final decision: to agree with the Culture Department bureaucrats and decline Legge’s invitation.102 Then, in May and June 1956, Richter traveled outside the Soviet Union again, representing the Soviet Union at the Prague Spring Festival that year and performing in Bratislava and Brno in addition to Prague. His success in Czechoslovakia prompted Mikhailov to try again to send him slightly farther afield, to East Germany. In late June 1956, Mikhailov mounted a full-fledged argument that Richter should be allowed to travel abroad more frequently. He briefly reprised the well-recognized fact that Richter was highly sought after abroad, then switched to a two-part argument. In the first part, Mikhailov tried to draw on whatever sense of solidarity might exist within the Central Committee for a country in the Soviet empire’s European periphery, the GDR. In February 1956, Mikhailov explained, the East German embassy in Moscow had approached the Ministry of Culture with a request for Richter to appear at their planned celebration of the centennial of the influential German composer Robert Schumann’s death in late July.

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Mikhailov considered the stature that Richter’s presence would convey to the event, which was sure to occupy a central place in East German musical life that year and, Mikhailov noted, would attract representatives from many other countries. He submitted a request that the Central Committee approve the trip in March but received no answer.103 Mikhailov then catalogued the many different requests that East German politicians, diplomats, and music institutions had filed with the ministry and recounted the success of Richter’s Czechoslovak tour. Probably to counter the supposition that his family past might make him a political liability on tour, Mikhailov emphasized Richter’s exemplary behavior on all his imperial tours of the mid-1950s, noting that his traveling companions reported that he always behaved with “great humility and decency.”104 In the surprising second part of his argument, Mikhailov appealed to the Central Committee’s compassion for Richter as a person. He concluded his request with an appeal on behalf of Richter’s psychological state. Mikhailov noted that Richter was well aware of the very high demand for his services internationally and the constant refusal to allow him to travel was sending him into a depression that had begun to affect his performances at home: The reasons for our refusals of these proposals are not very persuasive: we decline invitations recalling the busyness or poor health of the pianist, and at the same time send him on tour to Poland, Hungary, or Czechoslovakia. S. Richter is a person of great culture. He thinks it is a definite political distrust and he suffers seriously because of it. Now his morale is in a seriously bad state. On June 27 of this year, there was supposed to be a concert at the Malyi Hall of the conservatory. Richter began to play very badly, apologized to the public, and cut off his performance.105 Considering Richter’s psychological state and his good behavior on other imperial tours, Mikhailov asked permission to allow him to go to East Germany for two weeks to participate in the Schumann jubilee. This appeal seemed at first to have worked. In their report on Mikhailov’s request Boris Riurikov, the assistant head of the Central Committee Culture Department, and Iarustovsky agreed with Mikhailov that Richter’s appearance in East Germany would have all the positive effects claimed by Mikhailov, and they agreed that Richter’s tours of Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia had been unmitigated successes. The execution of Richter’s father and the fact that his mother was thought to still be living in West Germany they considered factors that complicated the issue of whether or not he could be sent to “capitalist countries and even to the GDR.” And they provided

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additional information about his personal life: “Richter himself is, in fact, a bachelor, he has no children, his marriage to the singer N[ina] Dorliak is not registered, his surroundings do not inspire particular confidence; he leads a withdrawn form of life.” Furthermore, the KGB, though without any specific complaints about Richter himself, did not support sending him to the GDR. Still, the Culture Department bureaucrats seem to have been swayed by the appeal to Richter’s psychological state. They noted that his nerves had begun to affect his performances just before recommending approval of Mikhailov’s request.106 In a marginal notation, Leonid Brezhnev agreed with them. Unfortunately for Richter, a second marginal notation dated eleven days after the bureaucrat’s memo indicates that at some point, this decision was reversed. The question was “removed from consideration,” and the deputy minister of culture (Sergei Kaftanov) was informed by another Culture Department bureaucrat (P. A. Tarasov) that the question had been resolved.107 Richter did not travel to East Germany. The precise reason for the reversal of Brezhnev’s approval remains unclear; perhaps the KGB argument (of which there remains in these sources no documentary trace) proved more persuasive to other members of the Central Committee. Perhaps time simply ran out—the jubilee was, after all, to begin on 21 July, just four days after the final, negative resolution of the question. The Ministry of Culture did not give up, and the result of a final attempt to send Richter to the capitalist West in 1956 suggests that either political (i.e., Central Committee) or, most likely, security (i.e., KGB) concerns were ultimately responsible for Richter’s confinement to the Soviet empire in the 1950s. In early September 1956, Deputy Minister of Culture V. I. Pakhomov wrote to the Central Committee to seek approval for a two- to three-week tour of Finland for three Soviet musicians: the cellist Daniil Shafran, the coloratura Goar Gasparian, and Richter. The tour would be a response to a request from various Finnish concert organizations, and it would fulfill the ministry’s own plans for cultural ties with Finland for 1957.108 This time, the ministry simply slipped Richter’s name onto the list, without making a particular appeal on his behalf. The Culture Department bureaucrats (this time, it was Riurikov and A. M. Shvedov, a lower-ranking official) quickly agreed to the request as it applied to Shafran and Gasparian. For Richter, though, the old restriction still applied: “The question of sending S. Richter to capitalist countries has already been considered and decided in the negative. The KGB stands by the exact same position. It would be correct to give the Ministry of Culture instructions to submit a replacement of S. Richter with a different pianist for the trip to Finland.” Pospelov and Suslov agreed, and the ministry was essentially told to stop proposing international tours for Richter.109

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In 1958, Richter’s wife, the soprano Nina Dorliak, wrote to Mikhailov with an emotional personal appeal to allow Richter to travel abroad. As Mikhailov had done in 1956, Dorliak emphasized Richter’s depressed state and tied it directly to the presumed lack of trust in him that prevented him from being allowed to visit the capitalist world.110 Mikhailov responded with another appeal to the Central Committee, this time to send Richter to England. Mikhailov’s most recent request contained the now-familiar statements describing Richter as one of the Soviet Union’s finest pianists, recounting his successful tours in Eastern Europe and now China, relaying his depressed state and the deep concern of his fellow musicians about that psychological state, and attaching Dorliak’s handwritten appeal as evidence of the last point. It also contained a new element, expressly designed to counter security concerns. Mikhailov suggested that Richter could be accompanied to England by a responsible official from the ministry and one of the most experienced officials in the Soviet embassy in London, V. S. Bogatyrev.111 Though it was standard practice to have someone from the Ministry of Culture accompany any touring Soviet performer, it was unusual for that person to be as high-ranking as Mikhailov’s language suggests in this case. It was extremely rare for individuals at Soviet embassies abroad to receive direct mention in Ministry of Culture communiques to the Central Committee. Mikhailov was clearly trying to strengthen his case. He concluded by emphasizing the contribution Richter could make to the overarching priority that justified all transimperial tours in the 1950s: “a Richter concert tour in England would be a great event in the musical life of Western Europe and, to a large extent, it would facilitate propaganda for Soviet musical culture.”112 As with every other such proposal in the 1950s, this last appeal failed. Cultural Department officials dutifully listed the arguments in favor of allowing Richter to go abroad, including his successful tours throughout the 1950s in Eastern Europe and China. But the same combination of his father’s fate, his mother’s whereabouts (suspected in 1958 to be either West Germany or Switzerland), and his alleged lack of any ties or family in the Soviet Union continued to disqualify him. This time, the Culture Department did not even feel it necessary to invoke the KGB.113 The Central Committee agreed.114 As in 1956, Richter was instead dispatched to Poland—though this time, in consideration of his mental state, at his own expense, and as an explicit exception, he was allowed to be accompanied by Dorliak.115 Richter would not travel in the West until 1960, when he toured Finland in May and when Hurok brought him (and Dorliak) to the United States that fall.116 The sad case of Sviatoslav Richter demonstrates that throughout the 1950s, even years after the beginning of the Thaw, Soviet perceptions of

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potential security risks always outweighed the potential propaganda advantage to be gained by having the most world-renowned musicians tour the West. Exhibiting the excellence embodied by Gilels, Oistrakh, the Moiseev, and the Bolshoi led Soviet officials to submerge their transimperial tours within the U.S.-dominated capitalist economy of cultural production, but they nevertheless maintained peculiarly Soviet controls over who could participate in that economy, in those exchanges. For good reasons, Soviet officials expected to be able to compete with Western art culture even among Western audiences and on the terms offered by the West. This obsession with control, however, eventually helped undermine the propaganda advantage gained by the very excellence that Soviet musicians displayed. This effect would become particularly pronounced after the years covered by this study, in the fantastically prominent defections of such ballet dancers as Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov.117 Other Troubles

But the defection of prominent artists was not the only counterproductive aspect of transimperial Soviet concert tours from the perspective of Soviet officialdom. Less visible, but eventually as potentially corrosive to Soviet cultural diplomacy, was the effect on touring artists of the elite luxuries produced by the Western economy. Material abundance was key to the U.S. argument for cultural supremacy and a constant preoccupation of the American press when Soviets visited. Exposing the Soviet elite to that argument always ran the risk of having it succeed. Sol Hurok, in particular, was famous for arranging comforts, sometimes including material luxuries for his artists, foreign and domestic. When he brought Margot Fonteyn and England’s Sadler’s Wells Ballet to the United States in 1949 and again for the 1950–1951 concert season, for example, Hurok impressed the company with what his biographer Harlow Robinson described as his “obvious love for artists.” They were also “grateful,” he reported, “for the ‘very human fashion’ in which his office did its work, and for his success in ‘presenting [them] to every possible advantage.’ ”118 This “human” treatment was probably a euphemism for food and drink. Early in his career, he adopted the habit of courting potential talent over lavish food and fine wine, and it was a habit he never relinquished.119 These sorts of luxuries could be seductive in and of themselves, but touring superstars from the Soviet Union already sat at the pinnacle of Soviet society in terms of their access to goods, so comparative luxury could be found at home as well.120 Even more corrosive to Soviet goals was the fact that for

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some participants, international tours revealed or underscored the corruption of the Soviet system and the exploitation of Soviet artists by Soviet officials. A brief look at the memoirs of two of the Bolshoi’s mid-century superstars attests to the eventual power of this perception. In the 2001 English translation of her autobiography, the Bolshoi Ballet’s prima ballerina, Maya Pliset­ skaya, dramatically and bitterly described the sense of wonder at the material abundance of American (high) society, the shock with which at least some Soviet artists greeted that material abundance, and the appalling exploitation of Soviet artists to fill the Soviet coffers characteristic of tours in 1959 and beyond.121 Plisetskaya’s denunciation of this exploitation extended to the Western impresarios who profited enormously from their sponsorship of the Soviet tours, though Hurok comes across relatively well in Plisetskaya’s account. Importantly, she reports that he provided free lunches for the dancers during the Bolshoi Ballet’s 1959 tour, when their per diems proved insufficient to provide them proper nourishment.122 Galina Vishnevskaya—an operatic soprano at the Bolshoi, the wife of Mstislav Rostropovich, and an eventual forced émigré—also remembered noting the material abundance of American society during her own first U.S. tour in 1960, but she later reported that it had little real impact on her.123 Instead, the eventual juxtaposition of what she described in her 1984 memoirs as legitimate American luxury and illegitimate Soviet corruption that she discovered by touring internationally contributed to forging her dissident stance toward the Soviet system. For example, Vishnevskaya recounted at some length how working with Hurok allowed artists—especially solo artists not touring with large companies—to subvert the otherwise gross exploitation of their tours by Soviet officials. Hurok would pay for meals, provide additional gifts surreptitiously, and intercede with hotel and theater management alike to ensure his artists’ material comfort.124 Vishnevskaya markedly contrasted Hurok’s concern for artists’ material welfare with what she clearly considered the illegitimate luxuries that she and other elite artists witnessed, and in which they partook, when performing for the Soviet political elite at home. Vishnevskaya juxtaposed her vivid composite account of the banquets at which she was asked to perform when a new soloist at the Bolshoi—of “the swollen, flabby faces of our self-appointed leaders of state, as they chewed their way through many a splendid still life” of “yard-long sturgeons, gleaming hams, and caviar”—with the “wretched daily life” of the rest of the population as a clear indictment of the Soviet system from which she had been forced to emigrate a decade before writing her memoirs.125 This contrast between gracious American abundance and corrupt Soviet concentration of wealth was much more damning than mere exposure to

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the consumer goods that both Plisetskaya and Vishnevskaya reported, that intrigued American journalists covering Soviet tours, and that eventually became essential to the stereotype of the transimperial tour. Moreover, it was decisive in only some cases. After all, despite later penning a description that is even more bitter than Vishnevskaya’s, Plisetskaya reports never even considering defecting at the time.126 Dorothy Chandler appears to have been right: inviting cultural figures from the Soviet empire to tour the West did partly undermine Soviet imperial claims, despite the runaway success of the tours from an artistic-propaganda point of view. But in 1958, these subversive effects were still to come, a product of the expansion of cultural exchange at the very end of the 1950s and into the 1970s.127

Standardization Soviet officials themselves generated the problems relating to the balancing act between the international and domestic obligations of touring musicians. They were so acutely aware of the potential problems of contact with the West that they constructed elaborate and intrusive controls over who could travel, when, where, and under what sorts of supervision. But the final effect of transimperial concertizing considered here no doubt eluded their attention altogether. Yet it may have been the most important musical effect of transimperial exchange: the eventual global standardization of orchestral sound. Standardization was a product of both actual travel and the dissemination of musical recordings, including recordings made by the musicians while they were on tour. During his extensive post-tour debriefing, Oistrakh described his recording activities and discussed in glowing terms his collaboration with leading U.S. orchestras. It was the recording sessions, Oistrakh insisted, that gave him “great artistic satisfaction.” Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra received special praise, as Oistrakh reported that Ormandy was the “first person who extended his hand to me.” Contrary to apparent earlier impressions that Ormandy and Philadelphia were “a bit reactionary,” Oistrakh reported that he and Gilels shared an opposite view: the orchestra’s “relations to us were extraordinary” and “in general in [Ormandy’s] relations to us, he showed himself to be a great friend.” These positive interpersonal connections were built on a bedrock of mutual artistic respect. Oistrakh reported that Philadelphia was generally “considered the best orchestra” in the United States, and he seems to have agreed, ranking the Boston Symphony Orchestra second. Oistrakh also praised individual musicians, including the violinist Zino Francescatti and especially the violist William Primrose, whom he

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called “a truly great artist” and the “top violist in the world.”128 At the end of the conversation, Oistrakh returned to the question of continued exchanges, noting the friendly interactions he had with many prominent musicians based in the United States, including fellow violinists Isaac Stern and Jascha Heifetz (the latter of whom sent a “touching telegram” from his home in California). All his fellow musicians, Oistrakh reported, considered it necessary to further broaden cultural ties, and many of them (Ormandy with his orchestra or alone, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Stern, and Primrose included) expressed an interest in visiting the Soviet Union.129 As these comments about Ormandy, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and other musicians attest, the primary considerations for the musicians involved in transimperial concert tours were musical, not political or ideological. Their collaborations were primarily musical, too, and when they thought of concertizing abroad, they thought of the reception that their performances would get from general audiences, critics, and fellow musicians. With exchange also came opportunities to listen to, learn from, and possibly emulate the new musical styles introduced by the touring visitors or by the hosts. Oistrakh clearly valued precisely this potential aspect of expanded cultural exchange, and while he advocated bringing American orchestras to the Soviet Union, he hinted at a process that would eventually become globally ubiquitous, the standardization of orchestral style. He noted that, “if the Philadelphia Orchestra visited us, it would have a beneficial impact on the quality of our orchestras; they need to hear a first-class orchestra.”130 The exact nature of that “beneficial impact” was a direct source of global standardization: our orchestral musicians “would be able to draw many useful conclusions for themselves, both with respect to ensemble [playing] and with respect to sound production and construction.”131 To hear what Oistrakh meant, one need merely compare the orchestral accompaniment in his recording of Antonin Dvorak’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in A Minor, op. 53, that he made in 1951 with Kirill Kondrashin’s State Symphony Orchestra of the USSR and that of a recording of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto he made with Ormandy’s Philadelphia Orchestra on his next visit to the United States in 1959.132 Just as evaluations of instrumental performance became standardized in part through the postwar efflorescence of international performance competitions, an international orchestral sound developed after World War II through the twin mechanisms of the increasingly rapid international dissemination of orchestral recordings and the collaborations born of globalized concert touring. The international standardization of orchestral and operatic sound, especially after World War II, is ubiquitously assumed and sometimes

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lamented as the loss of an earlier diversity of orchestral sound produced by different national traditions and sometimes even different ensembles.133 In his study of the effects on music making of music recordings, the musicologist Robert Philip characterized this standardization as a series of trends audible in the recordings of the twentieth century: The most basic trend of all was a process of tidying up performance: ensemble became more tightly disciplined; pianists played chords more strictly together and abandoned the old practice of dislocating melody from accompaniment; the interpretation of note-values became more literal, and the nature of rubato changed, becoming more regular and even. Acceleration of tempo was more tightly controlled, and the tempo range within a movement tended to narrow; the use of portamento became more discreet and more selective; bowing styles became more powerful and assertive; vibrato became more prominent and more continuous, both on strings and on most woodwind . . . ; dif­ ferent schools and national styles became less distinct.134 Philip convincingly attributes most of these changes to shifts in the way audiences and musicians alike thought about music performance after the advent and dissemination of musical recordings.135 Some of these trends were already well established by the end of the war (especially the increased discipline and literal interpretation of note values) and characterized the way orchestral and solo instrumental music was performed in both cultural empires of the Cold War. But others, like the homogenization of schools and national styles, had only begun. In the West, Philip shows that the homogenization of national styles was facilitated not just by recordings but also by the creation and operation of permanent, well-funded, well-rehearsed orchestras in the United States that drew musicians from all over Europe (and eventually capitalist Asia) and mixed formerly distinct national styles to form a homogenized one, which was initially understood as an American style. Philips thus provides evidence that the American “melting pot” orchestras were a major driving force of international homogenization.136 This new style was redisseminated internationally through recordings. The Oistrakh-Ormandy-Philadelphia, Oistrakh-Munch-Boston, and Oistrakh-Mitropoulos-New York recordings of late December 1955 and early January 1956 demonstrate that the two mechanisms of recording technology and transimperial concertizing were closely and deeply interrelated.137 In 1955 and 1956, these recordings were seen as evidence that two musical styles were competing with one another. In his New York Times review of the Oistrakh-Stern-Bach-Vivaldi recording with which this chapter began, the

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critic Harold C. Schonberg presented the two as representatives of different philosophies of music: Oistrakh’s was romantic, rich, and expressive to highlight the instrument, while Stern’s was restrained and precise to foreground the compositional intent. Not surprisingly, considering the framing, Schonberg preferred the American Stern.138 Schonberg’s improbable assumption here about the motivation of the two soloists while developing their differing styles resonates with the distinction between the rave reviews afforded Soviet virtuosi and the cool reception of new Soviet compositions. Oistrakh’s style showcased his violin, his vehicle for technical virtuosity, whereas Stern’s style emphasized the creativity of the composer, the compositional intent. Within a couple of years, the juxtaposition of musical styles was extrapolated to a full-blown clash of cultural values. Another New York Times critic, Howard Taubman, followed Ormandy’s Philadelphia Orchestra to Moscow in 1958 and stopped by the World’s Fair in Brussels on his way home.139 His review of the performances there concisely articulated the competitive terms of interpretation by the end of the period covered by this study. Taubman structured his review of the World’s Fair as a juxtaposition of U.S. and Soviet performing arts engaged in an intense competition. He characterized the American image as diverse, generous, improvised, unpredictable, and irresponsible, and its execution as extremely inconsistent. This characterization reflected his imagination of U.S. democracy, in a word (not his explicitly, but the implication saturates the article), free. The Soviets, in contrast, presented a carefully crafted, exquisitely executed, technically virtuosic presentation of happiness, abundance, and vitality. But the brilliance of the Soviet self-presentation, according to Taubman, was restricted to that technical virtuosity. Unlike the uneven but creative American artistic efforts, it lacked fundamental creativity, precisely because artistic content was controlled by the Soviet state. Stripped of creative outlets by political oppression, Taubman argued, the most artistically talented Soviets concentrated on—and perfected—their technique.140 For Western journalists, transimperial cultural exchange was thus fundamentally and ultimately about competition between the Cold War’s rival empires. In this case, freedom and creativity, on one hand, and oppression and technical brilliance, on the other, were characteristics that refracted ideological attachments through aesthetic judgments. Of course, any competition requires shared rules, shared measures of evaluation. Transimperial concert tours helped establish those values, homogenize them, and set the lines of interpretation through which participants could articulate their preferences. Oistrakh’s suggestion that Soviet orchestras “need[ed] to hear a first-class orchestra” in order to “draw conclusions” about such orchestral basics as tone production and ensemble playing

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suggests that along with the spectacular success of touring Soviet virtuosos there was a much more subtle, much slower, but eventually thorough synthesis of performing styles across the imperial divide. Transimperial musical exchange, through the clamor of cultural competition, thus contributed to global standardization, and with the collapse of the Soviet cultural empire at century’s end, the submersion of the last vestiges of a particularly Soviet orchestral style into a globalized (U.S.) ideal that itself had become permeated with the technical precision so epitomized at mid-century by Soviet competition laureates and touring virtuosi.141 In May 1951, two American senators made what they considered a sober appraisal of the state of the Cold War’s propaganda battle between the United States and Soviet Union. They did not like what they found, announcing “we have been losing the cold war battles up to now, and . . . we should speedily do something about it. Indeed, it is imperative that we do so.”142 Whether or not the United States was actually losing Cold War battles in the late Stalin period, much was to change over the course of the next decade. Sober analysts like the McCarthy-era senators would surely not like what those changes appeared to bring. In the music field, Soviet musicians continued to dominate international music competitions, and by the end of the decade, Soviet superstars were traversing the globe, enchanting and thrilling audiences and provoking ecstatic critical reviews. Soviet officials, meanwhile, were thrilled about the reception their musicians received all over the world. They sent musicians abroad, hoping to advance propaganda goals in the U.S. cultural empire itself, elevating the prestige of the Soviet cultural empire by displaying its cultural excellence and implicitly making the case for Soviet superiority through its musicians’ virtuosity and, subtly, their programming choices. In the broadest of terms, transimperial concert tours realized Soviet goals and justified American fears. However, several countertendencies and unintended consequences of the particularly Soviet approach to transimperial concertizing undermined these successes, and an almost unnoticed aspect of the tours advanced a long-term trend toward global integration. We have seen that displaying renowned instrumentalists in the West sometimes conflicted with domestic Soviet priorities. Despite apparent consternation about superstars’ penchant to shirk domestic touring duties within the cultural bureaucracy, however, the main response to this problem was to broaden the reserve of musicians invited to tour abroad. A peculiarly Soviet obsession with control remained a defining feature of these tours throughout the period of this study. Driven by the Soviet security apparatus to the point of creating minor conflicts between the

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KGB and the Ministry of Culture, the exertion of exceptionally tight controls over who could tour, when, where, and under what conditions eventually undermined the obvious musical successes of those musicians who did travel abroad. Keeping Richter at home, or at least within the boundaries of the empire, underscored an image in the West of a Soviet system that groomed some musicians for stardom but fundamentally oppressed them all. And the Soviet security apparatus’s fears were not necessarily unfounded. Exposure to the material abundance produced by U.S.-style capitalist economies led at least some Soviet stars to question—or deepen their questioning—of the legitimacy of the Soviet system itself. Conflicting priorities, the obsession with control, and the juxtaposition of material abundance and systemic corruption undermined the most obvious Soviet victories in the Cold War’s cultural competition. But for the concertizing soloists who participated in them, these effects of Cold War cultural competition were beside the point. Their primary interests were musical, and as they pursued those musical interests, they contributed to a quiet, subtle, but nevertheless important and lasting standardization of performance style. Propaganda competition bred musical synthesis. This synthesis was not the only integrative trend promoted by these transimperial concert tours. Encounters with the organizers of these tours, prototypical Western cultural entrepreneurs and impresarios, also prompted the Soviets to integrate more directly into a broader international economy of elite musical performance and dissemination.

Ch a p ter 5

Oistrakh and the Impresario Soviet Concert Tours and Systemic Integration

Sometime in the last months of 1955 or first days of 1956, one of the world’s greatest violinists found himself in posh hotel rooms grappling with the ramifications of U.S. tax law and determining the method du jour for legally skirting it, or at least reducing his own liability. David Fedorovich Oistrakh was in the midst of the smashingly successful tour of the United States analyzed in the last chapter. As we have seen, the tour was a tremendous artistic, political, and social success. But the American press also pointedly reported on the financial windfall it was assumed to be for Oistrakh himself, noting the $100,000 in gross fees he had earned in the couple of months he spent touring the East and Midwest.1 For Oistrakh and the officials in the Ministry of Culture to whom he reported about what he learned during his American tour, that $100,000 came with something of a surprise: he was to pay some 70 percent of it in U.S. taxes. Luckily for him, he learned that if he just retained the services of a tax accountant (for a mere $1,000), the accountant could manage deductions (“you can include on this list everything: all travel between cities, hotel bills, the cost of a secretary, laundry, various types of purchases,” Oistrakh would later report) and, in the end, reduce Oistrakh’s tax liability significantly.2 It was a lesson Oistrakh and his handlers learned quickly and well. Transimperial concert tours had significant financial results, as well as political and artistic ones. Generating those financial results depended in large part 146

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on the activities of the prototypical entrepreneur of the first two-thirds of twentieth-century musical life in the West, the impresario. Examining the Soviet confrontation with the character of the Western impresario requires exploring the mountains of proposals that would-be impresarios sent to Moscow, analyzing the arrangements for some of the Soviet artists’ most high-profile tours, and taking stock of rejected offers—humble, audacious, and grand. Organizing tours of their most internationally renowned musicians forced Soviet bureaucrats and policy makers to integrate into the U.S.-dominated capitalist economy of cultural production and its global diffusion. This integration was accomplished through the agency of Soviet musicians and cultural administrators and of Western impresarios. It seemed to serve the Soviets well in its early days, but that integration eventually revealed the failure of the Soviet system to match strides with its Western competitor. Whereas the globalization of musical style proved a synthesis of imperial styles that nevertheless tended toward long-term U.S. domination, this economic integration was a more clear-cut augury of the eventual triumph of the global capitalist system by century’s end.

Entrepreneurs and Agents When Soviet policy makers set out to display the excellence of the Soviet system outside the Soviet cultural empire by sending internationally renowned instrumentalists on tours of the West, they immediately encountered a cast of characters particular to the U.S.-dominated international capitalist economy of global musical exchange: agents, managers, and impresarios. They would eventually depend on these characters, and on their own ability to navigate a dizzying array of proposals emanating from them, to select the ones that would help them best display Soviet cultural excellence on Western stages and realize the profits from that display. Examining the interaction among Soviet bureaucrats, Western agents and impresarios, and Soviet musicians makes it possible to analyze Soviet efforts to confront and integrate with the market economy of the Western music world. The central problem for those on both sides of this interaction was how to integrate state interest in imperial display and cultural competition on the Soviet side with the private interests of those presenting Soviet artists for their own financial gain on the Western side. Just as when they began manipulating international copyright conventions to stop Twentieth Century Fox’s film The Iron Curtain, this engagement with Western arts entrepreneurs forced the Soviets to participate directly in the U.S. market economy, accepting its terms and seeking to compete within the restraints imposed by those terms. They quickly learned to manage this trick successfully, but with unforeseen consequences.

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When the Soviets signaled a cautious willingness to send artists abroad again near the end of Stalin’s life and especially after he died, Western arts entrepreneurs began probing the Soviet arts bureaucracy in an effort to find advantageous opportunities to present Soviet artists in their own countries. Some of these proposals were extraordinarily blunt about the importance of private financial interest in establishing cultural exchange. The case of John Rodgers, the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), and David Oistrakh was exemplary. On 11 August 1955, VOKS received a telegram from one John Rodgers, Melbourne. The telegram was so efficiently brief and to the point as to be reproducible in full: “Australian Broadcasting Commission controlled by Commonwealth Government very keen sponsor Australian tour David Oistrach [sic] Sydney Melbourne Adelaide July August 1956 stop Full proposals posted airmail urge Favourable consideration.”3 The VOKS leadership dutifully passed the request on to the Ministry of Culture without further comment on 17 August.4 Indeed, there could be little on which to comment in response to this first communique, but Rodgers followed up his initial telegram with a complete packet of materials that contained a concise history of one entrepreneur’s eventually thwarted efforts to capitalize on Oistrakh’s potential popularity with Australian audiences. The packet contained a letter sketching the basic contours of a proposal for an Australian tour for Oistrakh and copies of communications between Rodgers and Charles Moses, general manager of the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) that foregrounded Rodgers’s financial interest in the tour.5 These documents also allowed bureaucrats in the Ministry of Culture, if they were interested (they probably were not), to reconstruct the machinations of extending an invitation across imperial systems and the efforts of an independent entrepreneur to establish himself as a middleman between government-controlled institutions on either side of the imperial divide. According to his summary of events, sometime in the summer of 1955, Rodgers met twice with an ABC representative in Sydney to propose bringing one of the Soviets’ leading violinists (David Oistrakh, his son Igor Oistrakh, Igor Bezrodny, or Leonid Kogan) to Australia under the auspices of the ABC. Discussion quickly settled on the most famous of those in Australia—David Oistrakh. The Sydney representative’s interest was apparently piqued enough that Rodgers had a telephone conversation with Moses and followed up with a letter on 9 August, asking to send a telegram to Moscow to broach the subject tentatively. When Moses and Rodgers spoke again on 11 August, Moses tentatively proposed a two-month, three-city (Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide), fourteen-concert tour for July–August 1956, and the two discussed “appropriate financial guarantees and percentages.” On the strength of that conversation, Rodgers sent his brief telegram to Moscow.6

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Then he apparently waited for a word of encouragement from VOKS in Moscow and the more concrete proposals from the ABC that he promised in his Moscow telegram. Almost a week later, Rodgers received written word from Moses that evidently surprised and irritated him. Moses pressed Rodgers for a general reply from Moscow and indicated that, if Oistrakh was interested in an Australian tour, the ABC would transfer negotiations to its London representative. The letter finished with an acknowledgment of Rodgers’s efforts that nevertheless seems to have cut him out of further direct interest in the tour: “I need hardly tell you how very grateful we are to you for having drawn our attention to the possibility of this great artist visiting our country; if the possibility becomes a certainty, music lovers will have reason to rejoice.”7 Rodgers would not accept being so completely marginalized. He quickly sent his 19 August letter containing the outlines of the ABC proposal to Moscow, along with copies of his correspondence with Moses. The latter were included to explain what he considered his embarrassing inability to commence direct, concrete negotiations with the Soviet side. To Moses, he sent a rather tersely worded missive that outlined his efforts and explicitly asserted a claim to a continued financial interest in the tour. The crucial passage is clear, concise, and completely unfamiliar in a strictly Soviet imperial context: Needless to say, I shall be very happy if David Oistrakh comes to Australia next year under the auspices of the Australian Broadcasting Commission, and it is immaterial to me whether the engagement is completed by the Commission through me or by your London representative. I am confident that any agreement finalised in London will be acknowledged as the direct result of my negotiations and that my business interest in the project will not suffer. However, since the matter has not proceeded in quite the manner contemplated in our last telephone conversation and in order to avoid any possibility of subsequent misunderstanding at either end, I should like to set down exactly what I have done to date.8 The rest of the correspondence leaves no doubt that Rodgers was motivated largely by a sincere desire to see Soviet artists concertize in Australia. But equally beyond doubt is that for Rodgers, the proposed Oistrakh tour was also a question of private business interests. To the Soviets, too, Rodgers advanced a business agenda, though without the assertion of entitlement: “In the event of Mr. Oistrakh and his accompanist coming to Australia, I should consider it a great privilege to act as his Australian agent, on the customary commercial basis, and can assure you that all arrangements for him in this

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country would be first class.”9 Unfortunately for Rodgers, Moses, the ABC, and interested Australian audiences, the Soviet Ministry of Culture politely declined the invitation. V. T. Stepanov recommended that VOKS reply to Rodgers on behalf of Oistrakh, thanking Rodgers for the invitation but indicating that his schedule for the whole of 1956 was filled “with agreements with other concert agencies.”10 This last turn of phrase—“agreements with other concert agencies” rather than “appearances in other countries”— suggests that ministry officials understood and responded to the commercial components of the proposed exchange as well. Oistrakh would not tour Australia until 1958.11 Largely because it was unsuccessful, this incident is a particularly clear illustration of a trend in the 1950s that would have significant and long-lasting ramifications. A cultural entrepreneur with an apparently small business operation but grandiose visions of profitable musical exchange, John Rodgers, saw an opportunity to turn a profit by establishing himself as a middleman, a broker navigating the transimperial circuit of cultural flow. He sought to represent both sides of the transaction for the prospective tour, representing the Australian Broadcasting Commission to the Soviets and the Soviet musicians in Australia. The preliminary description of terms outlined in his proposal also demonstrate that Rodgers’s “business interests” were not insignificant. He stood to earn a great deal of money if either side accepted his services. Neither did in this instance, but the incident shows that Soviet tours in the West required recourse to these entrepreneurial characters—individuals who could combine personal interest, financial investment, and profit to broker an interchange that crossed the boundaries of the two Cold War cultural empires. Finding the right brokers would prove essential to Soviet efforts to exhibit their musicians in the West. A closer examination of the Australian side of this interaction also reveals how the Soviets might eventually find such brokers, even if, in this case, Rodgers did not fit the bill. Though it is not obvious in the materials described here so far, John Rodgers had long been known to VOKS at least, if not to the Soviet Ministry of Culture. In the 1940s, Rodgers was the director of the Australia-Soviet House in Melbourne, and before that, he had been the secretary of the Australia-Soviet Friendship League.12 In July and August 1948, he even visited the Soviet Union under VOKS auspices during a more general European tour.13 While in the Soviet Union, he was taken to a soccer game and the theater and discussed at length what sorts of materials from VOKS would be most useful for him as director of the Australia-Soviet House. He also told his VOKS interlocutors about conditions in Australia, ranging from

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the general political climate (“very hard for progressive organizations”) to the cultural scene (no opera theaters in Australia, just operetta theaters) to popular interests (sport attracts more interest than international affairs). He even responded to queries about specific Australian intellectuals who VOKS apparently considered potentially friendly.14 When he returned to Australia, he conducted a speaking tour to report his impressions of the Soviet Union and eventually published the lecture as a short book.15 Rodgers energetically promoted a positive view of the Soviet Union in Australia during the early Cold War, even when such views were under concerted attack while Australia energetically put its oar in for the American cause. During his lecture tour, Rodgers’s difficulties booking venues even made the national news. His struggle to rent the Melbourne Town Hall in particular resulted in a high-level court case during which Premier of Victoria Thomas Hollway spoke out against Rodgers’s effort and called the Australia-Soviet House “pernicious.”16 After the tour, Rodgers appeared before the Royal Commission on Communism to answer accusations of Communist Party membership and respond to a probe into the Australia-Soviet House’s finances.17 The next year, he was a main figure in another hubbub, this time over whether or not the Congress for Peace that took place in Melbourne that year was simply a front for Soviet propaganda.18 All this controversy took its toll on the fortunes of the Australia-Soviet House. By the time the Royal Commission announced that there was no discernible concrete link between the house and the Communist Party, vindicating the house in the terms of the day, the house had already ceased to exist. With dwindling membership and unable to continue to cover the expenses of owning the property, its remaining members sold the building in early 1950.19 Rodgers nevertheless remained embroiled in Cold War controversy, including during the dramatic spy scandal known as the Petrov Affair. In April 1954, Vladimir Petrov and Evdokiia Petrova, officials in the Soviet embassy in Canberra who also worked for the KGB, defected in what became an internationally sensational event.20 Rodgers was embroiled in the Petrov Affair when the undercover Australian security services agent who managed the Petrov defection accused him of attempted blackmail designed to help Australian communists. In the aftermath of the defection, the Australian government created a Royal Commission on Espionage to investigate Petrov’s revelations about Australian communists, and Rodgers was forced to appear before it numerous times.21 The scandal and its aftermath lasted well into 1955, close to the time that Rodgers first approached the Soviets about an Oistrakh tour.

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In the midst of these ongoing brouhahas, Rodgers turned to other means of arranging friendly exchanges between Australia, the Soviet Union, and the larger communist world. Founding a cultural exchange company under whose auspices he sought to mediate between the ABC and the Soviet arts bureaucracy seems to have been a strategy of the mid-1950s. Though he failed to broker a deal between the ABC and VOKS for an Oistrakh tour in 1955, he—or at least a company with a name closely resembling his affiliation in the VOKS-ABC correspondence—did pull off a politically tricky tour of the Classical Theatre of China in the aftermath of the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. According to press accounts of what was a wildly successful tour once it was allowed to proceed, the Chinese theater tour was managed by two otherwise competing theater organizations, the largest theater conglomerate in Australia, J. C. Williamson Theatres, Ltd., and Garnet H. Carroll, the impresario of one of Melbourne’s most prominent theaters, the Princess. It was at the Princess where the Chinese theater’s Melbourne performances took place.22 But all the newspaper advertisements for the tour’s performances in Melbourne and its single night in Canberra included a note that the theater management giants presented the Chinese company, “by arrangement with Australian Pacific Agencies.”23 This tour is the only time that the “Australian Pacific Agencies” appears in the Australian press of the 1950s. Coupled with Rodgers’s use of the name “Pacific” for his agency during the thwarted VOKS-ABC overture, the constant advertising presence of “Australian Pacific Agencies” alongside two of the most important forces of Australian theater management suggests that in this case, Rodgers had managed to broker a deal between the communist touring ensemble and the Australian cultural entrepreneurs who had the financial resources, venues, and mainstream cultural legitimacy in Australia to manage a successful tour for an arts organization from the other side of the imperial divide. Rodgers—if indeed he was the force behind the “Australian Pacific Agencies”—successfully positioned himself as a cultural entrepreneur and transimperial intermediary. Rodgers’s consistent engagement for the cause of Soviet-Australian friendship was such that the Soviets presumably could trust him as a reliable interpreter of conditions in Australia and attitudes there about Soviet musicians.24 He was a “friend” who had been active in the old networks of Westerners well disposed toward the Soviet Union that VOKS had managed since the 1920s. These networks no longer worked effectively in the 1950s. The whole collaborative “friendship” apparatus in the West, which included institutions like Rodgers’s Australia-Soviet House and Helen Black’s Presslit, was withering before the McCarthyite onslaught in the United States and its analogues elsewhere in the American cultural empire. The Rodgers-ABC

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incident shows the sort of lightning rods that figures such as Rodgers could be in the early Cold War West. At the same time, Westerners who were sympathetic to the Soviet Union could still interpret Western conditions and help the Soviets navigate the conventions of the international market for high-level concert tours. Rodgers tried to make the shift from friend to cooperative business partner with the Oistrakh tour, and he appears to have managed it successfully in the case of the Classical Theater of China tour. The challenge for the Soviet policy makers seeking to arrange successful transimperial concert tours for their world-class musicians would be finding potential partners who could facilitate the navigation without drawing lightning strikes from an anticommunist press and public. A crucial characteristic of such potential transimperial intermediaries in the West was the desire and capacity to turn a profit from a good-will tour. And when the tours did materialize, those old friends were still in place. When Oistrakh finally toured Australia in 1958, Rodgers, now head of the Australian Soviet Friendship Society, and his wife hosted a reception with three hundred guests before the violinist’s triumphant departure.25 John Rodgers was far from the only agent who hoped to capitalize on increasing transimperial cultural exchange in the mid-1950s. In the United States, a host of agents and managers of a wide range of musicians approached the Soviet embassy in Washington with everything from preliminary feelers to grandiose schemes of exclusive representation. Their motives were almost always a mix of commitment to “good-will tours” and financial gain, and they usually met with polite refusals. In late July and August 1955 alone, for example, the Soviet embassy in Moscow fielded proposals from Claudio Arrau’s personal manager and the agents for Carlos Chavez and the pianist Ruth Slenczynska.26 Both Arrau’s manager and Slenczynska’s agent referred explicitly to “good will” when they proposed having their clients tour the Soviet Union. For Arrau, a Soviet tour would reprise his prewar appearances in the Soviet Union, build on a friendly meeting with Gilels in Paris earlier in June 1955, and contribute to “the expanding good-will all around.”27 Slenczynska’s agent was not nearly as well-connected as Arrau’s. He wrote to the embassy after reading an article about the impending Gilels and Oistrakh tours in Time, explained that his client was a specialist in the interpretation of Rachmaninoff ’s piano works who also had both Soviet and American contemporary works in her repertory, and in what was an exception to the typical pattern, noted that “remuneration is of no particular consequence to Miss Slenczynska in connection with a concert tour to Russia.” Echoing a common sentiment, Slenczynska’s agent continued, “This artist would look at the whole project from the point of view of a good-will tour.”28

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Chavez’s agent sought to combine an invitation to a Soviet artist with the promotion of one of his own clients, the English pianist Moura Lympany. Lympany had given the British premiere of Khachaturian’s Piano Concerto in London in 1940, a fact to which her agent alluded when proposing that Khachaturian could tour the United States with Lympany performing his work.29 Though nothing would come of this particular proposal, it may have established the groundwork for Lympany’s participation in the first major postwar Soviet tour by a British orchestra. When the London Philharmonic Orchestra toured the Soviet Union in late 1956, Lympany was one of the two instrumental soloists. She performed Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto or Khachaturian’s Piano Concerto when the violinist Alfredo Campoli was not performing a violin concerto by either Edward Elgar or William Walton.30 In late 1955, the Soviet embassy in Washington merely collected the proposals and sent copies to the Ministry of Culture and VOKS leadership. In the accompanying memo, Ambassador Zarubin opined that cultural exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union ought to start with invitations to the most famous and popular artists in the United States. He noted that most of the artists proposed in this set of documents were not considered leading artists in the United States and indicated that embassy officials were at that moment working on their own proposal for cultural exchange which they intended to present to the Ministry of Culture in the near future. Consequently, he suggested that entertaining the proposals emanating from the American entrepreneurs “would be premature.”31 These entrepreneurial approaches to Soviet cultural authorities were common throughout the emerging American cultural empire, the capitalist world. For example, a series of Japanese impresarios and cultural groups arranged tours for Oistrakh in 1955 and for Gilels and Lev Oborin in 1956.32 These overtures provide another insight into the preconditions for the efflorescence of cultural exchange in the middle of the 1950s and the rivalries and competition between companies that often resulted. In their proposal to invite Oborin and Gilels to tour Japan in late 1956, representatives of three cooperating organizations placed the typical “good will” purpose of tours explicitly in the context of improving political and economic relations between the countries: “we are sure their performances will without fail culturally improve the relationship between USSR and Japan after it was recently established by the conclusion of the Fisheries Treaty.”33 The conclusion in May 1956 of negotiations regarding fishing rights was one of the major stepping stones toward the eventual signing, in October 1956, of the Soviet-Japanese Peace Declaration that officially ended World War II hostilities between these countries.34 The direct reference to that political context

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within cultural exchange proposals is a reminder of how closely political, economic, and cultural diplomacy were connected during the Cold War. Another formulation in the same proposal also reveals two typical characteristics of the early encounter with agents and impresarios: “It is learnt that, during Prof. D. F. Oistrakh’s visit to this country last year, there were some misarrangements on the Japanese side, for instance the artist could not have sufficient chance of contacting cultural circles. In view of such facts we would like to arrange so that they [Oborin and Gilels] can perfectly perform before Japanese people in general by 100 percent utilizing facilities in this capitalistic society.”35 First, emphasizing “this capitalistic society” reveals that organizers in Japan were explicitly conscious of the trans-systemic nature of the cultural exchange they sought to establish. Second, the allusion to “misarrangements” called attention to competition among Japanese companies seeking to sponsor Soviet tours. This competition was acknowledged by both Japanese organizations. The Oistrakh tour that the three criticized for “misarrangements” had been organized by one S. Isimuro, the president of the Japanese export-import company Progress Trading. In late January or early February 1956, Isimuro approached the Ministry of Culture with a proposal to organize a Japanese tour for Emil Gilels. Ministry of Culture officials characterized the Oistrakh tour as a success carried out with “favorable conditions.” They were inclined to agree in principle to the Gilels tour and sought permission from the Central Committee to negotiate.36 The bureaucrats in the Central Committee apparatus, however, recommended against the proposal, noting that Gilels was already committed to three months of international travel in 1956.37 In adopting the apparatus recommendation, Dmitrii Shepilov appended a note that reveals the origins of Lev Oborin’s tour of Japan under Progress Trading auspices and reveals that the Soviets, too, were eager to maintain good will with their potential partners: “Don’t just refuse; if Gilels cannot go, you may propose someone to the Japanese who will satisfy them.”38 That someone must have been Oborin. On 20 August, Isimuro visited the Soviet Ministry of Culture’s Foreign Relations Department to discuss details of Lev Oborin’s upcoming tour to Japan. In the meantime, a Gilels tour had been organized by a competitor. During his conversation with Ministry of Culture officials, Isimuro averred that “he was not just a business man, but also a lover of classical music and so he was very thankful to us for the agreement to organize tours of D. Oistrakh and L. Oborin in Japan.” It was that love of music that allowed Isimuro to look forward to Gilels’s tour even though it was organized by another company: “he noted that for him, as a lover of music, it is nice that

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this outstanding Soviet artist will appear in Japan even though he had been invited by a different company.”39 Again, love of music—another version of the familiar “good will”—combined with explicit financial interest (or competition over possible financial interest) to motivate agents and impresarios to organize their end of the cultural exchange. Though it was obviously not always successful, the appeal to “good will” was a fundamentally sound strategy for entrepreneurs hoping to attract Soviet “business.” It dovetailed with the shift over the course of the 1950s in Soviet propaganda regarding relations with the West from the confrontational stance of the late Stalin period to the emphasis on ideological competition that would culminate in Khrushchev’s principle of “peaceful coexistence.”40 As Khrushchev eventually formulated it explicitly while writing to an American audience in 1959, “peaceful coexistence” entailed renouncing war as a means of resolving disputes. In place of war, Khrushchev asserted that peaceful coexistence would allow the cultivation of peaceful competition between ideological systems. The Soviet system would triumph in such a peaceful competition, he thought, in part because of its capacity for cultural accomplishment: We believe that ultimately that system will be victorious on the globe which will offer the nations greater opportunities for improving their material and spiritual life. It is precisely socialism that creates unprecedentedly great prospects for the inexhaustible creative enthusiasm of the masses, for a genuine flourishing of science and culture, for the realization of man’s dream for a happy life, a life without destitute and unemployed people, of a happy childhood and tranquil old age, of the realization of the most audacious and ambitious human projects, of man’s right to create in a truly free manner in the interests of the people.41 Though he articulated it explicitly for Western audiences in 1959, the shift in Soviet propaganda to an ideological battle that emphasized the “genuine flourishing of science and culture” in the Soviet Union undergirded the expansion of cultural exchange throughout the decade.42 The groundwork for this peaceful competition that Khrushchev was so sure the Soviets would win depended on replacing potential military competition with the “good will” of cultural exchange. Appealing to these Soviet priorities was a potentially effective way to capitalize on the economic opportunities they created in the West. Though the Soviets were gradually gathering information about how the Western market for international concert tours operated throughout the mid-1950s,

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one thing was clear early on: the Soviets would not agree to tours that were guaranteed to cost the Soviet side hard currency. In late 1954, the Ministry of Culture received Central Committee permission to carry out negotiations, through the Soviet embassy in Washington, for an exchange of tours: Gilels would tour the United States, and the British-born American conductor Leopold Stokowski would tour the Soviet Union. The negotiations were to result in tours arranged without a hard currency subsidy. When the (unnamed) American firm’s final proposal required the Soviets to provide a $3,000–4,000 subsidy and set a firm deadline for the Soviet reply after which the possibility of a Stokowski tour would be withdrawn, Georgii Fedorovich Aleksandrov, the Soviet minister of culture, proposed telling the embassy in Washington to cut off negotiations.43 A week later (and two days after the reported deadline), Aleksandrov got word that the Central Committee agreed with his recommendation.44 The precedent was set: the Soviet side would not subsidize tours to the West and was hesitant even to provide subsidies for Soviet tours by Western musicians. Though the Ministry of Culture and embassy personnel both typically responded to reasonable offers with polite and indefinite refusals like the one suggested for Rodgers or counterproposals like the one offered to Isimuro, this was not always the case. Sometime in late November 1955, James Doolittle, the owner of the Greek Theater in Los Angeles, sent a telegram from London to the Ministry of Culture in Moscow. He bragged about his theater as the “most beautiful and perfect theater for dance in [the] country,” and offered to arrange a U.S. tour for the Moiseev Folk Dance Ensemble that would start in New York and culminate at his Los Angeles theater. He concluded by suggesting that he come to Moscow to negotiate the particulars and left his address, from 28 November to 7 December, as the Ambassador Hotel, Vienna.45 Marginalia on the Russian translation suggest that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not support the proposal and opined that the Ministry of Culture need not even reply.46 This rapid and complete dismissal of Doolittle’s proposal, including his suggestion that he come to Moscow to negotiate, was probably because the Soviets were already negotiating a Moiseev tour of the United States with a much more prominent impresario—Sol Hurok. Indeed, Hurok would eventually come to dominate Soviet-American cultural exchange.

The Impresarios Though the Ministry of Culture was bombarded with requests from agents and managers, large and small, Soviet cultural officials relatively early on

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decided to deal almost exclusively with the largest and most well-established firms. For the initiatory Gilels and Oistrakh tours of the United States in 1955 and for a subsequent tour by Mstislav Rostropovich in 1956, the Soviets chose to work with Columbia Artists Management. Columbia Artists Management’s president from 1948 until 1959 was Frederick C. Schang, a prominent agent who was trained as a journalist at the Columbia School of Journalism and worked for a time at the New York Tribune before he began representing artists in the 1930s. In the 1950s, Columbia Artists Management was perhaps the largest and most prominent corporate agency in the United States, representing such luminaries as Jascha Heifetz and Yehudi Menuhin and the conductors von Karajan and Ormandy. The company also had ties to émigré Russian composers, at one point representing Sergei Prokofiev and Sergei Rachmaninoff in addition to Igor Stravinsky.47 Many of the agents, big and small, who approached the Soviets emphasized their connections to Russian or Soviet musicians, and Columbia Artists Management could certainly do that. Ties to another client, not just of Columbia Artists Management but of Schang personally, probably also did not hurt: the African-American bass Paul Robeson, who Soviet arts officials had long considered an ally in the United States.48 Schang also apparently had connections in the Soviet embassy and a working relationship with the U.S. Department of State.49 If the Soviets wanted experienced and prominent organizers, they could scarcely have done better than Columbia Artists Management. Schang managed the Gilels and Oistrakh tours extremely well. The artists were satisfied, the audiences were large, the critics were thrilled, the profits were high. Still, Soviet arts officials were actively considering other agencies throughout 1955 and 1956. One of the other major contenders was the illustrious impresario Sol Hurok, whose efforts to bring a ballet troupe from the Bolshoi Theater to the United States had begun as early as the 1920s. Born Solomon Gurkov to a Jewish family in the Russian imperial border town of Pogar sometime in the late 1880s, Hurok emigrated to the United States in 1906. After struggling to make a living working at a series of the various assortment of unglamorous jobs available to young East European immigrants in Philadelphia and New York for a few years, Hurok established himself as a local impresario of sorts by 1911, when, in the words of his biographer, Harlow Robinson, he “had achieved local celebrity as a supplier of musical talent—primarily homegrown—to Brownsville’s clubs and labor organizations, mainly for political benefits.”50 The very next year, he made his first major break into the world of professional concert promotion, presenting the young but already famous Russian Jewish violinist Efrem Zimbalist at a benefit concert for the Socialist Party and turning a hefty profit. When

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Zimbalist agreed to have Hurok represent him again for a Carnegie Hall engagement the following year, Hurok’s incredibly successful career as the epitome of an American impresario had truly begun, on the eve of World War I and four years before the Russian Revolution.51 Already an established cultural force in the United States, Hurok began traveling to the Soviet Union in 1926, attempting to arrange Soviet tours in the West and Westerners’ tours of the Soviet Union. In 1930, he seemed to have achieved his goal. In August of that year, Hurok and the Soviets signed a contract giving Hurok a two-year monopoly on musical exchange between the United States and United Kingdom, on one hand, and the Soviet Union, on the other. Though the terms of the agreement were never met, Hurok continued to visit the Soviet Union throughout the 1930s.52 After World War II, Hurok recommenced his efforts to manage transimperial concert tours and had made inroads by the 1950s. Even as the arrangements for the Gilels and Oistrakh tours were being finalized with Columbia Artists Management, Hurok’s operation was proposing a much more logistically challenging sort of tour—that of a ballet or other dance ensemble. In September 1955, one of Hurok’s representatives, Alexander Parkson, traveled to Moscow to propose that Hurok organize U.S. tours for Soviet artists and to make available to the Soviets the many artists represented by Hurok, including the violinist Isaac Stern, the pianist Arthur Rubinstein, the soprano Marian Anderson, and the Katherine Dunham Ballet. Parkson met in person with officials in the Soviet Ministry of Culture and consulted with Hurok by telephone from Moscow. On 29 September, he sent a concluding proposal directly to V. T. Stepanov, head of the Ministry of Culture’s Foreign Relations Department. In this memo, Parkson relayed Hurok’s invitation to the ballet of the Bolshoi Theater, the Moiseev Folk Dance Ensemble (which Parkson called the “Moiseijev Folklore Ballet”), and “a number of individual Soviet artists for an extensive tour in America.”53 Stepanov read the letter on 1 October and sent it to a subordinate with the uninformative notation “prepare an answer” the same day.54 Parkson still had not received that answer ten days later, when he attempted to contact the Ministry of Culture again from Berlin. He had spoken on the telephone with a lower-ranking member of Stepanov’s department, but apparent technological failings in Berlin, Moscow, or both had prevented them from hearing one another clearly.55 There is no record of the content of Stepanov’s response, but Hurok himself met with Ambassador Zarubin in Washington later that month.56 His fortunes would soon change, if only after another high-profile tour sponsored by Columbia Artists Management. In February 1956, the Soviet embassy approached Frederick Schang and Columbia Artists Management to propose that Schang arrange a U.S. tour

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for Mstislav Rostropovich in just two months’ time. Though Schang had apparently not yet heard of the famous cellist, already the winner of a major international performance competition and a regular member of Soviet delegations touring Europe, he immediately agreed.57 From an initial announcement of ten New York recitals, the tour eventually grew to encompass a much broader geographical scope than the Gilels and Oistrakh tours of 1955. Rostropovich eventually performed in Canada and California, in addition to the major cities of the East and Midwest. Though the plaudits may not have been quite as ecstatic as they were during the earlier tours, the critical reception accorded Rostropovich was again extremely positive. The New York Times praised his technique and artistic stature. The dazzled Los Angeles Times ran a lengthy interview with the visiting virtuoso in which interviewer and interviewee both called emphatically for continued exchanges to increase understanding on both sides. Even the Washington Post and Herald Times, though bitterly lamenting the music programmed for the second half of his public debut in the capital, nevertheless praised Rostropovich’s musicianship and technique, as well as his polish.58 Behind the scenes, however, this third Columbia Artists Management tour did not go nearly as well. All the Soviet musicians who toured the West were accompanied by a representative from the Ministry of Culture. These arts officials acted as translators and monitored both the artists’ activities and the North American public’s reactions to them. Rostropovich was accompanied by the head of the American division of the Ministry’s Foreign Relations department, Eduard Ivanian. In his concluding report, penned after the group’s return to Moscow, Ivanian laid out a case to abandon Columbia Artists Management and allow Hurok to take control of Soviet tours in the United States. The thrust of the case was a gentle but decisive attack on Columbia Artists Management: As far as the company “Columbia Artists Management” is concerned, it is necessary to report that M. Rostropovich’s concerts in the USA and Canada were arranged by this company on a very low organizational level. Although we must accept some of the blame because we told the company about Rostropovich’s visit too late, when it was already difficult to reserve good halls and orchestras and achieve acceptable financial terms, the company did not exert all efforts to rectify the situation. Advertisement for the concerts was extremely insufficient, a fact about which we were told even by audience members who dropped by after the concert to congratulate Rostropovich on his success.59 In a draft of his report, Ivanian stressed the financial failings of the Rostropovich tour, and laid those failings completely at the doorstep of

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Columbia Artists Management. Schang’s contract provided for Rostropo­ vich to receive 60 percent of the box office receipts from each of his recitals, regardless of the net profits (or losses) earned by those concerts. Because of the aforementioned paucity of advanced publicity, profits in at least two cities (Cleveland and Washington) were far lower than Schang expected, and Columbia Artists Management initially sought to reduce Rostropo­ vich’s payment. After direct negotiations with Schang, the Soviets enforced the contract. Ivanian was quick to note, however, that Columbia Artists Management did not lose any money on the tour; all of Schang’s losses were passed on to the local agents to whom his company had subcontracted organizational details in each city.60 As a result of the company’s handling of the Rostropovich tour, Ivanian noted, he, Ambassador Zarubin, and the VOKS representative in the Soviet embassy, Iurii Guk, decided to recommend to the Ministry of Culture that future cultural exchange in the United States be negotiated with Hurok.61 In his invaluable biography of Sol Hurok, Harlow Robinson sheds further light on Ivanian’s recommendation. Hurok had taken the opportunity of Rostropovich’s tour to try to charm both Ivanian and Rostropovich, visiting Ivanian in his New York hotel room and gregariously opening the conversation in Russian. In an interview with Robinson, Ivanian recalled thinking that in addition to managing the finances of the tour poorly (he called them “stingy”), the Columbia Artists Management team was “not very pleasant to deal with.” In contrast, Hurok entertained Ivanian and Rostropovich at his favorite upscale New York restaurant more than once, plied them (or at least Ivanian) with tickets to Broadway shows, and generally succeeded in his charm offensive.62 For their part, officials in the Soviet embassy were already ready to recommend at least a partial switch to Hurok even before the enormously successful Oistrakh tour. In his summary of the Hurok-Zarubin meetings at the end of November 1955, Sergei Striganov, an official in the Soviet embassy in Washington, noted that if a Moiseev tour of the United States was approved, the embassy considered it “appropriate to entrust the organization of the tour to Hurok’s company.”63 Oistrakh’s debriefing contributed justification for the move to Hurok as well. When he met with Ministry of Culture officials nearly a year after his return, Oistrakh again spoke positively about Columbia Artists Management’s preparations for his tour. He noted that the company was very experienced and “everything was done perfectly precisely and cleanly, and everything was in place.” Then Oistrakh quickly shifted to a portrayal much less flattering within the context of Soviet discourse but consonant with Ivanian’s account of the Rostropovich tour: “Of course, these are typical businessmen. (They say that Hurok, on the other hand, is a simple man who

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loves music.) There is no way to check how much they earn and how much the artist does. There is not a single accountant who could understand the report that they presented. Demidov and I sat and tried to figure it out, but nothing came of it on account of its difficulty and complexity. Now, when contracts are signed, it is possible to learn from our experience.”64 Oistrakh explained at length what exactly his experience could provide. He started with a brief description of the U.S. tax system with which this chapter began: “There is such a thing as a tax there. There, the tax is progressive. It is wildly progressive and may approach 95 percent. Artists told me that sometimes they are afraid to play an extra concert because in the worst case, it might drastically increase their tax percentage.”65 Oistrakh’s tour had been a huge success—including financially. He reported that he had played an unusual number of concerts and that sales set records at the ticket office: “If before performers received $2,000–3,000 per concert maximum, then we received $6,000–7,000.”66 In addition to the concerts and recitals, Oistrakh also made extensive recordings with two competing companies. He ingeniously played the two off each other, primarily, he asserted, to stimulate competition between them to see who could release their recordings more quickly. The result of ticket sales and recordings earnings was a truly impressive gross earnings total for the six-week tour: more than $100,000. Of that, he was expected to pay 70 percent in taxes, so he “started to think about how to reduce this tax.” He eventually hired an accountant who figured out extensive deductions and split the earnings over two tax years to substantially reduce Oistrakh’s tax liability, cutting the final bill down to a mere $9,000.67 The time spent on these financial details—and Oistrakh’s comment that future tours should learn from his experience—indicates how important it was to figure out Western norms of financial compensation for concertizing artists and to develop strategies to maximize those norms. Experience like Oistrakh’s helped immensely, but so did carefully selecting partners, and his juxtaposition of Hurok, the simple music lover, with Schang, the typical businessman, added one more reason to make the switch. At a remove of thirty years, Ivanian recalled that convincing his superiors in Moscow, both at the Ministry of Culture and in the Central Committee bureaucracy, to make the switch from Schang to Hurok took a considerable amount of work. He laid the groundwork in advance of Hurok’s first visit to the Soviet Union since 1937, which took place in the fall of 1956.68 Among the proposals that the Ministry of Culture entertained that fall was a return visit for Oistrakh. Hurok proposed paying him $10,000 for a twenty-minute television appearance that would be part of an early December broadcast of “the greatest artists in the world” from New York. In addition to the television appearance, Hurok would also arrange several concerts. Minister

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of Culture N. A. Mikhailov, Ambassador Zarubin, and Oistrakh himself all thought it advisable to accept the invitation, and Mikhailov prepared a resolution that would allow Oistrakh, an accompanist, and a ministry official (such as Ivanian) to travel to the United States for two weeks.69 Bureaucrats in the Central Committee apparatus, however, disagreed. In their memo to the Central Committee, these officials omitted mention of the rather gaudy $10,000 payment while they recommended declining the offer, since Oistrakh had already been to the United States and toured thirteen other countries that year. Their superiors agreed, and again Hurok’s proposal came to naught.70 In November, the Ministry of Culture and the Soviet embassy in Washington approached the Central Committee with another series of proposals for U.S. tours sponsored by Hurok. Mikhailov referred to Hurok’s organization as “one of the greatest American concert companies” and summarized Hurok’s proposed tours. He suggested the Moiseev Ensemble for the spring of 1957 and reaffirmed his commitment to organizing a two-way exchange of soloists throughout 1957. The artists proposed included Gilels, Oistrakh, the violinist Leonid Kogan, and Aram Khachaturian to the United States and Hurok sopranos Roberta Peters and Marian Anderson, the baritone Leonard Warren, and the cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, among others, to the Soviet Union. Hurok also announced his interest in tours of ensembles drawn from the leading Soviet drama theater (the Moscow Art Theater, MKhAT) and, of course, the ballet troupe of the Bolshoi Theater, whom he hoped could tour the United States in 1958.71 Here Ivanian’s memory may have let him down thirty years later when he discussed the switch to Hurok with Harlow Robinson. Ivanian reported that the Central Committee sought to withhold Hurok’s access to the Bolshoi, instead foisting the Moiseev Ensemble on an admittedly willing Hurok as a sort of test. The older Ivanian hesitantly attributed this supposed decision to Moiseev’s connections in the Central Committee.72 Whether or not the Central Committee was committed to sending Moiseev to the United States before the Bolshoi, it is clear that Hurok had long preferred exactly that. These late 1956 proposals repeated a sequence that Hurok himself had first proposed more than a year earlier. In a follow-up letter to Ambassador Zarubin after they met in October 1955, Hurok explained that of the Bolshoi Ballet, the Moiseev Ensemble, and Berezka, he would prefer to have the Moiseev come first for the following reasons: (1) It would seem to me that it would be too complicated to try to organize a tour of the ballet on relatively short notice, for I am sure their schedule is established far in advance of the season.

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(2) I feel that the Beriozka is not as strong a company as the Moisseiev [sic]. My representatives in Paris tell me that the performances now being given by the Moisseiev are excellent and I expect to fly there for a few days soon to see it. Also, I understand the press has been very good. My suggestion would be to bring this company to the United States either in the fall of 1956 or the spring of 1957, which would give us time to plan and organize the tour.73 A year later, he was still pushing to bring the Moiseev Ensemble in the spring of 1957. He met again with Zarubin in Washington and exchanged correspondence with officials in the Ministry of Culture in Moscow. Hurok’s memos contained both concrete proposals (if Gilels were to tour in the 1957–1958 concert season, 35 percent of the box office gross would go to the hall; the remaining 65 percent would be divided between Gilels [80 percent] and Hurok [20 percent]) and detailed assurances about Hurok’s efforts to negotiate with U.S. authorities on behalf of the Moiseev Ensemble. For example, one of the main obstacles to robust Soviet-American cultural exchange created by the United States was a law that all visitors from the Soviet Union had to be fingerprinted on entry, a measure that Khrushchev considered insulting. Hurok reported that he planned to travel to Washington to try to get a final ruling on whether or not the Moiseev Ensemble could be exempted from the measure just as soon as the dust settled from the recently concluded presidential elections.74 When he forwarded Hurok’s proposals and a stack of similar proposals from Schang to the Central Committee in late November, Mikhailov sought permission to negotiate with Hurok regarding all the proposed soloists. His draft resolution even named target dates for most of the artists under discussion.75 Robinson also reports that Hurok received provisional agreement for his proposed Moiseev Ensemble tour at this point, provided he could get the fingerprinting requirement waived.76 Unfortunately for Hurok and the officials in the Soviet Ministry of Culture who wanted the tours to go forward, cultural diplomacy was always part of a larger system of imperial relations, an important tool but subject to shifts in other spheres. These negotiations took place in the shadow of the Soviet invasion of Hungary, which began on 4 November. Almost exactly one month later, the United States suspended all cultural exchange activities with the Soviet Union to protest Soviet actions in Hungary. Though the Soviets were not immediately informed of the decision in any official way, the State Department announced through the American press that all Soviet exchange

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proposals would be ignored and no U.S. proposals would be put forward.77 Arts officials in Moscow were quick to notice the change, and the Ministry of Culture withdrew its request to negotiate with Hurok, citing the U.S. State Department announcement that the exchange of cultural delegations with the Soviet Union would cease.78 The boycott was short-lived. When negotiations started again in April, the Ministry of Culture was eager to act on Hurok’s proposals, suggesting two-month American tours, combined with two week tours of Canada, for Gilels and Kogan. But the Central Committee had cooled to the idea. In a late 1957 response to a Ministry of Culture proposal to exchange multiple soloists, bureaucrats in the Central Committee apparatus opined that it would be inappropriate to send leading Soviet artists to the United States for two months at the expense of their concertizing possibilities at home. That said, the idea of cultural exchange was well enough entrenched that the recommendation was not to reject all exchange, just to limit soloists’ tours to a maximum of one month in duration. Another of the reasons given was that tickets in the United States were said to be so expensive that only the highly privileged bourgeois public could afford to attend.79 When Hurok finally did bring the Moiseev Ensemble to the United States in 1958, appearances in massive venues at accessible prices were a main feature.80 In fact, Hurok’s sensitivity in communications with Soviet cultural officials to concerns meant to resonate with Soviet ideological proclivities differentiate his proposals from those of the vast majority of the other agents and managers next to whom they were filed in the archives. The clearest example of this phenomenon is found in his communications with Ambassador Zarubin in late 1955. He repeatedly emphasized that he could present the Moiseev Ensemble “at popular prices” and stressed that he would prefer to book the Met in New York over Carnegie Hall because it “is no longer thought of as dressy or [as a] society opera house. People seldom dress for performances there in recent times and it is considered much more a people’s theater than formerly.” Again, concluding the tour in the mammoth Madison Square Garden would allow Hurok “to present them at a very popular price so that even those in low income brackets may see a real representative of Russian folklore and art.”81 While stressing accessibility and popularity, Hurok did not make the sort of explicit references to “business interests” that characterized, for example, John Rodgers’s approaches to the ministry. He thus presented a persona that was far less preoccupied with the financial arrangements than even Frederick Schang, whose resources dwarfed most other agents’. At the same time, Hurok also differentiated himself from the legion of American agents who

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stressed their commitment to improving relations between the Soviet Union and United States but who could not match the level of financial backing that Hurok always intimated that he could provide. In the same letter, for example, Hurok carefully juxtaposed his commitment to undertake personally a range of significant expenses (transport of the entire Moiseev Ensemble from Europe and all travel expenses within the United States) to the refrain that “we should be careful to keep admission prices within reach of the masses.”82 Committing personal funds and time—to fly to Paris to confirm his Paris representative’s high opinion of the Moiseev Ensemble in person or to travel immediately to Moscow to engage in direct negotiations—also allowed Hurok to present to the Soviets a combination of resources backed by the wealth and power earned through an extremely successful career, a commitment to making Russian and Soviet art accessible to “regular Americans,” and a gracious, generous, and charming persona. As Ivanian told Robinson thirty years later, “personal appeal means a lot, after all.”83 That statement could not be more applicable than in the highly personalistic circles of the Soviet cultural and political elite. Hurok proved to be the ideal partner as the Soviets engaged with the West and sought to display the excellence of Soviet musical culture on Western stages, to marry Soviet state interests with the financial interests typical of the Western cultural industry. But finding that partner was not necessarily easy.

The Imposters Among the countless agents and managers who approached the Soviet Ministry of Culture or Soviet cultural staff in Western embassies in an effort to establish cultural ties that would turn into profits were hustlers, entrepreneurial characters who either sought to transform modest operations into massive ones or to create new enterprises solely on the basis of exchange with the Soviets. Sifting out these impostors from the dizzying array of other entrepreneurs proved to be tricky, a source of unproductive costs and potential embarrassment for Soviet cultural officials. Evaluations or misevaluations of the seriousness of potential partners’ credentials and prospects for creating successful Soviet tours were also a source of tension between the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs when culture bureaucrats found themselves in awkward situations after following recommendations from embassy staff entrusted with managing Soviet cultural affairs abroad. As a result of this tension, the Ministry of Culture sought to increase its presence abroad, seeking to name trained cultural administrators to embassy staffs and displacing the embassy officials who wore many hats, including that of

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VOKS attaché. Insecurity about dealing with potential impostors also drove officials in both ministries to commit only to well-established impresarios such as Schang and Hurok. I denote as “impostors” those who either misrepresented themselves and their companies to the Soviets or whose demands far outstripped their ability to deliver on their proposals. The borderline between “impostor” and ambitious, legitimate agents and agencies is therefore porous. An early example of an agent who straddled that border was Peter Lawrence of Lawrence, Kanter, and Pratt, Inc. In early 1954, Lawrence approached the Soviet embassy and met repeatedly with a cultural attaché, Nikolai Vladykin, to set forth a proposal for a North American tour for a Soviet ballet troupe.84 Vladykin was apparently sufficiently impressed with Lawrence’s presentation in his New York apartment that he forwarded the proposal to Moscow and encouraged Lawrence and his partners to enter into exploratory negotiations with the Metropolitan Opera and “the several leading ballet companies in the United States.” Those negotiations revealed that the directors of the ballet companies, though not the Met, were interested in such an exchange in principle, but they doubted that Lawrence and friends could bring it off.85 So in April 1954, Lawrence submitted another proposal to the Soviet embassy, suggesting a much more modest initial exchange of a few dancers with the New York City Center Opera Company but a dramatic expansion in the overall scale of exchange. In this second proposal, Lawrence laid out a three-year plan in which a prominent Soviet soloist (Gilels in year one, Oistrakh in year two) would headline a series of tours that would eventually include the Moiseev Ensemble and (in year three) the Bolshoi ballet.86 Then he waited. Having heard nothing from the embassy for six months, Lawrence finally wrote directly to Moscow—to VOKS, not the Ministry of Culture—in late November 1954. This missive seems to have created some action on the Soviet side, and negotiations apparently continued until January. On 13 January, Lawrence sent a final letter to Iurii Guk at the embassy, spelling out the financial terms that would govern a hypothetical two-way exchange of soloists, offering a number of American artists, including several represented by Hurok, and renewing interest in tours by Oistrakh, Gilels, and prima ballerina of the Bolshoi, Galina Ulanova. Lawrence noted that his company’s lawyer would be traveling to Moscow, and he asked Guk to try to arrange a meeting between the lawyer and the head of VOKS, Andrei Denisov.87 This final approach does not appear to have had any result. So far, this description of Lawrence’s attempts to negotiate with the Soviets could have been repeated by any number of agents and managers in the

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mid-1950s. However, a number of details in Lawrence’s explanatory letters suggest that Lawrence may have had limited credibility. First, Lawrence seems to have conducted all negotiations from his home in New York City.88 Perhaps Lawrence sought to impress the Soviets with his hospitality. Perhaps his company had no offices. Second, his American interlocutors seem to have questioned his veracity, his competency, or both. The most prestigious venue contacted by Lawrence appears to have dismissed him out of hand while the others doubted either the Soviets or him.89 Without any prospects at the Metropolitan Opera, Lawrence suggested that top Soviet artists should instead appear with the New York City Center Opera and Ballet: The New York City Center Opera Company has been established for a little over eight years and is highly respected. It does not have the same audience as the Metropolitan but does in fact have a wider, more broadly representative audience. Its ticket prices are more than one-half below those at the Metropolitan. It plays two lengthy seasons a year in New York and goes on tour. We would not hesitate to recommend that your Artists appear as soloists with this Company where we know they would be welcomed with the greatest enthusiasm and respect.90 Though his description of the latter company was intended to impress the Soviets and appeal to their ideological sensibilities much as Hurok did a year later, “welcomed with the greatest enthusiasm and respect” surely fell far short of Soviet hopes for the first U.S. tours of their leading musicians. Furthermore, reading Lawrence’s November letter, one could easily understand if the Soviets thought he was trying to place their artists with a lesser company as a sort of trial balloon: “we certainly could bring about the appearance of any one of your great opera soloists with the New York City Center Opera Company if not immediately with the Metropolitan.”91 Third, in the April proposal, Lawrence made it clear that he had not completed even the preliminary groundwork necessary to realize his proposals within the complex diplomatic environment of the Cold War. He had not discussed any of the proposals with the State Department and would do so only after he had concrete dates for prospective Soviet tours. The justification for this lack of preparation demonstrates that his firm had no concrete reason to assume that State would support its endeavors: “We can only reiterate our feeling that the entire political and cultural scene dictates an affirmative reply on the part of the State Department.” Furthermore, Lawrence raised the issue of television appearances and radio performances only to say that he had “not investigated this area as yet, but we are confident that, once the artists are in this country, great demands would be made, and high prices paid for such appearances.”92

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Fourth, Lawrence, Kanter, and Pratt did not represent most, or perhaps any, of the artists they offered for tours of the Soviet Union. They sought to allay Soviet fears about this fact preemptively in January: “You will notice that these artists are managed by various agencies; we are able to secure their services, or that of any other artist, regardless of any such affiliation since these managers serve their client’s wishes. If any of these great artists wishes to go to your country, and we know they will, their managers cannot prevent them. Any question of agent’s commissions will be handled by us between the artist, the manager and ourselves.”93 One could understand if the Soviets doubted Lawrence’s bona fides. Finally, despite these obvious shortcomings even within Lawrence’s own proposals, he asked from the Soviets something quite extraordinary: exclusive representation rights for all Soviet musicians in the United States and for all American musicians who toured the Soviet Union. This request was forwarded quite forcefully in the April 1954 proposal: In order to proceed with the greatest efficiency we request your consideration of certain basic questions. . . . It is immediately apparent that virtually every concert management, as well as every major concert organization, would welcome the opportunity to present Soviet Artists. We have learned that many such requests have been placed with your Embassies and believe that, as we go more deeply into the matter, further direct offers will be made to you. Therefore, it becomes extremely necessary that we, at the earliest possible moment, secure assurances from you, preferably in writing, that we shall have the exclusive representation of all your Artists in the United States and Canada. Such exclusivity, of course, would depend on our satisfactory handling of these matters. We suggest, therefore, that you consider permitting us exclusivity through the first of the proposed visits with an option for the years beyond, dependent upon your being satisfied. It is undoubtedly obvious to you that it becomes hourly more difficult for us to attempt to represent you without such assurances of exclusivity as well as documented evidence of our role.94 It is perhaps unfair to call Lawrence an “impostor.” There is certainly no evidence that he sought to defraud the Soviets or even that he presented himself dishonestly in any way. It is clear, however, that he did not have the stature, connections, or expertise to arrange the sort of tours that would justify the monopoly over Soviet-American cultural exchange that he sought to establish. A hustling entrepreneur, he seems to have seen an opportunity for significant financial gain and sought to hitch his company to what would

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indeed be a very successful venture. The Soviets either recognized this lack of stature as a problem or were more persuaded by their negotiations with Schang, negotiations that were already underway in 1955. Though Lawrence dropped out of the picture without much further comment from the Soviet side, the case of another would-be impresario, one Carlton Smith, posed issues that were potentially far more significant. In the fall of 1955, Carlton Smith presented himself to the Soviet embassy in Washington as the director of the National Arts Foundation, Inc., supposedly a New York City-based foundation that boasted of the support of such luminaries as President Eisenhower and former President Truman. He suggested that he should visit Moscow to begin negotiations for an exchange program that would be organized by his National Arts Foundation, and the embassy recommended him to VOKS. VOKS arranged the trip he requested, and Smith arrived in Moscow on 18 September 1955. For about two weeks, VOKS facilitated what Smith called a fact-finding mission, an attempt to identify the best Soviet artists and artworks for his proposed exchange projects. He visited theaters, met with leading members of the creative intelligentsia, and was even received by Deputy Minister of Culture Tverdokhlebov.95 Just three days into his visit, he also requested a visa for the “official photographer” of his foundation so that they could take extensive photographs of the artwork in the leading museums of Moscow, Leningrad, and, eventually, Kiev—supposedly for a large-format, color magazine publication meant for wide distribution in the United States.96 Smith’s visit had the appearances of a major overture toward cultural exchange. It was not. VOKS bureaucrats later reported suspecting that something with Smith was amiss even in their earliest meetings. He failed to produce any documentation about his foundation’s funding levels or capacity to manage the exchanges he talked about. He deflected all queries about his foundation with vague but verbose references to famous friends and advisers but never articulated concrete proposals for exchange. On 3 October, the period of his official VOKS visit ended, but Smith and his photographer stayed on as tourists. Even then, they placed heavy demands on now frustrated VOKS officials, continuing the fact finding but still without furnishing any evidence of their capacity to negotiate actual exchange agreements. Then, on 5 October, Ambassador Zarubin wrote from the United States that he had been informed by the U.S. State Department that Smith had not been cleared to negotiate exchange agreements with any Soviet institutions and did not in fact represent any American museums with whom the Soviets might exchange artwork. He was just a minor businessman with no official

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authority.97 This information was passed on to VOKS, which continued to facilitate his extensive visits to cultural institutions, considering it better to maintain control over his movements rather than cutting off all communication with him for the remainder of his tourist stay.98 Then, on 13 October, the Soviet news agency, TASS, sent a long, secret report from New York that summarized an article published in the 12 October issue of the magazine Variety, which presented Smith as a nearly complete fraud whose unwarranted negotiations in Moscow were likely to damage rather than improve cultural exchange between the superpowers.99 Smith and his photographer left for Kiev that same day and on 17 October departed the USSR for a now pre-warned Warsaw.100 The Carlton Smith encounter raised several potentially significant issues for the Soviet cultural diplomacy operation. Most important, it showed how dependent on intermediaries abroad Soviet bureaucrats in Moscow were. Careless vetting by the embassy in Washington wasted a month’s time and effort for VOKS and the impressively large swatch of Moscow’s creative intelligentsia who met with Smith in October and November. Not surprisingly, VOKS leaders were irritated and did not hesitate to say so in their otherwise somewhat defensive summary report on the incident.101 Central Committee bureaucrats agreed, suggesting that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a whole and Zarubin himself have their attention brought to their “admitted mistake.”102 Second, the Carlton Smith episode suggests how comparatively easy it could be for an apparently self-confident and persuasive con man to dupe much of the Soviet cultural diplomacy bureaucracy, at least for as long as it took to spend a month meeting (and being photographed with) the Soviet Union’s most famous artists, musicians, actors, and directors. From these sources, it is impossible even to hazard a guess about Smith’s motivations, but his actions appear to have been harmless to Soviet interests and his own. At worst, the Soviets faced embarrassment about having fallen for his self-presentation. Finally, considering the extent of Smith’s audacious farce, it is striking that no one was significantly disciplined for allowing it to happen. Ambassador Zarubin admitted his embassy’s mistake halfway through the process and merely had it pointed out that the Central Committee noticed. For those more closely engaged in the time-consuming details of arranging cultural exchanges, though, the encounter with Smith was one more indication of the need to find reliable intermediaries. By the time Smith left for Warsaw, Gilels was already shocking U.S. audiences with his virtuosity. Perhaps the Smith incident had so few ramifications because the Soviets were already well on their way to finding the intermediary in the United States that they needed.

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Transimperial Integration Throughout the postwar 1940s and into the 1950s, the Soviet Union tried to create or support an extensive global cultural exchange system. The main components of this system abroad were Soviet friendship societies, organizations that were created, organized, and run by those who were sympathetic to the Soviet Union or, at the very least, committed to peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union. The main contacts between these friendship societies and the Soviet state bureaucracy was VOKS, which was supposed to monitor their activities, supply them with materials they needed to promote the Soviet cause, and—crucially—coordinate the exchange of cultural delegations between the countries. The largest of these societies in terms of membership and the most important in terms of domestic significance emerged within the Soviet empire in the 1940s, where the Sovietizing states often coordinated and supported their activities. The VOKS bureaucracy at home and these friendship societies abroad constituted an essential mechanism for the cultural integration of the emerging Soviet cultural empire in the postwar Stalin years.103 But friendship societies also existed throughout the West and in the Third World. Managing these networks and cultivating prominent Western intellectuals had, after all, been the prewar raison d’être for VOKS from the time it was founded in the 1920s.104 They could well have formed the main conduit for Soviet cultural exchange with the West in the 1950s, just as they had established a network of exchange and information gathering in Europe in the 1940s. But they did not. Instead, the bureaucrats responsible for managing Soviet cultural exchange with the West opted to utilize the services of the agents, managers, and impresarios whose sponsorship and advocacy facilitated the global mobility of the music superstars of the mid-century Western world. By opting to utilize impresarios instead of friendship societies to display Soviet cultural accomplishments in the West, Soviet policy makers opted to join a U.S.-dominated global capitalist economy of cultural exchange rather than struggle against that U.S.-dominated economy by creating an alternative system that could structure international cultural exchange, a system such as that of the VOKS-affiliated friendship societies. This choice was simultaneously strategic and opportunistic. In May 1954, the head of the Ministry of Culture Foreign Relations Department, V. S. Pereslavstev, was told by the visiting West German composer Kurt Driesch that friendship societies in the West did not typically have the resources to mount effective exchanges.105 This apparently resonated with Pereslavtsev’s own experience. In January 1955, he told the then acting

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head of the Western European division of VOKS, V. S. Volodin, that in the ministry’s experience, Belgian concert organizations simply outperformed the Society of Belgian-Soviet Friendship. If the Society of Belgian-Soviet Friendship sought to invite Soviet performers, it would be desirable for those invitations to come together from Belgian concert organizations and the society.106 And as the officials in the Ministry of Culture charged with overseeing exchange with Latin America noted, it was European impresarios and concert organizations who had developed ties to that region. In early 1956, they suggested using these concert organizations while taking the initiative to establish cultural exchange with Latin America—and elsewhere.107 Once they decided to exhibit Soviet culture in the West, the Soviets were thus presented with two options: use impresarios they understood to be more effective than their own international apparatus and integrate into the Western system when touring the West; or pour resources into developing an alternative, distinctively Soviet cultural exchange system that might or might not function as effectively. They chose integration. They surely had a number of both opportunistic and strategic reasons for making this choice. First, impresarios were good at manipulating the Western system for their own profit; to share in those profits, the Soviets merely needed to learn how to negotiate effectively. They learned quickly, so integrating into the Western system also meant profiting from the largesse created for elites in the global capitalist economy.108 Second, impresarios did not face the same hostility that friendship societies could provoke in the West, whether among mainstream audiences, venue management, or hostile local or regional governments.109 As long as the Soviets avoided insulting the comparatively minute numbers of people who belonged to their friendship societies, especially in the United States—as they did for Oistrakh’s first tour by having his “illness” cancel his scheduled appearances with von Karajan—they could minimize the suspicion with which Soviet citizens might be greeted in the West and capitalize on the fascination that they held. Third, the flip side of the effective impresario coin was that the VOKS apparatus, at home and abroad, was perpetually underfunded. Even attempting to finance tours through the VOKS apparatus would have required a massive investment of resources that the perpetually inefficient Soviet economy simply could not produce and policy makers would not devote to cultural diplomacy even if it could. Finally, the dizzying success with which early Soviet-Columbia Artists Management and Soviet-Hurok tours were greeted suggested again that in the 1950s, the Soviets could utilize the Western system—accept its terms—and still out-compete the West. These factors combined to create a situation in which the Soviets merged into the capitalist system of global art music production.

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But integrating within the Western system did not mean abandoning some particularities of the Soviets’ own system of music production. Soviet policy makers were happy to utilize the capitalist economy of cultural exchange, but we have already seen that they also insisted on maintaining tight controls over who participated in it. Maintaining the precarious balance between the goal of displaying excellence on the transimperial competitive stage and controlling those Soviets who embodied that excellence proved exceedingly tricky and eventually impossible. By the mid-1950s, the Soviet Union and United States were embroiled in a full-fledged competition that pitted their different economic, political, and cultural systems against each other. In a nuclear age, both superpowers typically sought to avoid direct military confrontation, preferring to carry out their struggle through surrogates, or in alternative, much more peaceful venues—athletic fields, chess boards, and concert stages. The resulting competitions allowed both sides to present themselves as gracious, cultured hosts and visitors, eager to advance the cause of peace in the world while nevertheless exerting the superiority of their particular system. The exchange of internationally touring musicians was perhaps the most momentous of these cultural competitions in the 1950s. When they embarked on the musical exchanges that constituted the Cold War’s cultural competition in the mid-1950s, the Soviets sought to display the excellence of Soviet cultural production, to show the strength of the Soviet cultural empire. Despite the advent and global distribution of recording technology after World War II, the most visible way to display Soviet musicians in the West was to send them there on tour. By the early 1950s, the Soviets had a good deal of practice managing international musical exchanges within their own cultural empire. Soviet musicians had toured Eastern Europe more and more frequently in the late Stalin years, and after Stalin’s death in March 1953, they began touring in the West with increasing regularity as well. But to mount successful tours in the capitalist world, the Soviets had to find trustworthy intermediaries. The agency of intermediaries made possible this transimperial exchange, this merging of Soviet artistic excellence into the capitalist economy of cultural production and its global diffusion. The most obvious of these individuals were, of course, the musicians themselves, exemplified by David Oistrakh. Oistrakh was universally recognized as one of the world’s finest violinists, and he was simultaneously eager to engage his colleagues in the West, able to charm the Western press and audiences alike, and willing to display a confidence about the Soviet system’s strengths.

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This was a perfect combination from the perspective of the second and third types of individuals who made transimperial cultural exchange possible: Soviet cultural bureaucrats and Western agents, managers, and impresarios. By the time Stalin died, the Soviets had created a system of transnational diffusion that operated primarily within the Soviet cultural empire but had the beginnings of institutional pathways in much of the rest of the world. This system of Soviet friendship societies would remain important in the Soviet empire and in parts of the Third World. But despite its generation of a comparatively small group of Westerners who were sympathetic to the Soviet Union and its postwar causes, friends like John Rodgers, this specifically Soviet system had not penetrated the West in a significant enough way to sustain successful cultural exchange. Indeed, the charged environment of the Cold War rendered reliance on sympathetic Westerners to interpret conditions in the West potentially counterproductive. So the main vehicle to display Soviet virtuosi in the West would have to be the impresario. It was the impresarios’ entrepreneurial pursuit of private material interest combined with genuine excitement about presenting outstanding examples of Soviet artistry in their own societies that often proved the impetus for specific transimperial exchanges. Once Soviet cultural bureaucrats identified reliable impresarios, like Sol Hurok in the United States, they adapted quite quickly to maximize the propaganda and financial advantages of the partnerships. In a material sense, the transimperial exchange of musicians created a win-win situation, even if they ultimately required the Soviets to integrate into the U.S.-dominated global capitalist economy. Of course, this integration was never complete. The last category of individuals who structured transimperial cultural exchange is that of the politician. Politicians on both sides saw the possible advantages of cultural exchange, even if they had to be convinced of it by Soviet Ministry of Culture officials or Los Angeles philanthropists. Their approvals enabled the more active partnerships among artists, impresarios, and cultural functionaries to work. Their often paranoid restrictions—whether it was the insulting U.S. insistence on fingerprinting members of Soviet delegations or, more menacingly, the Soviet preoccupation with maintaining strict control over which musicians could travel where and when—constituted the primary impediment for the continuation of transimperial cultural exchange. In the moment, the Western tours by the Soviet stars of mid-century high culture appeared to be triumphs of Soviet cultural accomplishment and even sophistication. The gasping praise in the Western press, the concert halls packed with enthusiastic audiences, and the impressive earnings all played to the Soviet advantage and contributed to an early Khrushchevian

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Soviet self-confidence, even arrogance, regarding the wider-ranging competition with the West. But these advantages were ultimately eroded by three much less immediately visible phenomena. The obsession with control that prevented Sviatoslav Richter from leaving the Soviet empire throughout the 1950s undermined claims by figures like Oistrakh or Rostropovich on his first American tour that politics played no role in Soviet musical life. Once those agents of transimperial exchange began defecting or moving into Western exile in the 1960s and 1970s, that darker side of Soviet cultural life became again blindingly bright in the West. Intentionally or incidentally (probably the latter), interaction with the impresarios also seduced some of the agents of Soviet excellence who did not ultimately defect. The material abundance that they witnessed and the luxuries they experienced while touring the West led at least some of them to develop an implicitly subversive comparison of the two systems, from a star’s perspective. But perhaps the most important and least immediately apparent side-effect of the Soviet tours was the integration into the Western economy that made them possible. In the early Khrushchev period, Soviet elites recognized that the standard of living in the Soviet empire lagged behind that of the most developed areas of the American empire. But they assumed that the scientifically planned Soviet economy would soon catch up with and then overtake the chaotic capitalist economy with its boom and bust cycles and wide differentials of wealth. For a few years in the late 1950s, that assumption seemed believable: the Soviet economy was expanding much more rapidly than the U.S. economy, and a Soviet satellite became the first to orbit the planet. At this high-water mark of the Soviet empire, Soviet violinists, pianists, and ballet dancers were taking the world by storm. The moment was illusory. In the 1960s, the Soviet economy again began to lag behind, and by the 1970s, it was clear that the Soviet empire could not outproduce the American one. Ultimately, the partial integration of perhaps the strongest element of the Soviet system into the capitalist economy would be followed by its complete submersion when the Soviet Union collapsed more than thirty years later.

Epilogue

In the early years of the Cold War, the acclaim accorded the virtuosi violinists and pianists who represented the Soviet Union in the increasingly global arena of music performance proved unsurpassable. In their youth, they dominated the emerging music competitions designed to provide early exposure for young musicians, to popularize the works of favorite national composers, and to pit musicians from the Soviet empire against those from the American one. Once they reached professional maturity, these virtuosi toured the world, wowing audiences, stunning critics, and projecting an image of the Soviet Union as a potent and sophisticated promoter of high cultural excellence. These continuing successes nevertheless masked an underlying Soviet weakness, for these projections of cultural excellence depended on Soviet willingness to engage with the legal and economic regimes dominated by the United States. A dynamic interaction between Soviet success in highly publicized competition and its quieter but simultaneous integration into the structures of globalization thus characterized the Cold War’s cultural struggle. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union presented the world with one of two competing projects with universal, global ambitions. By the 1950s, the struggle for primacy between those projects had already contributed to the rapid development of globalization. The dynamic of competition and integration drove the spread of globalizing cultural technologies and media. As Soviet soloists appeared on recordings and broadcasts with North American 177

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and West European orchestras, the global standardization of orchestral sound and performance ideals accelerated. This same dynamic contributed to the universalization of cultural values, as well; for the Soviet-dominated competitions established universal standards of evaluation and an expanding, but nevertheless bounded, global canon of instrumental repertory. Most obviously, the displays of cultural virtuosity invited audiences to both imagine and participate in an increasingly uniform world culture. The least obvious but potentially most momentous process by which the dynamic of competition and integration contributed to the acceleration of globalization in the 1950s, however, was the gradual but eventually systematic integration of the Soviet Union into the global legal and economic regime dominated by the United States. Whether it was to crush an American movie in Western Europe by manipulating international copyright law to which it was not yet officially a party or to realize the hard-currency profits and less tangible benefits of well-run concert tours organized by Western impresarios, the Soviet use of its virtuosi as cultural ambassadors contributed directly to the financial capital flows and legal regimes that structured the globalizing world later in the century. That participation literally paid off in the 1950s, but when the terrain of the Cold War shifted from high culture to economic development and popular culture, the Soviets would not fare so well. After Nikita Khrushchev’s famous trip to the United States in September 1959, the Soviet book exporter Mezhdunarodnaia kniga published a collection of the speeches he gave while on tour. Translated into English for an American audience and distributed the next year as Khrushchev in America, this collection provides a distillation of Khrushchev’s understanding of the state of the competition between the United States and Soviet Union at the end of the period examined in this book.1 Recent Soviet technological and cultural accomplishments had clearly reinforced the premier’s unshakable confidence in the Soviet system and his conviction that its triumph over U.S.-style capitalism was historically inevitable. Just as clearly, it indicates that whatever his contribution to loosening the requirements of artistic conformity during the Thaw, socialist realism as a way of interpreting the world around him was alive and well for Khrushchev: he saw specific cultural and technological accomplishments as the leading edge of much broader and much deeper transformations of the human condition. Put bluntly, in the 1960s a Soviet rocket on the moon today was as sure a harbinger of the abundance of Soviet consumer goods tomorrow as a muddy pit had been the promise of a new metro station in 1930s Moscow. Both justified the systemic sense of superiority that had long been a touchstone of Soviet culture and ideology. Before he left for his American tour and as soon as he touched down on U.S. soil, Khrushchev lauded two recent technological accomplishments—

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the world’s first successful lunar landing the day before he arrived in the United States and the launch of the world’s first nuclear-powered surface ship—as evidence that the Soviets had ushered in “a new era” of human development. He linked this new era to the nature of the Soviet system, asking rhetorically why it was that the Soviets were responsible for these two feats, and then answering in typically dialectical materialist terms: “The triumph became possible because these same Soviet people had with their own hands, their heroic labor, in a historically short period, succeeded in solving the supreme social problem. They have built a socialist society and are confidently building communism.”2 Similarly, the Luna 2 rocket to the moon and the icebreaker Lenin showed that the Soviets had unlocked the boundless capacity for human achievement: “our people are successfully developing the material and technical basis of communist society. Only people who deliberately close their eyes and refuse to look reality in the face can doubt the boundless possibilities for human progress offered by communism.”3 In the premier’s mind, technological accomplishment was not the only sign of the USSR’s inevitable victory in the competition with the United States. So, too, was the excellence of Soviet ballet. Khrushchev’s stay in Los Angeles was punctuated by a visit to the studios of Twentieth Century Fox. His remarks to the assembled filmmakers suggest that cultural refinement, symbolized by support for and appreciation of the ballet, was another marker of a society’s comparative development. He first asserted cultural development as the measure of a society and the importance of artists in promoting it: “In our country, we cannot think of making any progress without producing an intelligentsia of our own, without developing our culture in every way. There would be no point in building a new society without that.” And then he told an extended anecdote in which he contrasted his own youthful ignorance of ballet (and ballerinas, in a remark that the Soviet publishers of his speech insisted provoked laughter from the audience) with the lavish state support for the arts that was a cornerstone of the Soviet cultural system. The heart of the anecdote, though, was an assertion of Soviet superiority, proven by comparative artistic success: And now I wish to ask you what country has the most highly developed ballet. Would it be your country? No. Why, you don’t even have a state opera and ballet theater. Your theaters subsist solely on the hand-outs of wealthy people. But in our country it is the state that appropriates funds for the development of art. The whole world recognizes that Soviet ballet is the most extensively developed. We are proud of it. When our ballet company toured the United States, you rewarded it with well-deserved applause and praise. And what about our dramatic

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theater, what about our stage-craft? I won’t brag but will merely ask you to consult your conscience and tell me whether our theater is on the decline or on the rise. And what about our movies? You and we have different tastes. But it is a fact, isn’t it, that our films win prizes at international festivals. They are awarded to our films by impartial people who know their business.4 Yet if technological accomplishment and international cultural acclaim were Khrushchev’s evidence of Soviet superiority, his claim to that status ultimately rested on assertions about comparative economic potential. He linked cultural competition to living standards when he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee of the U.S. Congress that both sides ought to shift “from the arms race to competition in developing economy and culture, and raising living standards.”5 In a speech to the Economic Club of New York, he linked economic development assistance in Africa and Asia to peaceful coexistence, competition, and cultural exchange.6 Over and over again, he touted recent Soviet economic growth and claimed that during the next planning period the Soviet Union would actually overtake the United States. In a speech at the National Press Club, he explicitly linked his earlier, notoriously provocative claim that the Soviet Union would “bury” the United States to this point about comparative economic potential: I said that in the course of historical progress and in the historical sense, capitalism would be buried and communism would come to replace capitalism. You will say that this is out of the question. But then the feudal lords burned at the stake those who fought against feudalism and yet capitalism won out. Capitalism fights against communism. I am convinced that the winner will be communism, a social system which creates better conditions for the development of a country’s productive forces, enables every individual to prove his worth and guarantees complete freedom for society, for every member of society. You may disagree with me. I disagree with you. What are we to do, then? We must coexist. Live on under capitalism, and we will build communism. The new and progressive will win; and the old and moribund will die. You believe that the capitalist system is more productive, that it creates better conditions for social progress, that it will win. But the brief history of our Soviet state does not speak in favor of capitalism. What place did Russia hold for economic development before the Revolution? She was backward and illiterate. And now we have a powerful economy, our science and culture are highly developed.7

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Achievements in culture and technology served as indicators of the inevitable global success of the Soviet (or even Soviet-led) economic system. Khrushchev now began to measure comparative systemic success in terms of economic development and the satisfaction of consumer desire, areas quite distinct from the cultural and scientific fields in which the Soviets had demonstrated such success. By the end of the 1950s, he had decisively shifted the competitive terrain from cultural exchange and the space race to comparative economic development, a turn that would eventually contribute fundamentally to the failure of the Soviet imperial project. This ideological change was reflected in Khrushchev’s foreign and domestic policy priorities. The increased Soviet cultural presence in the West in the 1950s mirrored an even greater expansion of contact—cultural and economic—with the developing world after Stalin died. During the late Stalin years, the Soviets had tried to extend their influence by establishing cultural exchanges with the new countries of the postcolonial world.8 Though their economic efforts were not yet as developed as their cultural ones, Stalin-era leaders also imagined themselves at the head of a global economy distinct from the capitalist world economy.9 The bulk of the Soviet Union’s international economic activity during the late Stalin years was designed to bring the “socialist” world market to fruition, so it was concentrated in the newly consolidated East European imperial periphery. Even two years after Stalin died, nearly 80 percent of Soviet trade was with countries in its empire and with China, with the industrialized West accounting for the bulk of the rest.10 That balance changed after Khrushchev came to power in 1956. In addition to invigorating cultural outreach beyond the borders of the empire, Khrushchev inaugurated a long-term transformation of the Soviet Union’s economic relations with both the developing world and the industrialized West. By 1963, the decolonizing and developing world accounted for a tenth of the Soviet Union’s trade, and by 1970, the industrialized West accounted for nearly a quarter of it.11 Despite this marked expansion of Soviet economic activity beyond its imperial borders, the earlier conception of two world markets was never abandoned in the Khrushchev years.12 Instead, the Soviets sought to use carefully targeted economic development aid to draw developing countries into the Soviet-led world economy and away from the U.S.-led one. From the Aswan High Dam in Egypt to the Bhilai steel plant in India, the Soviets delivered massive economic development projects that appealed to elites in newly independent countries who hoped that economic development would cement their recent political liberation from the colonial yoke.13 Soviet aid thus initially focused on strategic countries (Egypt, India,

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Iraq, Indonesia) considered to be at the forefront of the fight for colonial independence, and thus potential path breakers for the postcolonial world as a whole.14 Unfortunately for Khrushchev and his vision of a socialist world economic system that would supplant U.S.-dominated global capitalism, Soviet aid to the developing world simply could not compete with vastly more extensive and eventually more effective U.S. aid. Over the course of the 1960s, the devastatingly poor quality of Soviet manufactured goods and crippling inefficiency of their delivery steadily undermined Soviet claims to the eventual superiority of the Soviet economic system. Increased U.S. pressure on the regimes of developing states coupled with the abysmal performance of Soviet products changed the very nature of Soviet aid, which increasingly focused on the provision of military supplies.15 In trade, too, the 1960s saw the gradual realization among the Soviet elite that the Soviet economy could not keep pace with global capitalism. In initiating a dramatic expansion of trade with the West, Khrushchev intended it to be an exchange of industrial goods for industrial goods. But Soviet industrial goods could not compete with their Western counterparts, and Western trading partners proved interested only in exchanging Western technology for Soviet raw materials. By the beginning of the 1970s, the Soviet Union had been relegated primarily to the neocolonial role of supplying raw materials to Western industrialized countries.16 The vision of an inevitably triumphant Soviet system had given way to a global economic reality in which the Soviet Union supplied weapons to desperate Third World elites in exchange for favorable terms governing the exploitation of natural resources while trading their own raw materials to a capitalist West in exchange for Western technology and industrial products, including consumer goods.17 Soviet theorizing about the global economy followed suit, and at the Twenty-Fifth Party Congress in 1976, Brezhnev explained the importance of the international division of labor within a single global economy.18 The battle for economic productivity and a consumption-based standard of living about which Khrushchev had displayed so much bravura had been lost. In domestic life as in the international arena, Khrushchev’s promise to bury the West in economic development raised expectations to heights that the Soviet system never met. From breakneck construction of the later despised concrete-block apartment buildings to alleviate chronic housing shortages to the amelioration of the hitherto abysmal lot of a perpetually squeezed peasantry, Khrushchev undertook concrete measures to improve the Soviet standard of living.19 Soon his emphasis on consumption permeated both the USSR and its European empire, setting new expectations for everyday leisure and comforts. To be sure, Soviet leaders from Khrushchev on never intended

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to equate socialist consumption with the unbridled passion for consuming characteristic of the West. Instead, they drew on a long Soviet legacy of promoting a specifically socialist, “cultured” lifestyle that included a specifically socialist mode of consumption that valued discernment and judicious selection rather than conspicuous display of abundance.20 Like everything else about the Soviet system, socialist consumption was supposed to be more restrained, more edifying—better—than that of the West. In theory, this socialist consumption could be supported with a relatively modest supply of consumer goods, but even this standard could not be realized. Trumpeting the productive capacity of the Soviet system and its contribution to a rising standard of living while simultaneously conducting campaigns against “acquisitiveness” at home proved very tricky.21 But it was pursued throughout the Soviet cultural empire in ways that gave rise to multiple definitions of socialist consumption and corresponding expectations among socialist populations for comforts that extended from households to leisure activities. Failing to meet these expectations contributed to an ongoing, low-level dissatisfaction with the Soviet imperial system.22 That dissatisfaction eventually expressed itself on the cultural front, as well. Beginning in the late Khrushchev years, popular culture—especially popular musical culture—played an increasingly important role in competition with the West. Whereas relatively high brow arts culture was deployed to compete for the attention and approval of highly educated audiences, popular culture was deployed to compete for the attention and approval of mass audiences (that nevertheless still included intellectuals, especially across the Soviet empire). By the 1970s and 1980s, violinists and ballerinas had become less important indicators of cultural strength than jazz men and, especially, the Beatles. Indeed, Western popular music, first American jazz and then AngloAmerican rock, proved in the long run to generate the sort of attraction to the American cultural system that Soviet leaders hoped their own musicians could generate for the Soviet system. Beginning in January 1955, the Voice of America’s Music USA/Jazz Hour broadcasts sent a waft of liberating freedom and an invitation, delivered in Willis Conover’s famously soothing and instructive baritone, to imagine a distant American society through “rose-colored glasses.”23 The U.S. State Department’s “jazz ambassadors” program sent some of jazz’s biggest stars all over the world in tours reminiscent of the Soviet musical tours described here—and they too were extremely successful.24 Along with the famously high standard of living in the United States—tied, of course, to the ready availability of the consumer goods Khrushchev promised to his domestic population—jazz was vastly more popular among, for example, African university students in France

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than the main institutional planks of American empire, “democracy” and a “liberal economy.”25 Within the Soviet Union as well, jazz had become associated with a potentially if mildly subversive youth subculture in the postwar Stalin years and retained an association with everyday disenchantment with the Soviet system for years afterward.26 By the end of the 1960s, serious Soviet jazz merged into a highly visible but alternative cultural sphere within urban Soviet society that also included avant-garde music, religious music, and the guitar poetry (or avtorskaia pesnia) of the so-called “bards,” like Bulat Okudzhava and Vladimir Vysotsky, whose music circulated widely on informal recordings. By the end of the 1970s, this milieu included Soviet rock as well.27 Never thoroughly repressed but always tinged with at least a hint of rebellion, the most popular of these strands became targets of co-option by the mid-1970s as Vysotsky played to huge audiences and Komsomol activists provided a patina of acceptability to the disco parties they hosted.28 Despite performers’ efforts to create distinctively Russian (or Estonian) varieties of rock, though, the Soviets never produced jazz or rock virtuosi in this unofficial sphere comparable to the official system’s violinists and ballerinas.29 The increasing popularity of rock, despite its common identification as an American and English cultural form, shows that the Soviets were losing out in precisely the field they had earlier so dominated.30 In fact, not only were the Soviets losing in the direct cultural competition with the United States by the 1970s, but the very ideal of a distinct socialist mass culture itself was beginning to disappear into a globalized American-style mass culture. Of course, the Soviet Union, too, developed a genuinely popular mass culture that was not directly associated with or understood to be derived from the West. This Soviet mass culture included the popular music of such estrada superstars as Alla Pugacheva, entertaining Soviet and imported movies (especially films from India), and, by the 1970s, the television.31 It thrived because it entertained Soviet audiences. However, as Kristin Roth-Ey has convincingly shown, success with mass audiences came at the price of generating a cultural product that eventually blurred the lines between a supposedly more edifying Soviet culture and an allegedly debased, entirely commercial Western one. Along the way, Soviet mass culture also became more commercialized, and its consumption retreated into more private realms. In short, successful Soviet mass culture in the 1970s was itself evidence that the Soviets had lost the cultural Cold War, even at home.32 The literature on the collapse of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe in 1989 and of the Soviet Union itself two years later is vast, and plausible explanations for it almost as varied. Determining the relative balance between long-term, structural causes and the shorter-term historical contingencies of

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the 1980s will surely occupy scholars for years to come. An important component of any completely satisfactory explanation, however, must be the failure of the Soviet system to deliver on the promises made by Khrushchev in that American kitchen in Moscow thirty years earlier. After the upheaval and mass intellectual disillusionment across the empire that followed the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968, socialist citizens were encouraged to settle into a “normal,” stable, predictable existence. That “normalization” meant that citizens across the Soviet empire were now afforded the leisure to lead a “quiet life” of everyday existence in which domestic comfort and stability replaced the storming mobilization for state goals that characterized life in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. An essential component of this Brezhnev-era “normality” was the expectation of stable consumption of consumer goods.33 Consumption and the pursuit of a particularly socialist self-realization eventually provided the conditions for the creation of alternative social and cultural milieux that were neither wholly part of the official system nor subversively apart from it. Whether or not they considered it subversive—which many clearly did not—Soviet youth increasingly consumed rock and roll, either performed by Western bands or in local variants derived from those Western models. Integrating these alternative milieux with a “normal” existence that also included a genuine attachment to socialist values and repetition of its “authoritative discourse” gave rise, as Alexei Yurchak has shown, to a situation that made the Soviet collapse at once possible and unexpected to those who lived through it.34 As they sought to finance the allocation of consumer goods sufficient to satisfy populations now engaged in “normal” lives of conformity, quiet consumption, and alternative cultural formations, East European governments consistently manipulated the artificial pricing structures of the Soviet-led economy of trade, acquiring underpriced Soviet raw materials in exchange for overpriced manufactured goods.35 The resulting “implicit trade subsidies” that the Soviet Union thus provided to its East European periphery skyrocketed in the 1970s to an estimated total of almost $22 billion. Coupled with direct aid and hard-currency loans to its imperial periphery (including in Asia and Latin America), that implicit trade subsidy raised the cost of maintaining its empire to well over $100 billion over the course of the 1970s. When those subsidies failed to deliver the standard of living demanded by their restless populations, East European governments increasingly turned to foreign loans, from Western banks and governments. The bloc’s resulting debt burden ultimately fell primarily on the Soviet Union, since a default anywhere in the empire would, because of the tightly integrated nature of the planned economy, have catastrophic ramifications throughout the economic system. As the commanders of the metropole, Soviet leaders could not allow that to happen.

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Eventually, the price of trade subsidies, direct aid, and debt protection proved to be too high, especially because these subsidies to the imperial periphery increasingly necessitated the imposition of austerity measures at home. The simultaneous increase in Soviet tourism across its empire made clear to Soviet citizens that their standard of living fell substantially below that of those living in the imperial periphery. By the end of the 1970s, the Soviet leadership was enduring two extremely high costs of maintaining an empire that had essentially been transformed into a tightly integrated regional periphery within the global capitalist system: the direct economic cost and the cost of deteriorating satisfaction among the metropole’s population about those costs, even when experienced indirectly. As Valerie Bunce so astutely wrote in 1985, on the verge of Mikhail Gorbachev’s ascendancy to power: The Soviet Union was forced into the unenviable position of using Soviet resources to prevent economic and political bankruptcy in the bloc. By the 1980s, the empire had become more, not less, of a burden for the Soviet Union, and at a time when such burdens could not easily be assumed. Eastern Europe’s purported growth in “bargaining power” with the Soviets in fact merely reflected how weak these states had become as a result of their growing economic dependence on Western markets. Soviet losses from empire were not Eastern Europe’s gains; growing Eastern European dependence on the Soviet Union could not be construed as Soviet gains. Instead, the resources of all the states in the bloc declined, and that decline was accompanied by a decline in Eastern Europe’s value to the Soviet Union.36 Once the cost of maintaining that empire became too much to bear, Mikhail Gorbachev set about dismantling it. The inability of Khrushchev’s command economy to outpace the economy of chaotic capitalism—and the foiled expectations that his promises raised among domestic populations across the empire—contributed directly to the eventual collapse of the Soviet empire. As he basked in the glory of Soviet satellites, moon probes, ballerinas, and violinists, Khrushchev’s vision of inevitable Soviet superiority seemed justified. He intensified the competition with the West, quietly integrating into U.S.-dominated economic and legal regimes to do so. Thirty years later, the contradictions inherent in the dynamic of competition and integration had been exposed, and the Soviet empire dissolved into the global capitalist economy dominated by the United States.

Notes

Introduction

1.  “Slovo pobeditelei,” Izvestiia, 15 April 1958, 3. 2.  “The Kitchen Debate: An Exploration into Cold War Ideologies and Propaganda,” www3.sympatico.ca/robsab/debate.html (accessed 30 January 2013). 3. On consumption and its new importance in the Khrushchev era, see, for example, 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, no. 2 (2002): 211–52. 4. For a few examples of this common trope, see the following selection of undergraduate world history textbooks: Richard Goff et al., The Twentieth Century: A Brief Global History, 6th ed. (New York, 2002), 270–497; William D. Bowman, Frank M. Chiteji, and J. Megan Greene, Imperialism in the Modern World: Sources and Interpretations, 1st ed. (New York, 2006), 244–89; Daniel R. Brower, The World in the Twentieth Century, 6th ed. (New York, 2006); and William J. Duiker, Twentieth-Century World History, 4th ed. (New York, 2006), 237–310. 5.  Terry Dean Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, 2001); Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Dean Martin, eds., A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford, 2001); Douglas Taylor Northrop, Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca, 2004); and Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, 2005). For the pioneers in the modern study of Soviet nationalities with which Soviet empire so closely overlaps, see also Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, 1993); and Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (1994): 414–52. 6. Ronald Grigor Suny, “The Empire Strikes Out: Imperial Russia, ‘National’ Identity, and Theories of Empire,” in A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin (Oxford, 2001), 26. Suny credits Mark Beissinger with the “conceived or perceived” formulation. It is worth noting that Suny denies that the metropole had a necessarily national (Russian) character; the ruling institution was the communist nomenklatura. 7.  This insight was clearly articulated by a group of scholars of Central Asia who challenged the understanding of the Soviet Union as “empire.” See the forum in Slavic Review 65, no. 2 (2006): 231–303, esp. Adeeb Khalid, “Backwardness and the Quest for Civilization: Early Soviet Central Asia in Comparative Perspective,” Slavic Review 65, no. 2 (2006): 231–51.

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  8.  Mark R. Beissinger, “Rethinking Empire in the Wake of Soviet Collapse,” in Ethnic Politics and Post-Communism: Theories and Practice, ed. Zoltan D. Barany and Robert G. Moser (Ithaca, 2005), 14–45, 235–41, here 17; Mark R. Beissinger, “Soviet Empire as ‘Family Resemblance,’ ” Slavic Review 65, no. 2 (2006): 294–303.   9.  In most conceptions of American empire, the crucial instruments of subtly operating nonconsensual control are economic, but for a theoretical discussion of the reproduction of cultural sameness in the West, see Philomena Essed and David Theo Goldberg, “Cloning Cultures: The Social Injustices of Sameness,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 25, no. 6 (2002): 1066–82. 10.  For a concise overview of this vast phenomenon, see two review articles, both quite skeptical of the identification of the Bush-era United States as an “empire”: G. John Ikenberry, “Illusions of Empire: Defining the New American Order,” Foreign Affairs 83, no. 2 (2004): 144–54; and Alexander J. Motyl, “Empire Falls: Washington May Be Imperious, but It Is Not Imperial,” Foreign Affairs 85, no. 4 (2006): 190–94. See also the special issue devoted to American empire after 2001 in Global Dialogue 5, no. 1–2 (2003), including the editor’s introduction (Paul Theodoulou, “Editor’s Note,” iii–iv). For a review of this development and a theoretical contribution to the ongoing debate, see esp. Ray Kiely, Rethinking Imperialism (Basingstoke, 2010). Other examples include attempts to popularize a highly critical conception of twentiethcentury American empire and its unforeseen consequences in its twenty-firstcentury continuation, esp. Chalmers A. Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York, 2000); and Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York, 2004). 11.  Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, MA, 2002), 16. For an influential study of American exceptionalism and expansion, see Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right (New York, 1995). This is obviously not always automatic or unchallenged. For a discussion of how earlier strains of this American universalism could be adapted to accommodate a newer multiculturalism, for example, see David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York, 2006). See also Nikhil Pal Singh’s discussion of it in “Culture/Wars: Recoding Empire in an Age of Democracy,” American Quarterly 50, no. 3 (1998): 471–522, here 504–6. For a study that places manifest destiny in the framework of comparative empire, see Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, 2010), 251–86. 12.  The scholarly literatures pertaining to Soviet ideology and to nationalities policy are vast. For a few examples that stress either teleological millenarianism or developmentalism, see Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1997), 8–9, which characterizes this ideological framework as “scientific utopianism”; and Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh, 2000) which stresses Soviet ideological millenarianism. For developmentalism and nationalities policy, see Martin, Affirmative Action Empire; Hirsch, Empire of Nations; Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment”; and Suny, Revenge of the Past. For the self-destructive nature of Soviet developmentalism in particular, see Suny, “Empire Strikes Out,” esp. 31. 13.  For a study that emphasizes the messianic and eschatological aspects of Soviet ideology, see Halfin, From Darkness to Light.

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14. That the Soviet Union represented an alternative modernity to that of the West was the point of departure for a significant trend within Soviet history beginning in the 1990s. For paradigmatic examples, see Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain; and Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921 (Cambridge, MA, 2002). My own thinking on this issue has been particularly influenced by Michael David-Fox and his insights regarding the transnational constitution of this alternative modernity. See especially Michael David-Fox, “Multiple Modernities vs. Neo-Traditionalism: On Recent Debates in Russian and Soviet History,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 54, no. 4 (2006): 535–55. 15.  Roland Robertson, for example, highlights the stretch from the 1870s to the end of World War I as constituting the crucial “takeoff ” period of globalization in Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (Thousand Oaks, CA, 1992), esp. 58–59. 16. Robertson considers that the Cold War interrupted and partly froze the world-cultural politics of modernity, even while dubbing the period from 1920s to the 1960s the “struggle for hegemony” (ibid., 51, 58–59). 17.  Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York, 1998). 18. For Roland Robertson, globalization depends on the bases of identity becoming increasingly if problematically shared, so that by the late twentieth century, identity in the globalized world was characterized by the “interpenetration of the universalization of particularism and the particularization of universalism” (Globalization, 99–100). According to Anthony Giddens, globalization is an inherent product of modernity, characterized primarily by reflexivity at both the individual and social level about that “disembeddedness,” or awareness of disconnection from the local context (The Consequences of Modernity [Stanford, 1991]). Similarly, according to Arjun Appadurai, globalization is a series of disjunctures in the economy, culture, and politics characterized by five dimensions of global cultural flows that provided, starting in about the mid-1970s, the building blocks of imagined worlds that are not coterminous with nation-states (Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization [Minneapolis, 1996], esp. 27–47). Appadurai’s five dimensions are ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes. It should be noted that Robertson considers that Appadurai’s “scapes” ignore what to him is the crucial institutionalization of the increasing interpenetration of the universal and the particular (Globalization, 103–4). Also, Appadurai’s five global dimensions are significantly different from Giddens’s four institutional dimensions of globalization (the world capitalist economy, nation-state system, world military order, and international division of labor) (Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 71). 19.  Mediation between the global and the local, for example, is essential to Saskia Sassen’s understanding of globalization. She has theorized that financial capital flows established conduits, first for cultural mobility and eventually for migration (Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money [New York, 1998]). 20.  For a few notable studies of the importance and institutional structure of Soviet culture in the years of the Revolution, Civil War, and the 1920s, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, October 1917–1921 (Cambridge, 1970); Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917–1929 (Cambridge,

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1985); Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford, 1988); Michael David-Fox, Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918–1929 (Ithaca, 1997); and Matthew Lenoe, Closer to the Masses: Stalinist Culture, Social Revolution, and Soviet Newspapers (Cambridge, MA, 2004). On musical life, which drew considerably less high-level attention in these early years than literature, see esp. Neil Edmunds, The Soviet Proletarian Music Movement (Oxford, 2000); Amy Nelson, Music for the Revolution: Musicians and Power in Early Soviet Russia (University Park, 2004); Marina Frolova-Walker and Jonathan Walker, Music and Soviet Power, 1917–1932 (Rochester, 2012); and the classic Boris Schwarz, Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia, 1917–1970 (Bloomington, 1972). 21.  Evgeny Dobrenko, Political Economy of Socialist Realism, trans. Jesse M. Savage (New Haven, 2007). For other versions of the Soviet Union as an “aesthetic state,” see Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge, MA, 2011), esp. 12–15; and Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. Charles Rougle (London, 2011). 22.  For this understanding of socialist realism, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Becoming Cultured: Socialist Realism and the Representation of Privilege and Taste,” in The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, 1992), 216–37. What I call a normative mode of perception, Fitzpatrick considers a “method of representation.” 23. Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov, “Sovetskaia literatura—samaia ideinaia, samaia peredovaia literatura v mire,” Pravda (Moscow, 19 August 1934), 2. Zhdanov was summarizing much longer remarks by the new authority in literature, Maksim Gorky, from earlier in the conference. 24. Ibid. 25.  The socialist realist novel is masterfully analyzed in Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago, 1981). 26.  On socialist realism and the visual arts, see especially Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism. 27.  Peter Kupfer, “Volga-Volga: ‘The Story of a Song,’ Vernacular Modernism, and the Realization of Soviet Music,” Journal of Musicology 30, no. 4 (2013): 530–76. On socialist realism in music, especially heroic symphonism, see Richard Taruskin, “Shostakovich and the Inhuman,” in his Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton, 2000), 468–544. 28.  For elucidation of this dynamic in music after World War II, including on the famous 1948 attack on the Soviet Union’s most prominent composers that began with a blistering denunciation of Vano Muradeli’s opera The Great Friendship, see Kiril Tomoff, Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939–1953 (Ithaca, 2006). On the paradigm-setting 1936 attack on “formalism” through a denunciation of Dmitrii Shostakovich’s heretofore successful opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, “The Lady Macbeth Affair: Shostakovich and the Soviet Puritans,” in The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, 1992), 183–215; and especially Leonid Maksimenkov, Sumbur vmesto muzyki: stalinskaia kul' turnaia revoliutsiia 1936–1938 (Moscow, 1997). 29.  This claim should be understood with the caveat that reception in the Soviet Union is notoriously difficult to assess. However, studies of topics ranging from the

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construction of the ideal Soviet reader to diary writing in the 1930s all suggest that many audiences, at least, followed the dictates of the directed reception inherent in socialist realism. For two influential examples, see Evgeny Dobrenko, The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature (Stanford, 1997); and Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, MA, 2006). It is also undeniable that some examples of this cultural output, like the blockbuster musical films that united Grigorii Aleksandrov, Isaak Dunaevsky, and Liubov' Orlova in the 1930s and the rich collection of war songs, had lasting appeal to mass audiences. For those two examples, see Rimgaila Salys, The Musical Comedy Films of Grigorii Aleksandrov: Laughing Matters (Chicago, 2009); Tomoff, Creative Union, 63–94; Suzanne Ament, “Sing to Victory: The Role of Popular Song in the Soviet Union during World War II” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1996); and, more generally, Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900 (Cambridge, 1992); and Stites, ed., Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia (Bloomington, 1995). 30. Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome, 8. 31.  Vadim Volkov, “The Concept of kul' turnost' : Notes on the Stalinist Civilizing Process,” in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (London, 1999), 210–30, esp. 224. 32.  For the place of translation in the development of Soviet culture in the formative 1930s, see Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome, esp. 16–20. Eleonory Gilburd has examined the place of Western culture—especially through literary translation—in the Thaw period in “ ‘To See Paris and Die’: Western Culture in the Soviet Union, 1950s and 1960s” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2010). On Wagner in the Soviet Union, see Rosamund Bartlett, Wagner and Russia (Cambridge, 1995), esp. 219–96. 33.  Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941 (Oxford, 2011), here 16. 34.  On the prewar period, see ibid., esp. 41–42. 35.  Ibid., 26. 36.  Sheila Fitzpatrick has shown that this rapprochement provided a foundation for the Stalinist system in The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, 1992). David-Fox refers to the beginning of this process in the 1920s as “the advent of a new kind of Soviet obshchestvennost' , an untranslatable term connoting the public sphere, civil society, the educated public, socially and politically engaged groups, even the intelligentsia” (Showcasing the Great Experiment, 42). 37.  For other extended discussions of the maneuverability afforded intellectuals, see Tomoff, Creative Union, on agency in the Composers’ Union, esp. chap. 4; Christina Ezrahi, Swans of the Kremlin: Ballet and Power in Soviet Russia (Pittsburgh, 2012), on “artistic repossession” in the Artistic Councils of ballet theaters, esp. chap. 3; and Ethan Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars (Princeton, 2006), esp. for the role discussions in scholarly disciplines played in determining Stalinism’s “scientific” ideology after the war. 38.  So it was in the American cultural empire as well. For a study that links postwar U.S. expansionism in Asia to the flourishing of middle-brow culture that simultaneously embraced that expansionism, denied its imperial character, and promoted “an ideal of U.S.-Asian integration,” see Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia

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in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley, 2003). I am grateful to David Engerman for bringing this book to my attention. 39. Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome, 22–23. 40.  Joseph S. Nye, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York, 1990); Joseph S. Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York, 2004). 41.  Greg Castillo, Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design (Minneapolis, 2010), xii. 42. Soviet cultural diplomacy was first addressed in Frederick Charles Barghoorn, The Soviet Cultural Offensive: The Role of Cultural Diplomacy in Soviet Foreign Policy (Princeton, 1960). My understanding of the term is derived especially from David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment, and the articles in a special journal issue edited by György Péteri devoted to the 1958 Brussels Expo (Journal of Contemporary History 47, no. 1 [2012]). For the American case, see especially Richard T. Arndt, The First Resort of Kings: American Cultural Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century (Washington, DC, 2005). For the place of academic exchange, see Yale Richmond, Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain (University Park, 2000). 43.  Historical works that examine the phenomena related to Nye’s “soft power” and explicitly link it to American empire during the Cold War include Matthew Fraser, Weapons of Mass Distraction: Soft Power and American Empire (Toronto, 2003); and Robert Elias, The Empire Strikes Out: How Baseball Sold U.S. Foreign Policy and Promoted the American Way Abroad (New York, 2010). 44.  Both Nye and Arndt frame their studies in part as a lament for the lost effectiveness of these cultural strategies (Nye, Soft Power; Arndt, The First Resort of Kings). 45. Mary Nolan, The Transatlantic Century: Europe and America, 1890–2010 (Cambridge, 2012). 46. For a suggestive connection between the prewar and post-Stalin cultural diplomacy projects, see David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment, 312–24. 47.  This characterization of the Soviet position regarding the twin “crises” in the Western musical culture split between “serious” and “light” music is derived from the address of the Second International Congress of Composers and Music Critics, Prague, 1948 (“Obrashchenie 2-go Mezhdunarodnogo s''ezda kompozitorov i muzykal'nykh kritikov v Prage,” Sovetskaia muzyka, no. 5 [1948]: 7–8). 48.  James Riordan, Sport in Soviet Society: Development of Sport and Physical Education in Russia and the USSR (Cambridge, 1977); Robert Edelman, Serious Fun: A History of Spectator Sports in the USSR (New York, 1993); Edelman, Spartak Moscow: A History of the People’s Team in the Workers’ State (Ithaca, 2009). On chess, see Andy Soltis, Soviet Chess, 1917–1991 (Jefferson, 2000). 49.  Jim Riordan, “The Role of Sport in Soviet Foreign Policy,” International ‘Nothing but Trouble’: The Journal 43, no. 4 (1988): 569–95; Jenifer Parks, “  Soviet Union’s Push to ‘Democratise’ International Sports during the Cold War, 1959–1962,” International Journal of the History of Sport 30, no. 13 (2013): 1554–67. 50.  Parks, “ ‘Nothing but Trouble,’ ” 1558. 51. On Soviet “shamateurism,” doping, and its connection to child abuse in elite Olympic sports training programs, see Jim Riordan, “The Rise and Fall of Soviet Olympic Champions,” Olympika: The International Journal of Olympic Studies 2 (1993): 25–44. The International Olympic Committee began regulating drugs only

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in 1960; though the Soviets built sporting success in part on doping, it was the GDR that developed the most sophisticated doping practices. On doping internationally, see Wayne Wilson and Ed Derse, eds., Doping in Elite Sport: The Politics of Drugs in the Olympic Movement (Champaign, IL, 2000); Thomas M. Hunt, Drug Games: The International Olympic Committee and the Politics of Doping, 1960–2008 (Austin, 2011). 52.  Riordan, “The Rise and Fall of Soviet Olympic Champions,” 31–33. 53. For an intriguing study that traces the transnational influence of the Soviet avant-garde to 1960s Cuba by way of Fascist Italy, see Masha Salazkina, “Moscow-Rome-Havana: A Film-Theory Road Map,” October 139 (Winter 2012): 97–116. For the Stalin era, the extraordinary, cosmopolitan figure of Sergei Eisenstein was the most influential Soviet film personality abroad. The literature on Eisenstein is vast; for recent examples, see Anne Nesbet, Savage Junctures: Sergei Eisenstein and the Shape of Thinking (London, 2003); Joan Neuberger, Ivan the Terrible (London, 2003); and Salazkina, In Excess: Sergei Eisenstein’s Mexico (Chicago, 2009). On Eisenstein’s influential contacts in the 1930s, see esp. Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome. 54.  Tony Shaw and Denise J. Youngblood, Cinematic Cold War: The American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds (Lawrence, 2010). 55. Stites, Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia; Tomoff, Creative Union, 63–94. 56.  Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir P. Naumov, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (New Haven, 2005). 57. On the Sovietization of Eastern Europe, see esp. Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, MA, 1995); Iván T. Berend, Central and Eastern Europe, 1944–1993: Detour from the Periphery to the Periphery (Cambridge, 1999); John Connelly, Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher Education, 1945–1956 (Chapel Hill, 2000); Mark Pittaway, Eastern Europe 1939–2000 (London, 2004); David Gerard Tompkins, “Composing the Party Line: Music and Politics in Poland and East Germany, 1948–1957” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2004); Balázs Apor, Péter Apor, and E. A. Rees, eds., The Sovietization of Eastern Europe: New Perspectives on the Postwar Period (Washington, DC, 2008); and Patryk Babiracki, “Staging the Empire: Soviet-Polish Initiatives in Propaganda, Science, and the Arts, 1943–1953” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2009). 58. Richmond, Cultural Exchange and the Cold War. 1. Shostakovich and The Iron Curtain

1.  Harry Brand, “Vital Statistics concerning The Iron Curtain,” n.d., typescript production notes provided to the author by Twentieth-Century Fox. Brand noted that the film took thirty-five days to shoot; ten were spent in Ottawa (2), where both leads suffered frostbitten toes (6). 2. Ibid.; Monthly Film Bulletin 15, no. 175 (1948): 96; John Rossi, “The Iron Curtain: A Premature Anti-Communist Film,” Film and History 24, no. 3 (1994): 100–112, here 104, 106. 3.  Monthly Film Bulletin 15, no. 175 (1948): 96. 4.  On the stylistic similarities and intention to evoke the FBI collaborations (and early on, actually to collaborate with the FBI), see D. J. Leab, “ ‘The Iron Curtain’:

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Hollywood’s First Cold War Movie,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 8, no. 2 (1988): 153–88; Rossi, “The Iron Curtain.”  5. Monthly Film Bulletin 15, no. 175 (1948): 96.   6.  For a concise synopsis of the media attention surrounding Gouzenko in the decades after his defection, see clips from the archives of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation: “The Gouzenko Affair,” CBC Digital Archives, www.cbc.ca/archives/ categories/war-conflict/cold-war/the-gouzenko-affair/topic-the-gouzenko-affair. html (accessed 19 April 2014). The Gouzenko defection and its ramifications are also the subject of Amy W. Knight, How the Cold War Began: The Gouzenko Affair and the Hunt for Soviet Spies (Toronto, 2005).  7. Igor Gouzenko, The Iron Curtain (New York, 1948); Igor Gouzenko, This Was My Choice (Montreal, 1948).  8. Rossi, “The Iron Curtain”; Leab, “ ‘The Iron Curtain’ ”; Paul Swann, “International Conspiracy in and around ‘The Iron Curtain,’ ” The Velvet Light Trap 35 (Spring 1995): 52–60.   9.  The literature on globalization is immense, diverse, and contested. However, a feature of the “din of globalization” is the persistence—despite countless illustrations to the contrary—of the view that globalization is an exclusive or exclusively important feature of the post-Cold War, post-1989 world order. For a succinct analysis of the popular phenomenon and its critics, see Geoff Eley, “Historicizing the Global, Politicizing Capital: Giving the Present a Name,” History Workshop Journal 63, no. 1 (2007): 154–88, esp. 161–63. 10.  E. A. Korovin, “Review of Study Aid for International Law (essays) by F. I. Kozhevnikov,” American Journal of International Law 43, no. 2 (1949): 389 n. *. V. S. Kemenov to A. A. Zhdanov (16 April 1948), RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 636, l. 270. Kemenov was head of VOKS. 11.  Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt, “ ‘New Masses’ and John Reed Club Artists, 1926–1936: Evolution of Ideology, Subject Matter, and Style,” Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 12 (April 1989): 56–75, here 58 n. 5; Gloria Garrett Samson, The American Fund for Public Service: Charles Garland and Radical Philanthropy, 1922–1941 (Westport, 1996), 150; Ivan Dmitrievich Papanin, Life on an Ice Floe: Diary of Ivan Papanin, trans. Helen Black (New York, 1939); Margaret Larkin, Singing Cowboy, a Book of Western Songs (New York, 1931); Vance Randolph, “Review of Singing Cowboy by Margaret Larkin,” Journal of American Folklore 45, no. 176 (1932): 274. I could not confirm that the Helen Black who wrote the piano accompaniments to the cowboy songs is the same as the Helen Black of interest here, but the political and artistic proclivities are consistent. 12. On VOKS in the 1920s and 1930s, see Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941 (Oxford, 2011). 13. Kemenov to L. P. Beria, 6 December 1946, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 258, ll. 352–52ob.; N. Norovkov, “Dokladnaia zapiska o kadrakh Vsesoiuznogo ob­shchestva kul'turnoi sviazi s zagranitsei” [undated, January 1947], RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 1059, ll. 1–13. Later, Kemenev would claim that between 1940 and 1946, the number of foreign societies with which VOKS was affiliated had increased from six to sixty-six, the departments within those societies increased from twenty-four to nearly seven thousand, and membership had leapt from just eight hundred to over

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three million (counting both individual and group members). He also provided two measures of his institution’s expanded workload. In 1940, VOKS sent fifteen thousand books and ten thousand photos abroad. In 1946, they sent 174,040 books and 308,935 photos. In this report, he noted that the VOKS budget had increased, too, from 3.5 million rubles in 1940 to 50.7 million in 1946. But even that major expansion was not enough to keep up with the workload. See Kemenev to the Central Committee (TsK), “Dokladnaia zapiska o rabote VOKS,” 7 October 1948, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 463, ll. 31–38, especially table on l. 31. 14.  Kemenov to A. S. Paniushkin, 27 May 1946, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 83, l. 28; draft proposal “O meropriatiiakh po rasshireniiu raboty Vsesoiuznogo ob­­ shchestva kul'turnoi sviazi s zagranitsei,” RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 83, ll. 29–34. 15. Marginalia dated 14 May 1947 on Kemenov to A. S. Paniushkin, 16 April 1947, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 258, l. 351. 16. S. Z. Apresian, “O deiatel'nosti VOKSa v SShA…,” 23 November 1946, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 258, ll. 58–61; and A. I. Alekseev to M. A. Suslov [undated, not later than 2 January 1947], RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 258, ll. 14–19. Apresian was the former vice consul to the United States; Alekseev the current attache in Paris. Alekseev’s attack on other institutions responsible for Soviet propaganda in France, like the Soviet Information Bureau (Sovinformbiuro) and Mezhdunarodnaia kniga, was even stronger than his attack on VOKS. 17.  N. S. Golovanov, “Doklad o zagranichnoi komandirovke v Italiiu prof. Shebalina i prof. Golovanova,” RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 261, ll. 117–27, here ll. 126–27. 18.  On rumors about an imminent shakeup at VOKS that circulated in the community of foreign diplomats and journalists in Moscow during the summer and fall of 1947, see L. S. Baranov to Suslov, 26 July 1947, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 259, l. 270; L. D. Kislova to G. V. Shumeiko, 25 July 1947, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 259, ll. 271–78; and Kislova to Shumeiko, 2 December 1947, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 1059, ll. 92–94. Baranov and Shumeiko were bureaucrats in the Central Committee apparatus. Kislova was a member of the VOKS leadership group. For the Orgburo’s order of the investigation that gave rise to those rumors, see Protocol no. 307 Orgbiuro TsK VKP(b), 21 May 1947, pt. 1, “Doklad VOKSa o rabote,” RGASPI, f. 17, op. 116, d. 307; and Materialy k protokolu no. 307 Orgbiuro TsK VKP(b), 21 May 1947, pt. 1, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 117, d. 771, l. 1. For the 1948 investigation and its aftermath, see RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, dd. 462–63; and RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 1142. 19. For a VOKS complaint about the Soviet tourism agency, Intourist, see Kemenov to Zhdanov, 15 May 1947, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 259, ll. 87–87ob. 20.  New York Times, 12 April 1948, 2; Black to Presslit, 13 April 1948, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 636, l. 274; Novoselov (Presslit) to Black, 14 April 1948, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 636, l. 275 (request for clarification). This Novoselov apparently headed Litmuzagenstvo Presslit. 21. Black to Presslit, 15 April 1948, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 636, l. 276; RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 636, l. 270. Black’s suggested wording is very similar to that reported by the New York Times, 12 April 1948. 22.  Black to Presslit, 19 April 1948, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 636, l. 277; and Black to Presslit, 23 April 1948, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 636, l. 272. Kemenov

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sent the telegram to Zhdanov on 28 April; Zhdanov passed it down the chain of command to D. T. Shepilov, and Shepilov archived it that day, noting that he had forwarded the issue to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs: Kemenov to Zhdanov, 28 April 1948, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 646, l. 271 and marginal notations. 23.  Based on his experience working in the Soviet book trade just over a decade after the events recounted here, Richard Hellie argues that this lack of control over Americans representing Soviet cultural institutions was an intentional strategy designed to keep the Soviet Union from becoming entangled in the U.S. court system, where they could be forced to reveal embarrassing information or “be held liable for all kinds of things.” According to his contact, the only requirement was “reliability,” by which was meant merely that the representative should not “embarrass” the Soviet Union. See Richard Hellie, “Working for the Soviets: Chicago, 1959–61, Mezhkniga, and the Soviet Book Industry,” Russian History 29, no. 2–4 (2002): 539–52, here 546. 24.  M. E. Pozolotin and Sakharov, “Zakliuchenie po rabote otdela balkanskikh i slavianskikh stran VOKSa,” 7 October 1948, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 462, ll. 64–70. Pozolotin and the incompletely identified Sakharov had just been transferred to VOKS from the Central Committee bureaucracy and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, respectively. That representatives of VOKS affiliates abroad were beyond VOKS control was apparent elsewhere in the emerging Soviet empire as well. For the frustration of the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs with VOKS’s inability to provide effective guidance for its Hungarian affiliates and VOKS frustration about that expectation, see “Iz dnevnika chlena Pravleniia VOKS Kislovoi L. D.,” 16 December 1948, GARF, f. 5283, op. 22s, d. 77, l. 47. 25. Black to Novoselov, 23 April 1948, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 636, ll. 296–99. See also another channel through which virtually the same material circulated within the Central Committee: Black to Novoselov, 22 April 1948, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 459, ll. 135–38. 26.  Production began on 28 November 1947 and concluded on 13 January 1948: Brand, “Vital Statistics concerning The Iron Curtain,” unpaginated coversheet. 27. For context, compare these sums to the reported payments to the North American principals: $20,000 to Gouzenko for story rights; $900–$2,000 per week to the screenwriters; $100,000 to Wellman to direct; and $25,000 to June Havoc (not a Fox star like Andrews and Tierney) to play a supporting role. In North America, the film grossed just less than $2 million (Leab, “ ‘The Iron Curtain,’ ” 161–62, 165, 170, 175). 28.  This claim is reiterated by ibid., 174. It is unclear if Leab’s contention is supported by Fox correspondence or the New York Times article; both are cited in the same long footnote referring to the claim to have paid $10,000 and to the contents of other internal discussions at Fox. Leab reports that Fox originally approached Boosey and Hawkes but was rebuffed because of strenuous opposition from the British Embassy. The New York Times reported the Soviet objection to the film and Fox’s claims to have purchased rights for the music (12 April 1948, 2). It ran at least sixteen stories about the film and commotion at the Roxy in the next two months. 29.  On Fox’s apprehension, see Leab, “ ‘The Iron Curtain,’ ” 174. 30. Black to Novoselov, 23 April 1948, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 636, ll. 296–99. The letter probably reached VOKS around 28 April; it was passed to the

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Central Committee on 13 May, then to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was archived on 17 May. Kemenov to Suslov, 13 May 1948, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 636, l. 295 and marginal notations by Suslov and Shepilov. On 18 May, another copy of the memo was also sent, marked for immediate action, to Zhdanov by the Central Committee’s Foreign Policy Department: Baranov to Zhdanov, 18 May 1948, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 459, l. 139. Baranov was the vice chairman of the Foreign Policy Department. Suslov noted that the issue had already been resolved with the Department of Agitation and Propaganda (Agitprop) and archived it the same day (marginalia, ibid.). 31.  “Guide to the Charles Recht Papers, TAM.176,” Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University, Charles Recht Papers; TAM 176, http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/tam_176/tam_176.html (accessed 6 April 2013). See also “New Soviet Envoy Here from Russia,” New York Times, 4 June 1922. Recht had been the attorney who represented Ludwig Martens, head of the Russian Soviet Government Bureau in the United States, which operated from 1919 until Martens was deported in 1921. 32.  Dmitry Shostakovich et al., v. Twentieth-Century Fox Film Corporation, Supreme Court of New York, Special Term, New York County, 196 Misc. 67; 80 N.Y.S. 2d 575; 1948 N.Y. Misc. LEXIS 2618; 77 U.S.P.Q. (BNA) 647. 33.  Ibid., “Headnotes” and “Opinion,” par. 2–3. 34.  Ibid., “Opinion,” par. 5. 35.  Ibid., “Opinion,” par. 4. 36.  Ibid., “Opinion,” par. 5. 37.  Ibid., “Opinion,” par. 6. 38.  Dmitry Shostakovich et al. v. Twentieth-Century Fox Film Corporation, Supreme Court of New York, Appellate Division, First Department, 275 A.D. 692; 87 N.Y.S. 2d 430; 1949 N.Y. App. Div. LEXIS 4047. 39.  That Black’s suggestions included contacting a British publisher and developing mutual copyright obligations in the United States, not France, does not detract from the essential point here: Black indicated that attending to copyright could tip the scales in the Soviets’ favor, and Soviet officials did so when the opportunity arose. 40.  Kemenov to Suslov, 23 September 1947, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 260, l. 91. This proposal would have assigned rights to Chant du Monde for France and its colonies, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Italy. At this point, the issue was tabled with the note that the process should be organized by the Soviet foreign trade bureaucracy, Vneshtorg. See V. V. Moshetov to A. A. Kuznetsov, 1 December 1947, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 260, l. 92; and Kuznetsov, marginalia, 1 December 1947, ibid. 41.  Kemenov to A. Ia. Vyshinskii, 29 April 1948, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 132, d. 85, l. 8. 42.  Ibid., ll. 8–8ob. 43.  Nikolai Krementsov, The Cure: A Story of Cancer and Politics from the Annals of the Cold War (Chicago, 2002). 44.  On the complexities of anticosmopolitanism in the Soviet domestic music scene, see Kiril Tomoff, Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939–1953 (Ithaca, 2006), esp. 152–88; and Kiril Tomoff, “Uzbek Music’s Separate Path: Interpreting ‘Anticosmopolitanism’ in Stalinist Central Asia, 1949–52,” Russian Review 63, no. 2 (2004): 212–40.

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45.  Vyshinskii to Kemenov, 6 May 1948, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 132, d. 85, l. 9. 46. Kemenov to Vyshinskii, 13 May 1948, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 132, d. 85, ll. 10–10ob. Kemenov also sent the proposed text for the agreement to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs official in charge of operations in France, head of the Ministry’s First European Department, S. P. Kozyrev (Kemenov to Kozyrev, 15 May 1948, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 132, d. 85, l. 11). 47.  Kemenov to Vyshinskii, 13 May 1948, l. 10, marginal notation. 48.  Kemenov to Vyshinskii, 25 May 1948, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 132, d. 85, l. 12. 49.  Vyshinskii to Kemenov, 28 May 1948, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 132, d. 85, l. 13. 50.  Kemenov to K. E. Voroshilov, 31 May 1948, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 132, d. 85, ll. 14 (copy), 31–31ob. 51.  Vyshinskii to Kemenov, 4 June 1948, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 132, d. 85, l. 15. 52. Kemenov to Vyshinskii, 9 June 1948, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 132, d. 85, ll. 16–16ob. This agreement retained the provision first introduced in Kemenov’s letter to Voroshilov of 31 May by which Chant du Monde would acquire the rights to Soviet music in France, its colonies, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Italy. 53.  Ibid., l. 16. 54.  Ibid. A. N. Kosygin was also minister of finance from February through December 1948. He was a member or candidate member of the Politburo from 1948 to 1952. Suslov had assumed leadership of Agitprop in 1947. He was a member of the Secretariat from 1947 until his death in 1982. 55. Kemenov to Voroshilov, 5 June 1948, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 132, d. 85, ll. 34–35; I. G. Zlobin to Voroshilov, 9 June 1948, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 132, d. 85, l. 30; Kemenov to Voroshilov, 11 June 1948, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 132, d. 85, ll. 36–38. 56.  Kemenov to Vyshinskii, 9 June 1948, l. 16ob. 57.  Kozyrev to Kemenov, 12 June 1948, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 132, d. 85, l. 18. It apparently took a couple more months for the signed agreement to be ratified by the USSR Council of Ministers; statements in support of the agreement—sometimes citing the possibility of hard-currency earnings and penned by political heavyweights Voroshilov and Zhdanov—dated as late as 10 August appear in the archival file: Kemenov to Voroshilov, 6 July 1948, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 132, d. 85, ll. 27–28 (includes draft resolution); Voroshilov and Zhdanov to Stalin, 7 July 1948, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 132, d. 85, ll. 25–26; and V. A. Zorin to Kemenov, 10 August 1948, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 132, d. 85, l. 22. Valerian Zorin was deputy minister of foreign affairs. 58.  D. P. Pozhidaev and V. I. Shevelev, “Spravka o sryve demonstratsii fil'ma ‘Zheleznyi zanaves’ v Bel'gii,” undated 1949, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 464, ll. 159–62. Pozhidaev and Shevelev were VOKS representatives in Belgium. Their report was forwarded by VOKS to the Central Committee on 1 December 1949: Kislova to B. N. Ponomarev, 1 December 1949, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 464, l. 158. 59.  Pozhidaev and Shevelev, “Spravka.” 60. Advertisement, Le Monde, 16 June 1949, 9. 61.  “La projection du film ‘le Rideau de fer’ provoque des incidents,” Le Monde, 17 June 1949, 6. A brief account of these events, including the text of the call to “republicans and democrats” to protest, was also published in the Soviet Union a day later: “Protesty protiv demonstratsii antisovetskogo fil'ma v Parizhe,” Sovetskoe iskusstvo, 18 June 1949, 4.

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62.  “De nouveaux incidents a propos du film ‘le Rideau de fer,” Le Monde, 19–20 June 1949, 6. 63.  “Nouveaux incidents au cinema ‘l’Avenue,’ ” Le Monde, 22 June 1949, 9; “Le Rideau de fer,” Le Monde, 23 June 1949, 5. Soviet press accounts put the arrest total for 22 June at eighty, including all sixteen members of parliament: [Mikhail] Romm, “Gollivud—fabrika lzhi,” Sovetskoe iskusstvo, 16 July 1949, 4. 64. Soviet newspapers reported that the upheaval continued, with forty more protestors arrested on 23 June and a few dozen more in the following days (Romm, “Gollivud—fabrika lzhi,” 4). 65. Advertisement, Le Monde, 7 July 1949, 9. 66.  “ ‘Le Rideau de fer’ a quitté l’affiche,” Le Monde, 9 July 1949, 9. In fact, the Soviet press presented the film’s closure as a victory of mass workers’ politics, explicitly if incorrectly crediting the demonstrations with shutting down the film (Romm, “Gollivud—fabrika lzhi,” 4). A film director and faculty member at the All-USSR State Institute of Cinematography, M. I. Romm may not have been aware of the accompanying, successful strategy that hinged on copyright. Even if he was, it is not surprising that members of the Soviet elite writing in the press would credit mass political action rather than clever legal ploys for their successes in international cultural competition. 67.  Protokol no. 77 zasedaniia Politbiuro TsK VKP(b), pt. 266, “O pred''iavlenii vo frantsuzskom sude iska o zapreshchenii demonstrirovat' vo Frantsii fil'm ‘Zheleznyi zanaves,’ ” 6 September 1950, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 1084, l. 266. 68.  The lower court ruling and results of the appeal are cited in William Strauss, “The Moral Right of the Author,” American Journal of Comparative Law 4, no. 4 (1955): 506–38, here 534–35 n. 56. 69.  Société Le Chant du Monde v. Société Fox Europe et Société Fox Americaine Twentieth Century, Cour d’appel, Paris, 13 January 1953, D.A. 1954, 16, 80. Strauss provides the dollar equivalencies: 534–35 n. 56. 70.  Dmitrii Shostakovich et al., “Pis'mo v redaktsiiu gazety ‘Izvestiia,’ ” Izvestiia, 11 April 1948, 4; “Moscow Broadcasts Protest,” New York Times, 12 April 1948, 2. 71.  Kiril Tomoff, “The Illegitimacy of Popularity: Soviet Composers and the Royalties Administration, 1939–1953,” Russian History 27, no. 3 (2000): 311–40, esp. 322–29. 72. For discussions within the Central Committee apparatus about paying royalties to foreigners, see RGASPI, f. 17, op. 133, d. 346, ad passim, 1952–1956, which contains information about both Soviet authors’ foreign royalties and foreign authors’ royalties in the Soviet Union. Russian privacy laws and archival access rules prohibit discussion or citation of details, but the general approach undertaken by Central Committee bureaucrats was to assert Soviet immunity as a non-Berne Convention state from paying royalties but nevertheless to attempt to oblige individual foreign authors who petitioned on their own behalf. 73.  On copyright, the market, and nineteenth-century publishing, see Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA, 1993); Catherine Seville, Literary Copyright Reform in Early Victorian England: The Framing of the 1842 Copyright Act (Cambridge, 1999); Brad Sherman and Alain Strowel, eds., Of Authors and Origins: Essays on Copyright Law (Oxford, 1994); Trevor Ross, “Copyright and the Invention of Tradition,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 26, no. 1 (1992): 1–27. 74.  A succinct history of the development of international copyright regimes focusing on relations between the United States and Eastern Europe can be found

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in Janice T. Pilch, “U.S. Copyright Relations with Central, East European, and Eurasian Nations in Historical Perspective,” Slavic Review 65, no. 2 (2006): 325–48. 75.  For the UCC as a realization of the “universal republic of letters” ideal, see Paul J. Sherman, “The Universal Copyright Convention: Its Effect on United States Law,” Columbia Law Review 55, no. 8 (1955): 1137–75, here 1137. For an overview of the issues and chronology of accession to the UCC, see Pilch, “U.S. Copyright Relations,” 332–36. 76.  Chant du Monde still trumpets its rights to music composed by Prokofiev and Shostakovich, and it lists a host of Soviet composers, including Miaskovsky, Kabalevsky, and Khachaturian, in its catalog (www.chantdumonde.com, accessed 11 April 2014). Exclusive rights now apply to a smaller area than in 1948: France, Luxembourg, Belgium, Andorra, Monaco, and the countries of francophone Africa. 77.  Pilch, “U.S. Copyright Relations,” 334–35, including a bibliography of the U.S. response in n. 29. 78.  For a judgment that accession to the UCC had not strengthened the Soviet government’s ability to suppress dissident publication abroad, see Peter B. Maggs, “New Directions in US-USSR Copyright Relations,” American Journal of International Law 68, no. 3 (1974): 391–409. 79.  For Soviet economists’ changing explanations for capitalism’s persistence, see Richard B. Day, Cold War Capitalism: The View from Moscow, 1945–1975 (Armonk, 1995). 80.  For an encyclopedic overview of cultural competition, including the contemporaneous development of several parallel strategic strains having to do with film that I do not discuss here, between the Soviet Union and United States during the Cold War, see David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (Oxford, 2003), esp. 117–246. Caute also notes that the Soviets enjoyed victories in some fields and times but contends that those victories were always offset by renewed evidence of the suppression of free artistic expression (612). For Caute’s treatment of the Iron Curtain affair, see 167–69. 81. It is not just the peculiarities of the French and U.S. legal systems that are responsible here. The Berne Convention established “moral rights” provisions, and one of the main obstacles to the United States joining Berne was that U.S. copyright law did not recognize those rights. See Herman Finkelstein, “The Universal Copyright Convention,” American Journal of Comparative Law 2, no. 2 (1953): 198–204, here 200. 82.  On the Iron Curtain case and regulation of intellectual property on the Internet, see Alexander Gigante, “Ice Patch on the Information Superhighway: Foreign Liability for Domestically Created Content,” Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal (1996), http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/property00/jurisdiction/Gigante.html (accessed 18 April 2014). On the role of “moral rights” in legal efforts to stop the use of music to torture inmates at Guantanamo Bay, see David Mery, “Fighting Torture with Copyright,” The Register, 21 March 2007, www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/21/ fighting_torture_with_copyright (accessed 18 April 2014). For U.S. copyright law fair use provisions, music, and torture, see Roger Parloff, “Tormenting Gitmo Detainees with Copyrighted Music: Is Torture a ‘Fair Use?’ ” Fortune, 27 March 2007, http:// legalpad.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2007/03/27/tormenting-gitmo-detainees-withcopyrighted-music-is-torture-a-fair-use (accessed 3 July 2008). The practice has been the subject of countless pieces in U.S. media; for a scholarly reaction to this

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coverage, see Suzanne G. Cusick, “Music as Torture / Music as Weapon,” Trans: Revista Transcultural de Música 10 (2006), www.sibetrans.com/trans/articulo/152/ music-as-torture-music-as-weapon (accessed 18 April 2014). 83.  For another example, in which the Committee on Artistic Affairs explicitly depended on its “friends” in Italy to explain the nature of the most internationally renowned opera company in Italy, La Scala, to befuddled cultural bureaucrats in Moscow, see N. N. Bespalov to A. A. Gromyko, 4 October 1950, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 137, l. 147. Bespalov was chairman of the committee; Gromyko, the deputy minister of foreign affairs. 84.  On the regime’s assimilation of the intelligentsia, in part through the party’s adoption of intelligentsia values, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, 1992); and Fitzpatrick, “Cultural Orthodoxies under Stalin,” in The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, 1992), 238–56. On the peculiarly Soviet public that was thus created, see David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment, esp. 41–42. 85.  This conclusion was prompted Sheila Fitzpatrick’s programmatic observation that conclusions about Stalinist politics might be drawn by shifting the questions asked of material that typically interests cultural, social, and intellectual historians (“Politics as Practice: Thoughts on a New Soviet Political History,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 5, no. 1 [2004]: 27–54, here 38–39). 86.  For expertise and professional organization, see Tomoff, Creative Union. For an example and explanation of the “decentralization of decision making,” see Julie Hessler, A Social History of Soviet Trade: Trade Policy, Retail Practices, and Consumption, 1917–1953 (Princeton, 2004). For the role of science and scientists in ideology formation, see Ethan Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars (Princeton, 2006). 87. Tomoff, Creative Union; Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars. 88. Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk, Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945–1953 (Oxford, 2004). 89. Draft “Akt priema-sdachi del po Vsesoiuznomu obshchestu kul'turnoi sviazei s zagranitsei” [undated, October 1948], RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 462, ll. 146–57; and Ponomarev to G. M. Malenkov, 15 December 1948, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 463, l. 122. 90.  Ia. Vazhnik, “Spisok rabotnikov TsK VKP(b) i Ministerstva inostrannykh del SSSR, prikreplennykh k otdelam VOKS dlia oznakomleniia s ikh rabotoi,” 4 October 1948, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 462, l. 144. 91.  This point is common across multiple draft resolutions considered by the Central Committee in late 1948 and early 1949 that sought to finalize the VOKS reorganization. See B. N. Ponomarev, V. P. Tereshkin, V. A. Zorin, M. P. Popov, and L. A. Slepov, “Proekt Postanovleniia TsK VKP(b), ‘O merakh po uluchsheniiu raboty VOKSa,’ ” [15 December 1948], RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 463, ll. 123–25; [Draft of] “Postanovlenie TsK VKP(b) o merakh po uluchsheniiu raboty VOKS,” undated, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 1142, ll. 46–48; and “O merakh po uluchsheniiu raboty VOKS,” unsigned and undated, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 1184, ll. 2–4, which circulated with Ponomarev to Zorin, 13 January 1949, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 1184, l. 1. Ponomarev, Tereshkin, Zorin, Popov, and Slepov constituted the commission convened by the Politburo to oversee the transfer of VOKS leadership: Ponomarev to Malenkov, 15 December 1948, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 463, l.

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122. They were all officials in the Central Committee bureaucracy or Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 92. “Vypiska iz pis'ma no. 278 rukovodstva Avstro-Sovetskogo obshchestva VOKSu,” undated, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 157, l. 50. 93.  V. G. Iakovlev to Bespalov, 15 Aug 1951, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 157. Vladimir Iakovlev was vice chairman of the VOKS governing board. Nikolai Bespalov was the chairman of the Committee on Artistic Affairs. 94.  Bespalov to Malenkov, 1 September 1951, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 157, ll. 47–48. Bespalov also requested that the Ministry of Finance be instructed to release the funds and count them against the Committee’s budget. 95.  The archives of both the Committee on Artistic Affairs and the Central Committee are filled with examples. For three, see RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 137, l. 391 (Committee denies Ministry of Foreign Affairs request, supported by VOKS, to send the Bolshoi’s superstar ballerina Galina Ulanova to Denmark, March 1950); ll. 427–30 (Committee supports VOKS proposal to send Soviet musicians to England but suggests English musicians should not tour the USSR, January–February 1950); and ll. 449–50 (Committee denies VOKS request to send Soviet pianists to Belgium on the grounds that their concert plans for the year are already set, later 1950). 96.  For two draft proposals, see P. I. Lebedev to Voroshilov, 4 April 1949, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 120, ll. 30–33; and Draft Postanovlenie Soveta Ministrov SSSR, “O plane gastrolei za granitse sovetskikh teatral'nykh i muzykal'nykh kollektivov i kontsertnykh ispolnitelei na 1949 g.,” April 1949, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 120, l. 29; [Draft of] Lebedev to Voroshilov, 7 July 1949, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 120, ll. 118–19; and Draft Rasporiazhenie Soveta Ministrov SSSR, Jul 1949, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 120, l. 117. The April proposal was slipped into a much larger exchange plan. The July proposal stood (unsuccessfully) on its own. Polikarp Lebedev was the chairman of the Committee on Artistic Affairs. 97. [Draft of] P. I. Lebedev to N. I. Baskakov, 10 February 1951, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 157, ll. 133–40; and P. I. Lebedev to Malenkov and Suslov, 5 February 1951, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 157, ll. 144–45, which asked approval to confirm Nikolai Tverdokhlebov, first secretary of the District Party Committee of the Komintern District in Moscow, as vice chairman of the Committee on Artistic Affairs for international work. 98. V. G. Grigor'ian and V. S. Kruzhkov to Malenkov, 12 February 1951, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 119, d. 257, ll. 160–61 (the heads of the Central Committee departments on the arts and international ties support the committee’s request); Protokol no. 550 zasedaniia Sekretariata TsK VKP(b), pt. 125-s, 20 February 1951, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 119, d. 257, ll. 157–58 (the Secretariat’s positive decision); and Vypiska protokola no. 80 zasedaniia Politburo TsK VKP(b), pt. 343, 22 February 1951, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 119, d. 257, l. 159 (Poliburo confirmation, including of N. E. Tverdokhlebov). 2. Dueling Pianos

 1. Barbara Niewierowska, “O konkursie: Mie˛dzynarodowy Konkurs Pianistyczny im. Fryderyka Chopina,” http://konkurs.chopin.pl/pl/about/competition (accessed 24 April 2014).

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 2. Evgenii Braudo, “Muzyka. Pobediteli na vsemirnom konkurse pianistov,” Pravda, 1 February 1927, 6; “Pobeda sovetskikh pianistov,” Izvestiia, 1 February 1927, 5.   3.  “Blestiashchii uspekh sovetskikh skripachei v Varshave,” Pravda, 18 March 1935, 6.   4.  “Blestiashchii uspekh sovetskikh skripachei na mezhdunarodnom konkurse v Briussele,” Pravda, 2 April 1937, 1; “Sovetskaia muzykal'naia kul'tura,” Pravda, 2 April 1937, 1; Mikhail L'vov, “Muzykanty nashei strany,” Pravda, 3 April 1937, 6; N. Maiorskii, “Triumf sovetskoi muzykal'noi kul'tury,” Pravda, 3 April 1937, 6; “Triumf sovetskikh muzykantov,” Izvestiia, 3 April 1937, 1; “Pobeda sovetskoi muzykal'noi kul'tury,” Izvestiia, 3 April 1937, 3.   5.  “Vozvrashchenie v Moskvu sovetskikh skripachei,” Pravda, 17 May 1937, 6.   6.  “Pobeda sovetskoi muzykal'noi kul'tury,” Izvestiia, 1 June 1938, 4; K. Gollar, “Pobeditel',” Literaturnaia gazeta, 4 June 1938, 5; D. B. Kabalevskii and Lev Oborin, “Triumf sovetskoi muzykal'noi kul'tury,” Literaturnaia gazeta, 4 June 1938, 5; “Nash stil',” Literaturnaia gazeta, 4 June 1938, 5.  7. Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Cultural Orthodoxies under Stalin,” in The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, 1992), 246.  8. D. B. Kabalevskii, “Otchet o poezdke gruppy sovetskikh muzykantov v Parizh v iiune–iiule 1953 g.,” 18 July 1953, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 9, ll. 1–23, here l. 1. The seventeen first prizes in seventeen competitions do not mean that the Soviets always came in first. Most competitions had multiple divisions (violin, piano, and cello divisions, for example, could produce three first prize winners in one competition), but it does represent a level of dominance unapproached by any other country.   9.  Niewierowska, “O konkursie.” 10.  “International Henryk Wieniawski Violin Competition,” www.wieniawski. com/ivc.html (accessed 24 April 2014). 11.  For lists of laureates for all competitions from 1937 to 2013, see “Concours Musical International Reine Elisabeth de Belgique: Palmarès du concours de 1951 à 2013,” http://perso.fundp.ac.be/~jmlamber/re/re.html (accessed 24 April 2014). 12.  “Concours de Genève | The Competition,” www.concoursgeneve.ch/sections/ the_competition; and a search for laureates of the competition: “Concours de Genève | Search Laureates,” www.concoursgeneve.ch/list_laureates/search (both accessed 24 April 2014). 13.  See “From 1943 to 1990—Concours Long Thibaud,” www.long-thibaudcrespin.org/en-gb/fondation/l-histoire/de-1943-a-1990.html (accessed 24 Apr 2014). 14.  Antonín Matzner, “History of the Festival,” www.prague-spring.net/historie (accessed 26 October 2009). The first Prague Spring Festival took place in 1946; the competition dates from the festival’s second year. 15.  “Hall of Fame | Filharmonia Budapest Nonprofit Ltd.,” www.filharmonia­ bp.hu/en/hall_fame (accessed 30 January 2013). 16. “Historical Background—Foundation International Piano Competition Ferruccio Busoni,” www.concorsobusoni.it/en-94–1984.aspx; “Gian Battista Viotti—International Music Competition—Vercelli,” www.concorsoviotti.it/ page.php?id=ba937e69e22147eaab5810ea7189ae8a&page_id=372d6d2c294490 68f2e87f97ce0230fc; “International Competition for Young Conductors,” www. concours-besancon.com/en; “ARD Music Competition: Springboard for a Career

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from 1952,” 24 January 2012, www.br.de/radio/br-klassik-english/ard-musiccompetition/prize-winners/index.html; “Premio Paganini,”www.paganini.comune. genova.it/premio_premiopaganini_eng.htm; “Maria Canals—Introduction,” www. mariacanals.org/en/concurs/presentacio.html; “Historique,” www.theatre-ducapitole.fr/1/le-concours-international-de-chant/concours-international-de-chant/ historique-du-concours/historique-124.html?lang=fr (all accessed 30 January 2013). 17.  There was no systematic, comprehensive world ranking system for chess in the 1940s and 1950s, but one estimate suggests that in the first half of the 1950s, twelve of the world’s top fifteen players were Soviet. The Soviets won all four top prizes in a major international tournament in 1952, all five of another one the next year, three of the top four in 1955, and six of the top seven in 1956. In the 1950s, the women’s world champion was always Soviet, and Soviet teams won the student world championships four of the first five times they competed. See Andy Soltis, Soviet Chess, 1917–1991 (Jefferson, 2000), 195. 18.  This typical motivation was accurately identified by N. A. Mikhailov, then minister of culture, in his preliminary proposal for what would become the Tchaikovsky Competition discussed at length in the next chapter (Mikhailov to TsK [undated, probably 30 June 1956], RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 737, l. 1). Mikhailov’s assertion can be confirmed by skimming the countless competition brochures located in the files of the Committee on Artistic Affairs and Ministry of Culture from the 1940s and 1950s. 19.  I was not able to locate a copy of this original invitation; the circumstances of its delivery are related in L. D. Kislova to N. E. Tverdokhlebov, 4 February 1953, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10s, d. 225, l. 19. Kislova was a member of the governing board of VOKS; Tverdokhlebov, vice chairman of the Committee on Artistic Affairs. N. A. Kazantseva was one of the leading lyric coloratura sopranos of the 1940s and 1950s. She was named People’s Artist of the RSFSR in 1947, won a Stalin Prize in 1950, and regularly toured internationally. She joined the party in 1955. See “Kazantseva Nadezhda Apollinarievna,” Muzykal' naia entsiklopediia (Moscow, 1974). 20.  Langbein to VOKS Musical Section, 15 January 1953, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10s, d. 225, ll. 20–23. Otto Langbein was a member of the Austrian Communist Party from 1932 until 1957, when he left, disillusioned by the Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956. See Henry Friedlander, “Foreword,” in People in Auschwitz, by Hermann Langbein, trans. H. Zohn (Chapel Hill, 2004). Friedlander notes that Hermann had a brother, Otto, whom I have assumed to be the same as the one who appears here. 21.  Langbein to VOKS Musical Section, l. 21. 22.  Ibid., ll. 22–23. 23.  It was passed from VOKS to the Committee on Artistic Affairs only on 4 February 1953: Kislova to Tverdokhlebov, 4 February 1953. 24.  Tverdokhlebov to G. M. Pushkin, 21 January 1953, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10s., d. 225, l. 2. 25.  Tverdokhlebov to Kislova, 9 February 1953, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10s, d. 225, ll. 24–25. 26.  “Kratkaia zapis' besedy proiskhodivshei mezhdu referentom Otdela informatsii i propagandy st. l-tom Kul'chitskii i direktorom “Muzik-Fereina” zala, general'nym sekretarem Obshchestva druzei muzyki g. Veny g-nom Rudol'fom

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Gamsegerom 5 fevralia 1953 g. v kabinete g-na Gamsegera,” RGALI, f. 962, op. 10s, d. 225, ll. 47–49. 27. A. Parkaev to Kislova, 2 March 1953, RGALI f. 962, op. 10s, d. 225, ll. 54–55. Parkaev was the VOKS plenipotentiary in Austria. This memo is a report of his own meeting with Gamsjäger, which parallels Gamsjäger’s interview with Kul'chitskii. So both the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and, here, VOKS apparatuses were working on this issue but not coordinating their efforts. 28.  “Kratkaia zapis',” ll. 47, 49. 29.  M. G. Gribanov to Tverdokhlebov, 20 February 1953, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10s, d. 225, l. 46. Gribanov was a bureaucrat in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It thus took more than a week for the ministry to deliver the summary of the discussion with Gamsjäger, even though Tverdokhlebov had asked for a speedy answer the day after the interview took place. See Tverdokhlebov to Pushkin, 12 February 1953, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10s, d. 255, l. 36. 30.  Kislova to Tverdokhlebov, 11 March 1953, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10s, d. 225, l. 53. Kislova merely forwarded Parkaev’s message of 2 March to Tverdokhlebov without comment. 31.  N. N. Bespalov to M. A. Suslov, 13 March 1953, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10s, d. 225, ll. 42–44, here, l. 43. 32.  Ibid., ll. 43–44. See also the draft response, forwarded to Suslov for Central Committee approval: RGALI, f. 962, op. 10s, d. 225, l. 45. 33.  V. S. Kruzhkov and V. G. Grigor'ian to Suslov, 12 March 1953, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 133, d. 395, l. 59; Bespalov’s materials constitute ll. 55–58. 34.  Bespalov to Pushkin, 20 March 1953, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10s, d. 225, l. 52. 35. World Federation of International Music Competitions, “Competition Info: International Beethoven Piano Competition Vienna,” www.wfimc.org/ Webnodes/en/Web/Public/Competitions/Competition+info?org=16677; “Internationaler Beethoven Klavierwettbewerb—Preisträger Innen,” www.mdw.ac.at/ beethoven-competition/ruckblick/preistragerinnen (both accessed 20 April 2014). 36.  Jenifer Parks has noted a similar attitude of “cautious confrontation” among Soviet sports officials through the end of the Stalin period, which she notes gave way to active engagement with international sports federations, including efforts to “democratize” them in the lead-up to the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. See Jenifer Parks, “ ‘Nothing but Trouble’: The Soviet Union’s Push to ‘Democratise’ International Sports during the Cold War, 1959–1962,” International Journal of the History of Sport 30, no. 13 (2013): 1554–67, esp. 1558–59. A marked increase in Soviet soccer matches against Western teams in late 1953 and 1954 may indicate a similar shift: see Peter Beck, “Britain and the Cold War’s ‘Cultural Olympics’: Responding to the Political Drive of Soviet Sport, 1945–58,” Contemporary British History 19, no. 2 (2005): 169–85, here 176–77. Chess appears to provide a counterexample. The Soviets first joined the World Chess Federation (known by its French acronym, FIDE) in 1947 in order to take part in the planning for the World Championships of 1948, an anomalous event caused by the premature death of the reigning champion in 1946. After a Soviet player won, FIDE gave the right to organize subsequent World Championships to the federation of the reigning champion, giving control of the event to the Soviets for the next two decades. See Edward Winter, “Interregnum,” Chess Notes (2004), www.chesshistory.com/winter/extra/interregnum.html; Soltis, Soviet Chess, 1917–1991, 157–94.

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37.  Competition Secretariat to de Gontaut-Biron, 9 August 1955, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8 d. 155, ll. 2–4. 38.  S. S. Mikhailov to V. S. Stepanov, 28 September 1955, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 155, l. 1 and undated marginal notation. Mikhailov was assistant to the head of the First European Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Stepanov, the head of the Foreign Relations Administration of the Ministry of Culture. 39.  “Vianna Da Motta International Music Competition,” www.vdamotta.org/ PstJuries.htm, http://www.vdamotta.org/PstWinner.htm, and www.vdamotta.org/ compHist.htm (accessed 26 October 2009). 40.  On the Ł agów Lubuski incident and its aftermath, see Adrian Thomas, Polish Music since Szymanowski (Cambridge, 2005), 43–49; Lisa Jakelski, “Gorecki’s Scontri and Avant-Garde Music in Cold War Poland,” Journal of Musicology 26, no. 2 (2009): 205–39, esp. 209–10. 41. For Hungary, see Danielle Fosler-Lussier, Music Divided: Bartok’s Legacy in Cold War Culture (Berkeley, 2007); and Rachel Beckles Willson, Ligeti, Kurtág, and Hungarian Music during the Cold War (Cambridge, 2007). For East Germany and a more extended analysis of the Polish case, see David Gerard Tompkins, “Composing the Party Line: Music and Politics in Poland and East Germany, 1948–1957” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2004). 42.  P. I. Lebedev to Grigor'ian, 3 September 1949, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 120, ll. 120–21; Prikaz no. 202 Komiteta po delam iskusstv pri SM SSSR, 21 March 1949, RGALI, f. 962, op. 5, d. 1118, ll. 33–34. 43.  The date of the Council of Ministers of the USSR (SM SSSR) decision was 25 June 1949; see Lebedev to Grigor'ian. The Poles had originally invited Oborin and A. B. Gol'denveizer. See “Lista artistov proponowanych do Jury IV Medzynarodowego Konkursu pianistow w Warszawie z okazji ‘Roku Chopinowskiego 1949’,” RGALI, f. 962, op. 5, d. 1118, l. 133, where he is incorrectly identified as “Borys.” This list has columns for those proposed and confirmed. Though not every country had apparently yet replied (including the Soviet Union), the Soviets were the only ones to provide a substitute. 44.  Lebedev to Grigor'ian. 45.  V. G. Iakovlev to P. I. Lebedev, 1 December 1949, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 126, l. 101. 46.  [I. S. Kuznetsov], “Spravka o IV-om Mezhdunarodnom konkurse pianistov im. Frederika Shopena i o gastroliakh v Pol'she sovetskikh pianistov, uchastnikov konkursa,” RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 126, ll. 95–100, here ll. 98–99. 47.  Ibid., l. 98. 48.  Ibid., l. 97. 49.  P. I. Lebedev to A. I. Lavrent'ev, 10 October 1949, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 126, l. 87. Lavrent'ev was deputy minister of foreign affairs. 50.  Ibid. Emphasis added. 51.  Kuznetsov, l. 96. 52. Ibid. 53.  Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941 (Oxford, 2011). 54.  For a brief history of the competition from its humble private origins in wartime France to its status as a cornerstone of French musical life at the end of

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the 1950s, see Cecilia Dunoyer, Marguerite Long: A Life in French Music, 1874–1966 (Bloomington, 1993), 135–48. 55. D. B. Kabalevskii, “Otchet o poezdke gruppy sovetskikh muzykantov v Parizh v iiune–iiule 1953 g.” See also Kabalevsky’s shorter but very similar account in his public report: D. B. Kabalevskii, “Sovetskie muzykanty v Parizhe,” Pravda, 26 July 1953, 6. Oborin was interviewed by Izvestiia, and Oistrakh also published a report when he returned. See “Uspekh sovetskikh muzykantov v Parizhe,” Izvestiia, 10 July 1953, 3; and D. Oistrakh, “Pobeda sovetskikh muzykantov,” Literaturnaia gazeta, 20 July 1953, 3. 56.  Kabalevskii, “Otchet,” 18 July 1953, l. 1. 57.  Ibid., ll. 1–2. 58.  Ibid., l. 2. 59.  Ibid., ll. 2–3. 60.  Ibid., l. 3. 61.  Ibid., ll. 3–4. The other laureates were Dorothy Wade (United States, third), Robert Virovai (stateless, fourth), Michéle Boussinot (France, fifth), Gilda Muhlbauer (United States, sixth), and Edmond Statkiewicz (Poland, seventh). Eighth prize was not awarded because two seconds were instead. For the announcement, see also “Le Prix Marguerite Long-Jacques Thibaud a une jeune violoniste Soviétique,” Le Monde, 16 June 1953. The “stateless” Virovai was born in 1921 in Yugoslavia to Hungarian parents, studied at the Belgrade and Budapest Conservatories as a child, and moved to the United States to start a concertizing career just before the war. At some point, he returned to Europe and eventually settled in Switzerland. See “Prone to Violins: Robert Virovai,” http://pronetoviolins.blogspot.com/2011/09/ robert-virovai.html (accessed 25 January 2013); and Russell Maloney and Charles Cooke, “Virovai,” The New Yorker, 17 December 1938. 62.  “Uspekh sovetskikh muzykantov v Parizhe,” Izvestiia, 10 July 1953. 63.  Kabalevskii, “Otchet,” 18 July 1953, l. 4. 64.  Ibid., 4–5; “Uspekh sovetskikh muzykantov,” Izvestiia, 10 Jul 1953. 65.  Kabalevskii, “Otchet,” 18 July 1953, l. 5. 66.  Ibid., ll. 5–6. 67.  Ibid., l. 6. 68.  Ibid., l. 8. 69.  Ibid., ll. 8–9. 70.  Georges Leon, “Final mouvementée au concours Marguerite Long—Jacques Thibaud,” L’Humanité, 22 June 1953, 2. I have not been able to further identify the allegedly slighted American pianist, whom Leon identified merely as “Tine.” 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid. 73.  The microfilm copy I was able to consult is not perfectly clear regarding the end of the direct Thibaud quote. I have interpreted it to end as marked here, which means that it was Leon, not Thibaud, who proclaimed Malinin the undisputed winner. Kabalevsky’s interpretation of the same article differs from mine; he attributed the entire paragraph to Thibaud. See ibid., 16. 74.  “Incidents au concours Marguerite Long,” Le Monde, 23 June 1953, 8. 75.  “Le concert des lauréats des concours Marguerite Long—Jacques Thibaud,” Le Monde, 24 June 1953, 9.

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76. Marguerite Long, “Madame Marguerite Long s’explique sur le concours international de piano,” Le Monde, 27 June 1953, 12. 77. Dunoyer, Marguerite Long, 151, 163. 78.  Kabalevskii, “Otchet,” 18 July 1953, l. 9; Dunoyer, Marguerite Long, 141–42. 79.  Kabalevskii, “Otchet,” 18 July 1953, l. 10. 80.  Ibid., ll. 10–11. 81. For Tarjus in the United States, see Howard Taubman, “Musical Travelers: Three Who Have Toured under League Auspices,” New York Times, 14 February 1954; and Taubman, “Two Soloists Play in Carnegie Hall: U.S. and French Exchange Students Appear in Concert Conducted by Leon Barzin,” New York Times, 23 February 1954. 82.  Kabalevskii, “Otchet,” 18 July 1953, l. 12. 83.  Ibid., ll. 21–22. 84.  Bespalov to Grigor'ian, 22 September 1950, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 137, l. 155. 85.  For another refusal to participate in an Italian composition competition, this time because the announced judges were “not authoritative,” see Bespalov to Suslov, 14 June 1951, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 133, d. 329, l. 50; and P. A. Tarasov and P. V. Lebedev to Suslov, 23 June 1951, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 133, d. 329, l. 51. 86.  M. S. Sergeev to P. I. Lebedev, 10 August 1950, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 137, l. 194. Sergeev was a bureaucrat in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the acting head of the ministry’s First European Department. 87.  P. I. Lebedev, marginal instruction, 14 August 1950, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 137, l. 194 (marginalia); Bespalov to Sergeev, 22 August 1950, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 137, l. 193. The marginal notation is an instruction from Lebedev to inform the ministry that the committee did “not consider it necessary” to participate; the Bespalov memo fulfills that instruction. 88.  Bespalov to Sergeev, 5 September 1950, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 137, l. 192. 89.  Sergeev to Bespalov, 7 September 1950, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 137, l. 5 and ll. 6–12 (one copy of the brochure). 90.  See the Russian translation of the brochure, with marginal notations: RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 137, ll. 202–9; and two versions of “Vypiska iz usloviia konkursa, poluchennogo dopolnitel'no,” RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 137, ll. 210–15, 216–22, esp. marginalia, l. 221. 91.  Bespalov to Grigor'ian, 23 September 1950, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 137, l. 154. Grigor'ian was a bureaucrat in the Central Committee apparatus; this memo was also copied to M. S. Sergeev from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 92.  For the decision, see Protokol no. 80 Politbiuro TsK VKP(b), pt. 279 (16 February 1951), RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 1087, l. 55. For the follow-up reports, see P. I. Lebedev to G. M. Malenkov, 7 April 1951, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 133, d. 329, ll. 17–19; Malenkov to Grigor'ian and Kruzhkov, 9 April 1951, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 133, d. 329, l. 16; and Tarasov and N. I. Baskakov to Malenkov, 30 April 1951, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 133, d. 329, l. 20. 93.  “Queen Elisabeth Competition Violin 1951 Candidates,” www.concoursreine-elisabeth.be/cgi?usr=sgn64au9tc&lg=en&pag=1992&tab=108&rec=96&frm =0&par=aybabtu&id=5083&flux=15939216 (accessed 29 January 2013). See also

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“Novaia pobeda sovetskogo muzykal'nogo iskusstva,” Izvestiia, 25 May 1951. The Izvestiia article got the order wrong, announcing incorrectly that Kaverzneva placed fifth and Gorokhov seventh.   94.  M. E. Koptelov, report, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 137, ll. 256–57. Mikhail Efremovich Koptelov was deputy political adviser to the Soviet high commissioner for Austria.   95.  Mikhailov to Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (TsK KPSS), 27 April 1957, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 46, l. 38.   96.  This time, the Ministry of Culture and Central Committee bureaucrats’ concerns about short notice, a stacked jury with no guarantees it would include a Soviet representative, and the relative lack of prestige of the competition overrode the Ministry of Foreign Affairs desire to participate, see S. S. Mikhailov to V. S. Pereslavtsev, 27 April 1955, RGANI, f. 5, op. 17, d. 545, l. 96; N. A. Mikhaikov to TsK, 14 June 1955, RGANI, f. 5, op. 17, d. 545, l. 95; A. M. Rumiantsev and Tarasov to TsK, 17 June 1955, RGANI, f. 5, op. 17, d. 545, l. 99; and D. T. Shepilov and Suslov, marginalia, RGANI, f. 5, op. 17, d. 545, l. 99 (marginalia). S. S. Mikhailov was assistant head of the First European Department in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, N. A. Mikhailov was the minister of culture, Pereslavtsev was the head of the Ministry of Culture’s Department of Foreign Relations, and Rumiantsev and Tarasov were officials in the Central Committee’s arts oversight bureaucracy.  97. Such was the case with the International Competition of Choral Song, May 1950: Bespalov to Sergeev, 14 March 1950, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 137, l. 395.  98. M. D. Iakovlev and B. M. Iarustovskii to TsK KPSS, 8 October 1955, RGANI, f. 5, op. 17, d. 545, ll. 209–11, here l. 209. Iakovlev was vice chairman of the Central Committee Department of Science and Culture, and Iarustovskii was the head of that department’s Music Sector. For the institutional affiliations of the Warsaw contestants, see Dmitrii Paperno, Notes of a Moscow Pianist (Portland, 1998), 81; and G. F. Aleksandrov to TsK, 27 October 1954, RGANI, f. 5, op. 17, d. 494, l. 209. Aleksandrov was the minister of culture.   99.  M. D. Iakovlev and Iarustovskii to TsK KPSS, 8 October 1955, l. 209. 100.  Ibid., l. 210. 101.  Ibid., l. 211. 102. Paperno, Notes of a Moscow Pianist, 88–93. 103.  M. D. Iakovlev and Iarustovskii to TsK KPSS, 8 October 1955, l. 211. 104.  Ibid., l. 211. The phrase that I have translated as “popular opinion” is ob­-­ shchestvennoe mnenie, literally “the opinion of educated/informed society.” 105.  Soviet officials would continue to use audience preferences for Soviet performers as a measure of the “objectivity” of judging throughout this period. For complaints about “nonobjective” judges from Poland and Czechoslovakia causing a Czech and an American to finish ahead of a Soviet contestant supposedly preferred by audiences in Toulouse, see N. K. Danilov to TsK, 25 December 1958, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 72, ll. 166–69. Danilov was deputy minister of culture. 106. On the concentration of professional authority and material privilege within a small, exceptionally elite group of composers in the late Stalin period, see Kiril Tomoff, Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939–1953 (Ithaca, 2006), esp. 215–99.

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107.  M. D. Iakovlev and Iarustovskii to TsK KPSS, 8 October 1955, l. 210. 108.  Ibid., l. 210. What to do about ideological education, especially mandatory Marxism-Leninism courses that neither students nor most faculty valued, would continue to plague music education throughout the period. For an excellent discussion of how this issue got tangled up with intergenerational politics, student discipline, and the early Thaw at the Gnesin Institute, see Stephen V. Bittner, The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw: Experience and Memory in Moscow’s Arbat (Ithaca, 2008), 40–74, esp. 52–54. 109.  M. D. Iakovlev and Iarustovskii to TsK KPSS, 8 October 1955, l. 210. As an example of this last point, the two noted that the conservatory had even given Grach the wrong music to prepare before the Paris competition. 110.  Ibid., l. 211. 111. Paperno, Notes of a Moscow Pianist, 75. Paperno continues the passage by noting that Stanislav Neuhaus was the lone exception. One wonders if that exception was made as the result of his family pedigree (he was the son of one of the two most influential piano professors of his generation, Heinrich Neuhaus) and his role as an aggrieved victim of biased judging in Paris, 1953. 112.  Ibid., 71–96. 113.  P. I. Lebedev to Aleksandrov, 5 January 1949, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 126, l. 103. The policy basis for Soviet participation was set by a Council of Ministers decision dated 20 December 1948. 114.  For an example, see V. A. Klimov, “Avtobiografiia” [undated 1949], RGALI, f. 962, op. 5, d. 1118, l. 29. Valery Klimov was a violinist competing for a spot in the Soviet delegation to the 1949 Prague Spring Festival’s music competitions. On these sorts of autobiographical statements, see Sheila Fitzpatrick and Yuri Slezkine, In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War (Princeton, 2000). 115. See, for example, [F. Ia.] Kurochkin and Teplov to A. I. Anisimov, 12 March 1949, RGALI, f. 962, op. 5, d. 1118, l. 74. Kurochkin was the director of the Khar'kov Conservatory and Teplov was his assistant director. Anisimov was the head of the Chief Directorate for Musical Institutions within the Committee on Artistic Affairs and chairman of the jury. This memo argued for the inclusion of Natalia Eshchenko and Isabella Iukht in the final selection round. See also handwritten programs of some of Iukht’s performances in Khar'kov: RGALI, f. 962, op. 5, d. 1118, ll. 77–80. The programs were clearly submitted to show the range of Iukht’s repertoire and her comfort performing it in public. The Ukraine-wide appeal was filed by the chairman of the Ukrainian branch of the Committee on Artistic Affairs: N. Pashin to P. I. Lebedev, 12 March 1949, RGALI, f. 962, op. 5, d. 1118, l. 89. For a similar effort to promote students from the republics undertaken by their conservatory, this time during the selection rounds before the Prague Spring Festival’s violin competition, see K. S. Dombaev to K. K. Sakva, 21 February 1949, RGALI, f. 962, op. 5, d. 1118, l. 109. Dombaev was the assistant director of the Erevan Conservatory; Sakva was an official in the Committee on Artistic Affairs. 116.  Komitet po delam iskusstv pri Sovet Ministrov SSSR, Prikaz no. 202, 21 March 1949, RGALI, f. 962, op. 5, d. 1118, ll. 33–34. The jury members and their affiliations were as follows: Aleksandr Anisimov (the head of the Chief Directorate for Music Institutions in the Committee on Artistic Affairs), Iurii Briushkov (then still a

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member of the Moscow Conservatory piano faculty, though he would soon shift to Leningrad), Nikolai Golovanov (principal conductor at the Bolshoi Theater), Nina Emelianova (Moscow Conservatory piano faculty member), Aleksandr Nikolaev (Moscow Conservatory professor of piano), Lev Oborin (Moscow Conservatory professor of piano), Konstantin Sakva (Anisimov’s vice chairman), Pavel Serebriakov (Leningrad Conservatory professor of piano), Mikhail Chulaki (a composer who held a post in the Soviet Composers’ Union), Iurii Shaporin (Moscow Conservatory professor of composition), and I. A. Prokhorova (the jury’s secretary). 117.  P. I. Lebedev to Grigor'ian, 3 September 1949, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 120, ll. 120–21. The six were V. K. Merzhanov (a Moscow Philharmonic soloist, and one of the two without any party affiliation), T. N. Guseva, G. A. Muravlev, S. G. Neuhaus (the other one without a party affiliation, though his father was one of the two most important piano pedagogues in the Soviet Union), E. V. Malinin, and B. M. Davidovich (the only non-Russian—she was Jewish and would eventually split the first prize with the Polish pianist Helena Czerny-Stefan´ska). 118.  A vivid description of the effects of antisemitism in these late rounds is provided by one of its victims in Rostislav Dubinskii, Stormy Applause: Making Music in a Worker’s State, (New York, 1989), 14–23. 119.  A. I. Serov, “Spravka o podgotovke uchashchikhsia k uchastiiu v konkurse na Mezhdunarodnom konkurse studentov v Prage” [undated 1950], RGALI, f. 962, op. 4, d. 1416, ll. 75, 77. For extensive coverage of the details of this selection process, see RGALI, f. 962, op. 4, d. 1416. 120.  For a study of how this gradient was expressed in the promotion of new compositions in paradigmatically Western musical forms, see Marina Frolova-Walker, “ ‘National in Form, Socialist in Content’: Musical Nation-Building in the Soviet Republics,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 51, no. 2 (1998): 331–71. For the practice of arranging professional consultations between composers from the national republics and Muscovites systematically and in response to professionalizing and Europeanizing campaigns, see Tomoff, Creative Union, 42–44; and Kiril Tomoff, “Uzbek Music’s Separate Path: Interpreting ‘Anticosmopolitanism’ in Stalinist Central Asia, 1949–52,” Russian Review 63, no. 2 (2004): 212–40, esp. 233–39. On the formation of nationalities studios in the Moscow Conservatory in the 1930s, see Iu. V. Keldysh, ed., Istoriia muzyki narodov SSSR, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1970), 233. 121. Paperno, Notes of a Moscow Pianist, 79–83. 122.  Aleksandrov to TsK, 27 October 1954, RGANI, f. 5, op. 17, d. 494, l. 209. Aleksandrov referred to a Central Committee resolution dated 8 April 1954 as providing the instructions to select four contestants. 123.  Suslov to Rumiantsev, 28 October 1954, RGANI, f. 5, op. 17, d. 494, l. 209, marginalia; and Iarustovskii, short informational notation, 30 October 1954, RGANI, f. 5, op. 17, d. 494, l. 208. 124.  A. V. Sveshnikov, D. F. Oistrakh, L. N. Oborin, A. I. Khachaturian, and V. A. Rozanov, report, 27 October 1953, RGANI, f. 5, op. 17, d. 444, ll. 91–94. The authors of this report were all prominent members of the Moscow Conservatory faculty. Sveshnikov was its director, and Rozanov was the director of the Central Music School affiliated with the conservatory. It was part of an appeal to the Central Committee to provide a well-supplied dormitory for the school. For the specific complaint about fresh air, sports, and sleep deprivation, see one Golysheva to V. A.

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Rozanov, 9 August 1953, RGANI, f. 5, op. 17, d. 444, l. 95. Golysheva was a doctor reporting to the school’s director. 125.  The Olympic training programs throughout the Soviet empire were infamous throughout the Cold War. For a scholarly review of abuses in the Soviet system, see Jim Riordan, “The Rise and Fall of Soviet Olympic Champions,” Olympika: The International Journal of Olympic Studies 2 (1993): 25–44. 3. From a Musical Holiday to the Tchaikovsky Competition

  1.  For a few examples, see “Announcing the Fiftieth Anniversary Celebration of Van Cliburn’s Win at the First Tchaikovsky Competition,” 11 February 2008, www.cliburn.org/press-room/press-releases/announcing-the-50th-anniversarycelebration-of-van-cliburns-win-at-the-first-tchaikovsky-competition; “Van Cliburn: Treasuring Moscow after Fifty Years: NPR,” NPR.org, 1 March 2008, www. npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87771963; “Online NewsHour Report: Pianist Van Cliburn Reminisces,” PBS, 11 April 2008, www.pbs.org/newshour/ bb/entertainment/jan-june08/vancliburn_04–11.html; and Richard S. Ginell, “The Buzz Is Just a Little Less Forte Now,” Los Angeles Times, 27 April 2008, http://articles.latimes.com/2008/apr/27/entertainment/ca-contest27 (all accessed 15 February 2013).   2.  N. N. Bespalov to M. A. Suslov, 27 July 1951, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 133, d. 323, ll. 110–13, with appendices, ll. 114–36. Bespalov had replaced P. I. Lebedev as chairman of the Committee on Artistic Affairs in April.   3.  Ibid., l. 110.  4. Ibid.   5.  Ibid., ll. 110–11.   6.  Ibid., ll. 111–12.   7.  Ibid., ll. 112–13; details regarding the proposed participants, juries, and the eighty concerts were included in a separate appendix, ll. 116–20.   8.  Ibid., l. 113.   9.  See the first appendix to the proposal, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 133, d. 323, ll. 114–15, and the draft prospectus for the competition, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 133, d. 343, ll. 121–36. 10.  P. A. Tarasov and P. V. Lebedev to Suslov, 15 September 1951, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 133, d. 323. 11.  Bespalov to G. M. Malenkov, 1 February 1952, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 119, d. 744, ll. 2–5, with appendices ll. 6–45. Of particular interest are the financial details, ll. 33–45. 12. Memo to P. K. Ponomarenko and N. S. Khrushchev, 27 February 1952, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 119, d. 744, l. 46. 13. Suslov, Bespalov, and V. S. Kruzhkov to Malenkov, 25 February 1952, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 119, d. 744, l. 47. 14.  N. A. Mikhailov to TsK KPSS, undated, but probably 30 June 1956, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 3, d. 737, l. 1. 15.  Ibid., ll. 1–2. 16.  The draft Central Committee resolution (l. 1), draft text of the requirements and parameters of the competition (ll. 2–9), and a detailed budget (ll. 10–14) are RGALI, f. 2329, op. 3, d. 736, ll. 1–14.

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17.  “Svodnaia scheta raskhodov I Mezhdunarodnogo konkursa skripachei i pianistov im. Chaikovskogo v Moskve (v tys. rub.),” RGALI, f. 2329, op. 3, d. 736, l. 10. Detailed breakdowns follow, ll. 11–14. 18.  “Stenogramma soveshchaniia Organizatsionnogo komiteta i Mezhdunarodnogo konkursa pianistov i skripachei im. P. I. Chaikovskogo v Moskve,” 31 August 1956, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 3, d. 726, ll. 1–27, here ll. 2–21 (piano repertory). 19.  For details of a late Stalin-era campaign that hinged on the imposition of “advanced” homophonic and polyphonic music in Central Asia at the expense of native monophonic traditions, see Kiril Tomoff, “Uzbek Music’s Separate Path: Interpreting ‘Anticosmopolitanism’ in Stalinist Central Asia, 1949–52,” Russian Review 63, no. 2 (2004): 212–40, esp. 222–28. 20.  “Stenogramma,” 31 August 1956, ll. 11–12 (exchange between Gilels and Shostakovich about Skriabin and Rachmaninoff), l. 19 (propagandistic character), and l. 21 (stimulus to Soviet composers). 21. This is Katerina Clark’s “Great Appropriation” of the 1930s (Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 [Cambridge, MA, 2011]). 22.  “Prikaz Ministra kul'tury SSSR no. 592, ‘O provedenii v g. Moskve Mezhdunarodnogo konkursa pianistov i skripachei im. P. I. Chaikovskogo,’ ” 3 September 1956, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 3, d. 736, ll. 24–26. 23.  Mikhailov to TsK KPSS, 9 October 1956, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 3, d. 737, ll. 3–5. 24.  “Prikaz Ministra kul'tury SSSR no. 763, ‘O premiiakh…,’ ” 13 November 1956, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 3, d. 736, l. 30. 25.  See for example, “Stenogramma zasedaniia Orgkomiteta Mezhdunarodnogo konkursa pianistov i skripachei im. P. I. Chaikovskogo,” 11 May 1957, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 3, d. 727, ll. 15–22. 26.  “Stenogramma,” 11 May 1957, ll. 11–12. 27.  “Stenogramma,” 11 May 1957, ll. 9–15. 28.  “Stenogramma zasedaniia Orgkomiteta Mezhdunarodnogo konkursa pianistov i skripachei im. P. I. Chaikovskogo,” 21 September 1957, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 3, d. 728, ll. 17–19. 29.  Ibid., ll. 1–25, here ll. 4–17. 30. Ibid. 31.  V. V. Tselikovskii to Mikhailov, 12 November 1957, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 3, d. 737, ll. 6–7. 32.  Mikhailov to TsK KPSS, 22 August 1957, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 42, ll. 104–5, with a draft resolution, l. 106. 33.  “Stenogramma,” 21 September 1957, ll. 20–24. 34.  B. S. Riurikov and B. M. Iarustovskii to TsK, 27 September 1957, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 42, l. 107. 35.  For a request for extra help to renovate the museum in Klin, see Protokol no. 5 zasedaniia kollegii Ministerstva kul'tury SSSR, 5 February 1958, pt. 3, “O khode podgotovki k Mezhdunarodnomu konkursu pianistov i skripachei im. P. I. Chaikovskogo,” RGALI, f. 2329, op. 3, d. 737, ll. 16–17. 36.  B. D. Vladimirskii to Mikhailov, 16 October 1957, “Plan provedeniia Mezhdunarodnogo konkursa pianistov i skripachei im. P. I. Chaikovskogo,” RGALI, f.

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2329, op. 3, d. 737, ll. 20–24. This report was a response to one of a regular series of decrees that Mikhailov issued starting in September. See, for example, Protokol no. 24 zasedaniia kollegii Ministerstva kul'tury SSSR, 20 September 1957, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 3, d. 737, ll. 8–10, especially pt. 3, ll. 9–10. For an earlier report, see Vladimirskii, “Spravka o rabote Otdela muzykal'nykh uchrezhdenii po provedeniiu Mezhdunarodnogo konkursa pianistov i skripachei im. P. I. Chaikovskogo,” 13 September 1957, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 3, d. 736, ll. 27–29, prepared for the 16 October meeting. See also “Protokol soveshchaniia u tov. Mikhailova N. A. po voprosam podgotovki k Mezhdunarodnomu konkursu im. P. I. Chaikovskogo,” 13 November 1957, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 3, d. 737, ll. 11–12; Prikaz Ministra kul'tury SSSR no. 685, “O provedenii v g. Moskve Mezhdunarodnogo konkursa pianistov i skripachei im. P. I. Chaikovskogo,” 18 November 1957, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 3, d. 736, ll. 22–23, with appendices, especially relevant here is ll. 35–36, the plan for the competition; Prikaz Ministra kul'tury no. 727 “Voprosy podgotovki k Mezhdunarodnomu konkursu im. P. I. Chaikovskogo,” 13 December 1957, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 3, d. 736, l. 41; and “Postanovlenie Kollegii Ministerstva kul'tury SSSR, “O podgotovke i provedenii Mezhdunarodnogo konkursa pianistov i skripachei im. P. I. Chaikovskogo,” 5 February 1958, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 3, d. 736, ll. 15–21, for last-minute preparations. 37.  See S. V. Kaftanov to TsK KPSS, 8 March 1958, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 71, l. 1; and Riurikov and Iarustovskii to TsK, 12 March 1958, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 71, l. 2, for the Egypt story. Kaftanov was deputy minister of culture. I was unable to positively identify Fawzi, noted in the Central Committee materials as “First Deputy Minister of Orientation.” It is possible that it was leading Egyptian graphic artist Al Hussein Fawzi. For tourists, see for example, “Stenogramma,” 11 May 1957, ll. 22–24; and Vladimirskii, “Spravka,” 13 September 1957, l. 27. 38.  “Prilozhenie no. 5 k prikazu no. 685 Ministra kul'tury SSSR,” 16 November 1957, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 3, d. 736, ll. 38–40. 39.  See, for example, the exchange between Gilels and Vladimirskii in which the latter indicates that the ministry will print a special publication run of the mandatory repertoire (“Stenogramma,” 31 August 1956, ll. 14–19). 40.  “Prilozhenie no. 4 k prikazu no. 685 Ministra kul'tury SSSR,” 16 November 1957, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 3, d. 736, l. 37. 41.  See, for example, “Protokol no. 5 zasedaniia Kollegii Ministerstva kul'tury SSSR,” 5 February 1958, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 3, d. 737, ll. 13–18, especially pts. 1.1–1.5 (l. 15). 42.  “Prazdnik muzyki: Torzhestvennoe otkrytie Mezhdunarodnogo konkursa imeni P. I. Chaikovskogo,” Pravda, 18 March 1958. Preparations for the opening ceremony went to the last minute. The ministry’s plan was presented to the Central Committee on 12 March and sent back for improvements on 15 March, with the Department of Culture initially substituting Mikhailov for the proposed introductory speech by Mossovet Chair N. I. Bobrovnikov, who “categorically refused” to participate and suggested that the Ministry of Culture find more suitable, authoritative performers for the opening concert. See Kaftanov to TsK, 12 March 1958, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 71, l. 3; and Riurikov and Iarustovskii to TsK, 15 March 1958, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 71, l. 4. In the end, Mikhailov and Bobrovnikov both spoke.

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43.  For the final order of finish among the violinists, see “Prikaz po Ministerstvu kul'tury SSSR no. 353-k,” 11 April 1958, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 3, d. 736, l. 42. 44.  These impressions are so widespread that they form a key component of the American lore about Cold War cultural competition. For the Kennedy Center bio, see “Harvey Levan ‘Van’ Cliburn,” The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, www.kennedy-center.org/explorer/artists/?entity_id=3707&source_ type=A (accessed 26 April 2014). For the Time magazine cover, see “Time agazine Cover: Van Cliburn—May 19, 1958,” http://content.time.com/time/ covers/0,16641,19580519,00.html (accessed 26 April 2014), and www.time.com/ time/covers/0,16641,19580519,00.html (accessed 9 November 2009). For a recent blog entry that shows how striking the memories recounted in the Kennedy Center bio remain for some American classical music fans, see makuahunowai, “Reappraisals,” the first entry under “Comments” and blogger Nick Lewis’s response (both, 18 June 2007) to “Van Cliburn at the First Tchaikovsky Competition,” www. nicklewis.org/van-cliburn-at-the-1st-tchaikovsky-competition (accessed 9 November 2009). 45. These reports, a long concluding report submitted after the competition came to a close, and the responses of the Central Committee apparatus’s Department of Culture constitute RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 71. 46.  Mikhailov to TsK, 22 March 1958, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 71, ll. 5–6. 47.  D. A. Polikarpov and Iarustovskii to TsK, 29 March 1958, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 71, l. 7. 48.  For the report on the first round, see Mikhailov to TsK, 25 March 1958, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 71, l. 9, with supporting materials, ll. 8, 10–11. For the request for a Kremlin celebration, see Mikhailov to TsK, 27 March 1958, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 71, l. 12. 49.  Polikarpov and Iarustovskii to TsK, 8 April 1958, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 71, l. 13. 50.  Mikhailov to TsK, 22 April 1958, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 71, l. 20. 51.  Mikhailov to TsK, 1 April 1958, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 71, l. 14. 52.  Ibid., l. 15. Mikhailov concluded by asking for responses to his earlier reports and requests. 53.  Mikhailov to TsK, 22 April 1958, l. 19. 54.  “Stenogramma zasedaniia Zhiuri konkursa pianistov (III tur),” 13 April 1958, ll. 1–21, esp. ll. 3–5 (voting protocol and doubling one prize), ll. 6–7 (first place vote). 55.  Ibid., ll. 7–11 (second place votes and discussion) and l. 12 (Richter). 56.  Mikhailov to TsK, 22 April 1958, l. 22. 57.  Emil Gilel's, “Iskusstvo sblizhaet narody,” Pravda, 14 April 1958, 6; I. Martynov, “Prazdnik muzyki,” Izvestiia, 15 April 1958, 3. 58.  Mikhailov to TsK, 22 April 1958. 59.  Ibid.; and Riurikov and Iarustovskii to TsK KPSS, 25 April 1958, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 71, l. 28. 60. Prikaz Ministerstva kul'tury no. 311, “Ob itogakh Mezhdunarodnogo konkursa skripachei i pianistov im. P. I. Chaikovskogo,” 5 May 1958, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 3, d. 736, ll. 47–54.

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61.  Prikaz no. 311, l. 48. 62. Ibid. 63.  Mikhailov to TsK, 13 October 1958, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 72, ll. 135–36; and Polikarpov and Iarustovskii to TsK, 20 November 1958, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 72, l. 137. In the end, the Tchaikovsky Competition had cost 1.6 million rubles, over 50,000 of which were hard currency, significantly over budget but still a tiny fraction of the originally proposed Moscow Musical Holiday. According to the marginalia on l. 137, the Central Committee agreed with this denial. 64.  Prikaz no. 311, pt. 2, ll. 48–49. The departments of Music Institutions and Higher Education Institutions were to take one month to coordinate details with the republican ministries. Marginalia on l. 49 indicate that the minister of culture of each republic was informed of this “suggestion” between 16 May and 18 May. 65.  Ibid., pts. 3–4, 14, ll. 49, 52. 66.  Ibid., pt. 8, l. 51. The commission was to be chaired by Z. G. Vartanian, head of the Department of Music Institutions. 67.  Ibid., pt. 5b, l. 49. 68.  Mikhailov to TsK (22 April 1958), l. 26. 69.  Prikaz no. 311, pts. 5a, 5v, l. 49. 70.  Ibid., pts. 6a and 6v, l. 50. 71.  Ibid., pt. 6b, l. 50. 72.  Ibid., pt. 7, ll. 50–51. 73.  Ibid., pts. 12 and 19, ll. 52–53. 74.  Ibid., pts. 13, 15–17, ll. 52–53. 75.  Ibid., pts. 9–10, ll. 51–52. 76.  Ibid., pt. 18, l. 53. 77.  Mikhailov to TsK, 22 April 1958, 23. 78. Ibid. 79.  “Kratkaia zapis' besedy proiskhodivshei mezhdu referentom Otdela informatsii i propagandy st. l-tom Kul'nitskim i direktorom ‘Muzik-Fereina’ zala, general'nym sekretarem Obshchestva druzei muzyki g. Veny g-nom Rudol'fom Gamsegerom 5 fevralia 1953 g. v kabinete g-na Gamsegera,” 11 February 1953, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 225, ll. 47–49. 80.  Here I am simplifying a complex and extensively studied but still developing understanding of how music is perceived. For studies about non-expert musical judgment, see Barbara E. Lewis and Charles P. Schmidt, “Listeners’ Response to Music as a Function of Personality Type,” Journal of Research in Music Education 39, no. 4 (1991): 311–21; Zohar Eitan and Roni Y. Granot, “Growing Oranges on Mozart’s Apple Tree: ‘Inner Form’ and Aesthetic Judgment,” Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal 25, no. 5 (2008): 397–418; S. Omar Ali and Zehra F. Peynirciogˇlu, “Intensity of Emotions Conveyed and Elicited by Familiar and Unfamiliar Music,” Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal 27, no. 3 (2010): 177–82; and Jenefer Robinson and Robert S. Hatten, “Emotions in Music,” Music Theory Spectrum 34, no. 2 (2012): 71–106. 81.  For a paradigmatic example, see Howard Taubman, “Windows to the Souls of Nations: The Cultural Offerings at Brussels, A  Critic Finds, Reveal More Than the Sponsors Intended,” New York Times, 7 September 1958, SM20. 82.  Robert Philip, Performing Music in the Age of Recording (New Haven, 2004).

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4. Oistrakh on Tour, Richter at Home

1.  Tully Potter, “Mendelssohn / Mozart / Bach, J.S.: Violin Concertos (Oistrakh, Ormandy) (1955),”www.naxos.com/mainsite/blurbs_reviews.asp?item_code=8.111 246&catNum=8111246&filetype=About%20this%20Recording&language= English (accessed 8 January 2013). The liner notes are for Felix Mendelssohn, W. A. Mozart, and J. S. Bach, Violin Concertos, D. F. Oistrakh (violin), Eugene Ormandy (conductor), Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, recorded 1955, Naxos 8.111246, 2007, compact disc, which reissued selections from two earlier Columbia LP records. 2.  The recording of the first two was released the next year as Felix Mendelssohn, Violin Concerto; W. A. Mozart, Violin Concerto No. 4, perf. D. F. Oistrakh (violin) and Eugene Ormandy (cond.), Columbia ML 5085, 1956, LP. 3.  For the improvised decision, see Potter, “Mendelssohn / Mozart / Bach, J.S.: Violin Concertos (Oistrakh, Ormandy) (1955).” Closer to the event, a New York Times reviewer suggested that the Vivaldi replaced a more sensible pairing of the two superstars in the Bach double, explaining that Oistrakh wanted to record the latter with his son, Igor, then just bursting onto the international stage: Harold C. Schonberg, “Concertos with Stern and Oistrakh: Beethoven Concerto,” New York Times, 15 April 1956, 132. However, Schonberg places the recording session sometime in January, so the precision of his information about the session itself is dubious. In any case, these three recordings were released as David Oistrakh and Isaac Stern, Bach and Vivaldi Violin Concertos, Columbia ML 5087, 1956, LP, which Schonberg reviewed. 4.  Schonberg, “Concertos with Stern and Oistrakh.” 5.  For an article that stresses the Soviets’ competitive intent in concert tours to the United States in particular and traces those tours well into the 1960s, see Simo Mikkonen, “Winning Hearts and Minds? Soviet Music in the Cold War Struggle against the West,” in Twentieth-Century Music and Politics: Essays in Memory of Neil Edmunds, ed. Pauline Fairclough (Burlington, 2013), 135–54. On the place of Oistrakh and Richter tours of Finland in expanding Soviet cultural diplomacy efforts to the West, see Meri Herrala, “David Oistrakh and Sviatoslav Richter Stepping through the Iron Curtain,” in Ei ihan teorian mukaan, ed. Mikko Majander and Kimmo Rentola (Helsinki, 2012), 241–60. On Cold War cultural competition more generally, see Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War (New York, 1996); Naima Prevots, Dance for Export: Cultural Diplomacy and the Cold War (Middletown, Conn., 1999); Arch Puddington, Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (Lexington, 2000); Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York, 2001); Kenneth A. Osgood, “Hearts and Minds: The Unconventional Cold War,” Journal of Cold War Studies 4, no. 2 (2002): 85–107; David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (Oxford, 2003); Penny M. von Eschen, Satchmo Blows up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, MA, 2006); Greg Castillo, Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design (Minneapolis, 2010); Kristin Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire That Lost the Cultural Cold War (Ithaca, 2011); and Pauline Fairclough, “Détente to Cold War: Anglo-Soviet Musical Exchanges in the Late Stalin Period,” in Twentieth-Century Music and Politics: Essays in Memory of Neil Edmunds, ed. Pauline Fairclough (Burlington, 2013), 37–56.

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  6.  For a couple of examples, see “Music: A Master,” Time, 28 November 1955, www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,861677,00.html (accessed 2 December 2010); and “Music: Shostakovich Premiere,” Time, 9 January 1956, www. time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,866738–1,00.html (accessed 2 December 2010). Reports within the Soviet Ministry of Culture also quoted rave reviews in the Philadelphia Inquirer, News (Philadelphia), Minneapolis Star, and the New York Herald Tribune. Highest-level Soviet press coverage of the tour included the following: “Kontsert D. Oistrakha v N'iu-Iorke,” Izvestiia, 25 November 1955, 4; “Uspekh kontsertov Davida Oistrakha v SShA,” Izvestiia, 20 December 1955, 4; “Kontsertnye vystupleniia Davida Oistrakha v SShA,” Pravda, 20 December 1955, 4; and “Ogromnyi uspekh D. Oistrakha v SShA,” Izvestiia, 3 January 1956, 4.  7. Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge, MA, 2011), esp. 8.   8.  The artifacts range from popular films to the largest scholarly summary of cultural battles during the Cold War. For two representative examples, see Taylor Hackford, White Nights (Columbia Pictures, 1985), which starred one of the most prominent of those defectors, Mikhail Baryshnikov, alongside Gregory Hines and Helen Mirrin; and Caute, The Dancer Defects.  9. For an intriguing study of perpetually thwarted negotiations to initiate Anglo-Soviet musical exchanges in the late Stalin period, see Fairclough, “Détente to Cold War.” 10.  See “International Henryk Wieniawski Violin Competition,” www. wieniawski.com/ivc.html (accessed 24 April 2014); “Queen Elisabeth Competition, 1937–2013: Violin, Piano, Voice, Composition,” 2013, www.cmireb.be/Concours2/ documents/Palmares1937201319863.pdf; “David Oistrakh,” www.cmireb.be/cgi?l g=en&pag=1698&tab=102&rec=164&frm=0&par=secorig1680&par2=atvorig0 (accessed 29 April 2014); Michel Stockhem, “A Half-Century of Emotion,” trans. J. Drake, www.cmireb.be/en/p/5/41/44/50ans.html (accessed 9 December 2010). 11. “Ukaz Prezidiuma Verkhovnogo Soveta RSFSR o prisvoenii pochetnykh zvanii RSFSR rabotnikov iskusstv,” Izvestiia (Moscow), 28 October 1942, 1; “Postanovlenie Soveta narodnykh komissarov Soiuza SSR o prisuzhdenii Stalinskikh premii za vydaiushchiesia raboty v oblasti iskusstva i literatury za 1942 god,” Izvestiia (Moscow), 20 March 1943, 1; “Ukaz Prezidiuma Verkhovnogo soveta SSSR o nagrazhdenii ordenami i medaliami rabotnikov Moskovskoi gosudarstvennoi konservatorii im. P. I. Chaikovskogo,” Pravda, 29 December 1946, 1. He was awarded the most prestigious title available to artists, Peoples’ Artist of the Soviet Union, on 15 August 1953: “Ukaz Prezidiuma Verkhovnogo soveta SSSR o prisvoenii professoru Moskovskoi gosudarstvennoi konservatorii, skripachu Oistrakhu D. F. pochetnogo zvaniia narodnogo artista SSSR,” Pravda, 16 August 1953, 1. 12.  In this trip, he was joined by the conductor Evgenii Mravinskii and his wife, the pianist Lev Oborin, and the pianist and accompanist Abram Makarov: “Svedeniia o delegatsiiakh i kontsertnykh kollektivakh, napravlennykh Komitetom po delam iskusstv pri Sovete ministrov SSSR za granitsu za period s 1 iiuliia 1945 g. po nastoiashchee vremia” [5 June 1946], RGASPI f. 17, op. 128, d. 875, ll. 3–6, here l. 6 (date provided by A. Smol'ianov to L. S. Baranov, 5 June 1946, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 875, l. 2). See also A. Smolianov, “Kratkii otchet o prodelannoi rabote delegatsii i kontsertnykh kollektivov vyezzhavshikh za granitsu po zadaniiu Komiteta po delam

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iskusstv pri SM SSSR s 1 iiulia 1945 goda po nastoiashchee vremiia,” undated (but obviously submitted with ll. 2–6), RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 875, ll. 7–8, here l. 8; and “Svodka o delegatsiiakh, vyezzhavshikh iz Sovetskogo soiuza za granitsu s 1944 g. po 1 iiulia 1946 g.,” RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 876, l. 37. 13.  “Spisok rabotnikov i chlenov ikh semei, ne vyekhavshikh po raznym prichinam za granitsu, posle resheniia TsK VKP(b) i Komissii TsK VKP(b) po vyezdam za granitsu (po sostoianiiu na 1 ianvaria 1947g.,” RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 92a, ll. 46–48. The reason given was that travel to Austria was approved on 20 June 1946; their last performances at the Prague Spring Festival took place on the evening of 2 June 1946: “Nede˘le 02. Cˇerven 1946,” http://old.festival.cz/program5ea9.html?id_ program=15&akce=prehled&typ=datum&hodnota=1946–06–02&menu=1 (accessed 9 December 2012). The lag time was clearly too long—a typical problem that plagued international concertizing throughout the Stalin period. 14.  “Spravka o sostoiavshchikhsia vyezdakh rabotnikov iskusstv za granitsu za period s 1946 g. po iiul' 1951 g. vkliuchitel'no,” 31 August 1951, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 157, ll. 51–64, here l. 60. This list was prepared by Deputy Chairman of the Committee on Artistic Affairs N. E. Tverdokhlebov. For Finland as the “safest” Western country, see Mikkonen, “Winning Hearts and Minds?”; and esp. Herrala, “David Oistrakh and Sviatoslav Richter.” 15. For Italian plans, see E. Meleshko to D. P. Shevliagin, 18 March 1947, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 258, ll. 186–86ob. Meleshko was head of the Central European Department of VOKS; Shevliagin was a member of the Central Committee Department of Foreign Ties (Otdel vneshnykh snoshenii). For efforts to extend his Finnish trip to Sweden, see P. I. Lebedev to V. G. Grigor'ian and copy to A. I. Lavrent'ev, 10 November 1949, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 120, l. 144. Lebedev was head of the Committee on Artistic Affairs, Grigor'ian a member of the Central Committee, and Lavrent'ev deputy minister of foreign affairs. On a VOKS request to send Oistrakh to England, see E. P. Mitskevich to P. I. Lebedev, 8 September 1949, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 120, l. 135; and P. I. Lebedev to Mitskevich, with copy to Grigor'ian, 21 September 1949, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 120, l. 136. Mitskevich was vice chairman of the VOKS leadership board; the request most likely fell through because the Committee on Artistic Affairs would not commit to providing the necessary finances. 16. See materials on proposed exchange of musicians between the USSR and England: Alan Bush, Leonard Cassini, Bernard Stevens to VOKS, 7 November 1949, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 137, ll. 429–29ob.; VOKS to Committee on Artistic Affairs, ibid., l. 430; Mitskevich to P. I. Lebedev, 24 January 1950, ibid., l. 428; and A. I. Anisimov to Mitskevich, 14 February 1950, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 137, l. 427. 17.  “Spravka,” 31 August 1951, l. 57; and RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 199, l. 39 (for exact dates). See also “Queen Elisabeth Competition, 1937–2013: Violin, Piano, Voice, Composition” for a complete list of winners and jury members. 18.  N. N. Bespalov to M. A. Suslov, 7 June 1951, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 133, d. 329, l. 48; P. A. Tarasov and P. V. Lebedev to Suslov, 14 June 1951, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 133, d. 329, l. 49. This round of correspondence demonstrates the extreme micromanagement of mundane visa issues for foreign travel; it also shows how difficult those visa issues could be in the early Cold War by providing a glimpse into communiques between the Soviet and Italian embassies in Brussels regarding Oistrakh’s

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visa to Italy. See also “Spravka,” 31 August 1951, l. 57. Iampolsky was a frequent international traveler who accompanied many Soviet headliners in their solo recital concerts. 19.  “Albert Hall: Mr. David Oistrakh,” The Times (London), 7 December 1954, 11. See also “Mr. David Oistrakh’s Recital,” The Times (London), 11 November 1954, 11; and “Mr. David Oistrakh: Two Concertos,” The Times (London), 26 November 1954, 5. 20.  For Oistrakh’s jury participation in Brussels in 1955, see Ministry of Culture materials relating to the invitation to Oistrakh to serve on the jury, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 46, ll. 95–100 and “Queen Elisabeth Competition, 1937–2013: Violin, Piano, Voice, Composition.” For his concert programs to be performed during and after the competition, see RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 93, ll. 9–10. For a follow-up discussion with the impresario who arranged the Japanese tour, see “Zapis' besedy s S. Isimuro—prezidentom kompanii ‘Progress Treiding,” undated, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 384, ll. 43–44. The conversation took place on 20 August 1955. 21.  Ulbrich Wallner to Soviet embassy, 9 September 1954, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 72, l. 6. 22.  “Zapis' besedy s nemetskim kompozitorom Kurt Drishem (Zapadnaia Germaniia)” [undated, no later than 3 June 1954], RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 72, ll. 1–5, here ll. 1–2. 23.  Ibid., ll. 2–3. 24.  Ibid., ll. 3–5. 25.  “Gilels Triumphs in Philadelphia: Top Soviet Pianist Receives Ovation after Tchaikovsky Work—Here Tonight,” New York Times, 4 October 1955, 40; “Music: A Great Pianist,” New York Times, 5 October 1955, 40; Harold C. Schonberg, “A ‘Little Giant’: Gilels’ Playing Has the Mark of a Master,” New York Times, 12 October 1955, 36; and Cyrus Durgin, “Master of the Keyboard: Soviet Pianist Emil Gilels Cheered at Boston Debut,” Daily Boston Globe, 24 October 1955, 7. 26.  “Music: A Great Pianist.” 27.  Durgin, “Master of the Keyboard.” 28.  Maxine Cheshire, “For Evening Musicale: The Russian Embassy Lights Up,” The Washington Post and Times Herald, 28 October 1955, 65; and “Gilels Pays $2,000 Cash for a Piano,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 22 December 1955, A9. 29.  Howard Taubman, “The Test Is Music: International Exchanges Are Welcome but Art Must Be the Major Factor,” New York Times, 18 September 1955, X9; and Edgar Driscoll, “Here With ‘Good Wishes,’ Says Russian Pianist,” Daily Boston Globe, 23 October 1955, 29. 30.  “Na gastrole v SShA,” Pravda, 29 September 1955, 4; “Vystuplenie Emilia Gilel'sa v N'iu-Iorke,” Izvestiia (Moscow), 6 October 1955, 4; “Kontsert E. Gilel'sa v Filadelfii,” Pravda, 11 October 1955, 4; and “Kontserty sovetskogo pianista v SShA,” Literaturnaia gazeta 13 October 1955, 1. See also the short mention of the Gilels tour in a list of praise for Soviet artists then performing abroad that includes Oistrakh and the Moiseev Ensemble: “Fakty odnogo dnia,” Pravda, 9 October 1955, 2. 31.  Draft memo to Aleksandrov, 25 January 1955, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 163, l. 61; George Kuyper to Soviet ambassador, 13 December 1954, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 65 (see also l. 4, the Russian translation); F. C. Schang to Youri J. Gouk [sic], 8 January 1955, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 163, l. 64 (see also l. 5, the Russian

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translation). Kuyper was the manager of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; he was writing on Reiner’s behalf. Iurii Guk was the cultural attache in the Soviet embassy in Washington. 32.  Telegram copy of contract [undated, probably around 15 September 1955], RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 166, ll. 133–52. 33.  A. A. Slavnov to D. G. Slukhanishvili, 21 September 1955, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 166, l. 126; and Slavnov to [Soviet] embassy, 10 October 1955, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 166, l. 127. Slavnov was a bureaucrat in the Ministry of Culture; Slukhanishvili, in the Concert Tour Administration. 34. Draft Programs, on Oistrakh’s personal stationary (undated, fall 1955), RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 166, l. 131. “Spravka” [unsigned, undated], RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 6, l. 32. This report had to have been written between 31 October and 4 November 1955 since it describes events in the past tense through 31 October and accompanied a memo dated 4 November. The report describes the negotiations between von Karajan and Oistrakh over repertoire, conducted through the Soviet embassy: on 14 October, embassy officials confirmed Oistrakh’s proposed program with von Karajan. On 19 October, embassy officials passed to the Ministry of Culture von Karajan’s request that Oistrakh perform the Mendelssohn violin concerto instead of Oistrakh’s preferred Brahms. On 20 October, the ministry replied that Oistrakh would not perform the Mendelssohn, and on 31 October, von Karajan again agreed to Oistrakh’s original program. In the draft programs, Oistrakh notes a willingness to perform any of nine concertos, listed in order of preference. Mendelssohn was not on that list. 35.  “Sell-out for Oistrakh,” New York Times, 1 November 1955, 25. 36.  “Music Note,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 2 November 1955, B2. 37. See for example, “Red Violinist to Visit,” Los Angeles Times, 6 November 1955, 20, which ran a brief report from Moscow when Oistrakh received his visa to travel to the United States. 38.  See, for example, Claudia Cassidy, “On the Aisle: This Is Quite a Lot of Concert to Get Into One Headline,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 14 October 1955, A1 (the “Notes” section) and the considerably more cautious (and accurate) Ross Parmenter, “World of Music: Job for Ibert,” New York Times, 23 October 1955, X9 (the “Oistrakh” section). The Chicago Daily Tribune crowed about breaking the story two weeks later in the midst of a brief report about the London Philharmonia’s appearance at Orchestra Hall and about Oistrakh’s impending visit to the city: “Philharmonia Plays Second Concert Today,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 5 November 1955, G2. 39.  N. A. Mikhailov to TsK, 4 November 1955, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 6, ll. 30–31. Mikhailov identified the secretary of the Soviet-American friendship society merely as “Ber”; I have assumed this is the same Theodeore Bayer who had been administrative secretary of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship in 1950, for which see Jessica Smith, “Seven Years of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship,” VOKS Bulletin 64 (1950): 92–97. At the request of the leadership of the American Communist Party, Fast reportedly met with one Sobolev, who I assume to be Arakadii Aleksandrovich Sobolev, then the Soviet representative to the United Nations and UN Security Council, and Bayer met with Ambassador G. N. Zarubin. 40.  D. A. Polikarpov and B. M. Iarustovskii to TsK, 10 November 1955, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 6, ll. 33–34. Polikarpov was head of the Culture Department within

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the Central Committee apparatus; Iarustovskii headed its music sector. These characterizations no doubt understate von Karajan’s association with Nazism. He was a party member whose career flourished under the Nazi regime, though whether his membership was purely or just partially careerist exercised biographers and popular music writers through the one hundredth anniversary of his birth. For the most extensive biography, which argues for primarily careerist motivations, see Richard Osborne, Herbert Von Karajan: A Life in Music (Lebanon, 1998). For continued disgust in the popular musical press a decade later, see for example, Norman Lebrecht, “The Clapped-Out Legacy of Karajan That Impoverished Classical Music,” The Independent, 6 April 2008, www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/norman-lebrechtthe-clappedout-legacy-of-karajan-that-impoverished-classical-music-805141.html (accessed 9 January 2013). Von Karajan’s Nazi past was certainly controversial at the time. His first U.S. tour, with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1955, evoked protests from American musicians, audiences, and Jewish groups but received support from the CIA front organization, the Congress for Cultural Freedom and, eventually, the U.S. State Department. See “Musicians Oppose Concert Here by ‘Nazi-Led’ Berlin Orchestra,” New York Times, 20 February 1955, 1; “Berlin Philharmonic Manager Explains Nazi Membership, Silent on Tour Protest,” New York Times, 21 February 1955, 17; “State Department Inquiry,” New York Times, 22 February 1955, 23; “Committee Backs Orchestra Tour: Cultural Freedom Group Is Opposed to Banning of the Berlin Philharmonic Here,” New York Times, 22 February 1955, 23; “Thousand Sign Protest on Orchestra Visit,” New York Times, 23 February 1955, 23; “Musicians Press Protest on Tour: Executive Board of Local 802 Votes to Submit Objection on Berlin Unit to A. F. M.,” New York Times, 24 February 1955, 21; Howard Taubman, “Question of Art and Politics Is Raised Anew by Berlin Philharmonic Visit,” New York Times, 6 March 1955, X7; and “Three Pigeons Loosed as Protest at Concert of Berlin Orchestra in Carnegie Hall,” New York Times, 31 March 1955, 23. On the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the CIA, see Saunders, The Cultural Cold War. 41.  Mikhailov to TsK, 4 November 1955, 30–31. 42.  Polikarpov and Iarustovskii to TsK, 10 November 1955, 33; “Oistrakh Cancels Debut Tomorrow,” New York Times, 12 November 1955, 23. The newspaper’s source was Columbia Artists Management, which reported the contents of a letter of regret from Oistrakh, delivered to them through the Soviet embassy. 43.  V. A. Boni to E. A. Elshin, 9 November 1955, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 166, l. 119a. This memo arranged for a change in Oistrakh’s air travel itinerary. V. A. Boni was head of the Ministry of Culture Department on the Americas. 44.  See for example: “Oistrakh On Way Here,” New York Times, 15 November 1955, 39; and “Oistrakh Arrives for Tour of US,” New York Times, 17 November 1955, 44, the first article in which Oistrakh himself addressed the issue. 45.  Mikhailov to TsK, 4 November 1955, 30–31. 46.  Polikarpov and Iarustovskii to TsK, 10 November 1955, 33. 47.  Ibid., 34. 48.  Mikhailov to TsK, 11 November 1955, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 6, ll. 35–36, here l. 35. 49. Ibid. 50.  Ibid., 35–36.

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51.  Ibid., 36. 52.  “Oistrakh Scores Recital Triumph,” New York Times, 24 November 1955, 39; Seymour Raven, “Words Nearly Inadequate to Hail Violinist,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 30 November 1955, B7. See also the two newspapers reviews after the first of each pair of recitals: Howard Taubman, “Singing Strings,” New York Times, 21 November 1955, 26; and Raven, “Oistrakh Is Superb in Debut Here,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 29 November 1955, A6. 53.  “Oistrakh Extends Stay,” New York Times, 5 December 1955, 34; “Oistrakh to Introduce Shostakovich Concerto,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 5 December 1955, C12; Ross Parmenter, “Music: A New Concerto. Oistrakh in Premiere of Shostakovich Work,” New York Times, 30 December 1955, 13; and “Music: Shostakovich Premiere,” Time, 9 January 1956, www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,866738–1,00. html (accessed 2 December 2010). See also “Broken String Fails to Entangle Oistrakh,” New York Times, 31 December 1955, 17; and “Oistrakh Heard Here,” New York Times, 2 January 1956, 17. On the recording, see Claudia Cassidy, “Records: Oistrakh’s Shostakovich, ‘Poeme’ and Rondo Capriccioso,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 22 January 1956, E8; and the recording itself: Shostakovitch: Violin Concerto Op. 99 (First Recording), Mitropoulos, Oistrakh, Columbia Masterworks ML 5077 (1956). 54. Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, 1992); Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome; Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941 (Oxford, 2011). 55. Handwritten notes on Oistrakh’s personal stationary [undated, but September–October 1955], RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 166, ll. 130–31. These undated notes were filed with a copy of the contract between Oistrakh and Columbia Artists Management and a set of memos dealing with the mundane formalities of international travel connected with the U.S. tour. 56.  R. P., “Gilels ‘Concert’ at Carnegie Hall:  Changes Planned Recital to Play Rachmaninoff and Beethoven Concertos,” New York Times, 17 October 1955; and Seymour Raven, “Russ Cellist Plays Debut in Chicago,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 8 May 1956, b3. 57.  Handwritten notes, l. 131. 58.  “Gilels Triumphs in Philadelphia”; “Music: A Great Pianist”; Schonberg, “A ‘Little Giant’ ”; and Seymour Raven, “Reiner-Gilels Recording Day Musical Treat,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 6 November 1955, g1. 59. R. P., “Gilels ‘Concert’ at Carnegie Hall”; Howard Taubman, “Music: Oistrakh Plays: Soviet Violinist Heard in Three Concertos,” New York Times, 22 December 1955, 20. 60.  Handwritten notes, l. 131. Before he left for the United States, these were his top two choices for concerti beyond the Mozart, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky standards to perform with a U.S. orchestra, presumably because he expected the orchestras to have some familiarity with them. The Khachaturian concerto was written for and dedicated to Oistrakh, as was the Shostakovich piece he played. That Shostakovich premiere was an on-tour decision. 61.  Schonberg, “A ‘Little Giant.’ ” 62.  Paul Hume, “Russian Has Cello Debut in Capital,” The Washington Post and Times Herald, 15 April 1956, C9; Albert Goldberg, “Cellist from Russia Dazzling

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Virtuoso,” Los Angeles Times, 24 April 1956, 21; and Raven, “Russ Cellist Plays Debut in Chicago.” 63.  Parmenter, “A New Concerto.” 64.  Goldberg, “Cellist from Russia Dazzling Virtuoso.” 65.  Schonberg, “A ‘Little Giant.’ ” 66.  Music criticism in the mainstream press was permeated with this assumption of Soviet repression, though it was not always articulated in direct interchange with the Soviet musicians themselves. For a report of Rostropovich’s response to a question about artistic freedom, see Albert Goldberg, “The Sounding Board: Rostropovich Describes Musical Life in Soviet Union; Denies Political Influence on Composers,” Los Angeles Times, 13 May 1956, E5. For a reference to security issues tied to the activities of Oistrakh’s translator alongside a reference to postrevolutionary expropriation of the Russian aristocracy, see John Briggs, “Vignette of a Visiting Soviet Violinist,” New York Times, 27 November 1955, 151. 67.  Briggs, “Vignette of a Visiting Soviet Violinist”; “Gilels Pays $2,000 Cash for a Piano”; Harold C. Schonberg, “Soviet Musicians Shop for Goodies,” New York Times, 22 December 1955, 19; Marie McNair, “Music the Note at Soviet Embassy,” Washington Post and Times Herald, 17 December 1955, 23. The papers also reported on the general travel restrictions imposed by the U.S. Department of State on all Soviets and how that affected plans for Oistrakh’s tour (“Many Cities Off Limits to Red Violinist,” Washington Post and Times Herald, 25 November 1955, 3). An earlier controversy about how to work around a mandatory fingerprinting requirement to which the Soviets objected had been the subject of a similar article during the Gilels tour: “Red Artists Given Status As ‘Officials,’ ” Washington Post and Times Herald, 1 October 1955, 27. 68.  On the Geneva Summit, see Günter Bischof and Saki Dockrill, eds., Cold War Respite: The Geneva Summit of 1955 (Baton Rouge, 2000). For an explicit reference to it during coverage of the tours, see “Music: A Great Pianist.” 69.  “Cultural Exchange Asked by Oistrakh,” New York Times, 25 January 1956, 28. 70.  Robert T. Hartmann, “Mrs.  Norman Chandler Urges Cultural Exchange,” Los Angeles Times, 21 January 1956, 2. Chandler, the wife of Los Angeles Times publisher Norman Chandler, was a major arts philanthropist in southern California, a regent of the University of California system, and president of the Southern California Symphony Association. The long-time home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, was named for her after she led the successful fundraising efforts for its construction, an effort that was just beginning at the time of her Congressional testimony. See “Dorothy Buffum Chandler,” www.musiccenter.org/ about/About-The-Music-Center/History—Archives/Dorothy-Buffum-Chandler (accessed 29 April 2014). 71.  “Otchet o kul'turnykh sviaziakh SSSR so stranami amerikanskogo kontinenta v 1955 godu” [not signed or dated, but early 1956], RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 82, ll. 1–14, here ll. 2–3. The quotes are from the Philadelphia Inquirer, 26 November 1955 (Stradivarius) and the Philadelphia News, 26 November 1955 (best in world). The report also quoted the Minneapolis Star (best since Eugene Izai) and the New York Herald Tribune (greatest of his time). 72.  Ibid., ll. 3–4.

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73.  “Zapis' besedy s D. Oistrakhom o poezdke v Ameriku,” 14 December [1956], RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 166, ll. 120–25. 74.  Ibid., ll. 120–21. 75.  Ibid., l. 125. 76.  Polikarpov and Iarustovskii to TsK, 16 September 1957, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 46, ll. 111–13. 77.  Ibid., l. 111. 78.  On Petrov’s international exploits in the 1950s, see I. M. Yampol'sky, “Petrov, Ivan,” Grove Music Online, www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/ music/O002700 (accessed 29 April 2014); and Galina Gorbenko, “Nezabvennyi russkii bas: Vspominaia Ivana Petrova,” Belcanto.ru, 21 January 2004, www.belcanto. ru/article21012004.html. 79.  Polikarpov and Iarustovskii to TsK, 16 September 1957, l. 111. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid. 82.  Ibid., l. 112. 83.  Ibid., l. 112. 84.  For a discussion of a Stalin-era attack on the highest royalty earnings emanating from the Central Committee bureaucracy and Ministry of Finance, see Kiril Tomoff, Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939–1953 (Ithaca, 2006), 227–34; and Kiril Tomoff, “The Illegitimacy of Popularity: Soviet Composers and the Royalties Administration, 1939–1953,” Russian History 27, no. 3 (2000): 311–40. 85.  Poliakarpov and Iarustovskii to TsK, 16 September 1957, ll. 112–13. 86. Ibid. 87.  For another account of Richter’s case, based on many of the same archival documents consulted here, see Mikkonen, “Winning Hearts and Minds?” As I do, Mikkonen sees Richter’s case as particularly illustrative of the Soviet preoccupation with security. His chapter follows the case beyond the point I take it here and into the 1960s, when the restriction was finally lifted. 88.  See Paul Geffen, “Sviatoslav Richter Discography,” http://trovar.com/str/ RichterD.html (accessed 29 April 2014). 89.  Czech Philharmonia to VKI, 21 September 1948, RGALI, f. 962, op. 5, d. 1118, l. 124. 90.  For the inclusion of Richter on a list of past Prague Spring Festival participants who had represented the Soviet Union’s artistic achievements well, see A. M. Rumiantsev, Tarasov, and P. V. Lebedev to TsK, 25 January 1954, RGANI, f. 5, op. 17, d. 494, ll. 1–6, here l. 1. The authors were all bureaucrats in the Central Committee’s Culture Department. 91.  “Plan gastrolei teatral'nykh i muzykal'nykh kollektivov i kontsertnykh ispolnitelei za granitsei na 1949 god” [April 1949], RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 120, ll. 24–28, here l. 24. 92.  Russian translation of Alan Bush, Leonard Cassini, and Bernard Stevens to VOKS, 7 November 1949, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 137, ll. 429–49ob. 93.  Anisimov to Mitskevich, 14 February 1950, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 137. Anisimov was head of the Committee’s Chief Directorate of Musical Institutions;

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E. Mitskevich was a vice chairman of VOKS. Anisimov was acting on the general instructions of N. N. Bespalov, first vice chairman of the Committee on Artistic Affairs. See marginalia on E. Mitskevich to P. I. Lebedev, 24 January 1950, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 137, l. 428. P. I. Lebedev was chairman of the Committee on Artistic Affairs. Richter’s name was first suggested by Anisimov.   94.  A. Parkaev to L. D. Kislova, 2 March 1953, RGALI, f. 962, op. 10, d. 225, ll. 54–55. Parkaev was the VOKS representative in Austria, Kislova a member of the VOKS leadership committee.  95.  “Sovetsko-vengerskoe kul'turnoe sotrudnichestvo v 1946–1955 godakh” [unsigned, undated, but late 1955], RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 109, ll. 1–5, here l. 3; Polikarpov and Iarustovksii to TsK KPSS, 11 April 1956, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 24, l. 31.   96.  For a few examples, including two laments that Richter would not soon appear in the West from critics who had the rare opportunity to hear him perform live in Moscow while they followed the Philadelphia Orchestra-Ormandy tour of the Soviet Union, see Howard Taubman, “Richter, Pianist, Heard in Moscow: Much-Heralded Performer Does Not Disappoint in Concerto by Mozart,” New York Times, 20 May 1958, 38; Max Frankels, “Richter, Ormandy in Joint Triumph: Soviet Pianist Is Soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra in Moscow,” New York Times, 30 May 1958, 12; and Taubman, “Windows to the Souls of Nations: The Cultural Offerings at Brussels, A  Critic Finds, Reveal More Than the Sponsors Intended,” New York Times, 7 September 1958, SM20. The ubiquitous record reviews are too numerous to list, but the American critical consensus of the 1950s was concisely summed up by Claudia Cassidy at the end of a one-paragraph record review: “Wish he could come visiting” (“Records: ‘New Girl in Town,’ Spanish Music, Markevitch, Richter, Old London Town,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 30 June 1957, e9).   97.  F. S. Schang to Boni, 19 October 1956, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 24, l. 166. Schang also hedged his bets: should the Richter tour be denied, he sought to organize tours for Gilels or either of the Oistrakhs for 1957–1958. On a grander scale, he suggested a Leningrad Symphony orchestra tour provided that the onerous fingerprinting provision could be waived for them.   98.  Mikhailov to TsK KPSS, 27 March 1956, RGALI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 24, l. 29.  99. William S. Mann, “Legge, Walter,” Grove Music Online, www.oxford musiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/16297 (accessed 29 April 2014). Columbia Records would eventually become EMI, by which label many of those postwar productions that Mann dubs “classic examples of the medium” would later be remembered. 100.  Mikhailov to TsK KPSS, 27 March 1956; Proekt postanovleniia TsK KPSS, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 24, l. 30. 101.  Polikarpov and Iarustovskii to TsK KPSS, 11 April 1956, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 24, l. 31. 102.  Ibid., marginalia, 12 April 1956. 103.  Mikhailov to TsK, 29 June 1956, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 24, ll. 70–71, here l. 70. This document has been published as N. A. Mikhailov, “Zapiska ministra kul'tury SSSR N. A. Mikhailov s pros'boi razreshit' S. T. Rikhteru priniat' uchastie v torzhestvakh, posviashchennykh kompozitoru R. Shumanu,” in Apparat TsK KPSS i kul' tura, 1953–1957: dokumenty, ed. Z. K. Vodop'ianova et al. (Moscow, 2001), 504–5.

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104. Ibid. 105. Ibid. 106.  B. S. Riurikov and Iarustovskii to TsK KPSS, 6 July 1956, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 24, ll. 73–74. This document has also been published as B. S. Riurikov and B.M. Iarustovskii, “Zapiska otdela kul'tury TsK KPSS s soglasiem sekretaria TsK KPSS o razreshenii pianistu S. Rikhteru priniat' uchastie v torzhestvakh, posviashchennykh 100-letiiu so dnia smerti Roberta Shumana,” in Apparat TsK KPSS i kul' tura, 1953–1957, 512–13. 107.  Riurikov and Iarustovskii to TsK, 6 July 1956, l. 73. 108.  V. I. Pakhomov to TsK, 6 September 1956, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 24, l. 110. 109.  Riurikov and A. M. Shvedov to TsK, 15 October 1956, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 24, l. 112 and marginalia, 15 October 1956, ibid. Another deputy minister of culture (P. V. Lebedev) was given the instructions to reconsider on 16 October: marginalia, ibid. 110.  Dorliak to Mikhailov [undated, but either very late 1957 or early 1958], RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 72, ll. 29–30. 111.  Mikhailov to TsK [received 14 Jan 1958], RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 72, ll. 27–28. 112.  Ibid., l. 28. 113.  Polikarpov and Iarustovskii to TsK, 4 April 1958, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 72, l. 31. 114.  Ibid., marginalia. 115.  S. V. Kaftanov to TsK [received 15 September 1958], RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 72, l. 125 and marginalia on ibid. Kaftanov was deputy minister of culture. 116. See Harlow Robinson, The Last Impresario: The Life, Times, and Legacy of Sol Hurok (New York, 1994), 387–88; Mikkonen, “Winning Hearts and Minds?”; and Herrala, “David Oistrakh and Sviatoslav Richter Stepping through the Iron Curtain.” 117.  See “Dancer Kidnapped, Soviet Aide Charges,” New York Times, 4 July 1974, 16; “Baryshnikov, Defecting Dancer, Says Decision Was Not Political,” New York Times, 7 July 1974, 34; Caute, The Dancer Defects; and Robinson, The Last Impresario, 389–91. 118. Robinson, The Last Impresario, 315, citing, in part, Ninette de Valois, Come Dance with Me: A Memoir, 1898–1956 (London, 1959), 188. 119. Robinson, The Last Impresario, 85. 120.  On composers as typical of the artistic intelligentsia and its elite access to goods in the Stalin period, see Tomoff, Creative Union, 215–99. 121. Maya Plisetskaya, I, Maya Plisetskaya, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (New Haven, 2001), 199, 202–3, 206–17. The first edition was published in Russian: Maiia Mikhailovna Plisetskaia, Ia, Maiia Plisetskaia (Moscow, 1994). 122. Plisetskaya, I, Maya Plisetskaya, 207, 209, 217. 123. Galina Vishnevskaya, Galina: A Russian Story, trans. Guy Daniels (1984), 288. This is the first published edition of Vishnevskaya’s memoirs, which were subsequently released in Russian, both in the West and in post-Soviet Russia: Galina Vishnevskaia, Galina: Istoriia zhizni (Paris, 1985); Galina Pavlovna Vishnevskaia, Galina: Istoriia zhizni (Moscow, 1991); and Galina Vishnevskaia, Galina: Istoriia zhizni, exp. ed. (Moscow, 2006).

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124. Vishnevskaya, Galina: A Russian Story, 298–300. For a gently phrased early complaint about the deleterious effects of miserly compensation—especially insufficient housing allotments—on Soviet performers touring in the West, see D. B. Kabalevskii, “Otchet o poezdke gruppy sovetskikh muzykantov v Parizhe v iiune–iiule 1953 g.,” 18 July 1953, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 9, ll. 1–23, here ll. 20–21. Kabalevsky’s main concern was that Soviet musicians could not accept social invitations from French colleagues because their substandard hotel accommodations meant that they could not hope to reciprocate. 125. Vishnevskaya, Galina: A Russian Story, 117–20. 126. Plisetskaya, I, Maya Plisetskaya, 198. 127.  On the shift, see Mikkonen, “Winning Hearts and Minds?” 135–54. On the later state of affairs, see Caute, The Dancer Defects. 128.  Zapis', ll. 121–22. 129.  Ibid., ll. 124–25. 130.  Ibid., l. 122. 131. Ibid. 132.  David Oistrakh et al., I. Brams—A. Dvorzhak. Kontserty dlia skripki s orkestrom, Gramzapis' GCD 00212, 1991, compact disc, recorded 1951, 1952; and David Oistrakh et al., Violin Concertos by Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky, Sony Classics 700812, 2007, compact disc, recorded 1956, 1959. 133.  The classic lament about standardization of music more generally is associated with the voluminous writings of Theodor Adorno. For one representative example, see T. W. Adorno, “A Social Critique of Radio Music,” The Kenyon Review 7, no. 2 (1945): 208–17. For two recent examples of the ubiquitous assumption framing popular writing about music that diverges from it, see Philip Kennicott, “Reflecting on Style,” Opera News 74, no. 2 (2009): 12–15; and Anthony Tommasini, “Finding the Soul of Russia Everywhere,” New York Times, 16 April 2011. 134.  Robert Philip, Performing Music in the Age of Recording (New Haven, 2004), 232. 135.  Ibid., esp. 4–25. 136.  Ibid., esp. 23–24, 94–97. For a technical discussion that contributed to the practical realization of a small aspect of the much larger standardization, the change in oboe sound amid discussion of particularly French and German national styles, see Waldemar Bhosys, “Oboe Reed Standardization,” Woodwind Magazine 2, no. 5 (1950): 5; and Walter L. Wehner, “The Effects of Four Profiles of Oboe Reeds on Intonation,” Journal of Research in Music Education 18, no. 3 (1970): 242–47. 137. For lists of LP and CD releases containing the three recordings, see Jean-Michel Molkhou, “Oistrakh on Record,” Strad 108, no. 1291 (1997): 1268. 138. Harold C. Schonberg, “Concertos with Stern and Oistrakh: Beethoven Concerto,” New York Times, 15 April 1956, 132. 139.  For a series of intriguing scholarly examinations of the Brussels Expo ’58 World’s Fair, see György Péteri, ed., “Sites of Convergence—the USSR and Communist Eastern Europe at International Fairs Abroad and at Home,” special issue of Journal of Contemporary History 47, no. 1 (2012): 1–212. 140.  Taubman, “Windows to the Souls of Nations.” 141.  Without the imperial overtones, Philip makes this point incidentally in his discussion of how the tenacious “Russian” brass playing that typified Soviet orchestras for most of the twentieth century is disappearing as a younger, internationalized

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generation of Russian brass players replaces the last Soviet-trained musicians (Performing Music in the Age of Recording, 95–96). 142. Ben Atlas, “Senators Ferguson and Green as ‘Voice’ Reorientation,” The Billboard 63, no. 18 (1951): 8. The senators in question were Homer S. Ferguson (Republican from Michigan) and Theodore Green (Democrat from Rhode Island); their dire assessment came out of an investigation of the effectiveness of Voice of America broadcasts. 5. Oistrakh and the Impresario: Soviet Concert Tours and Systemic Integration

1.  “Shostakovich Premiere,” Time 67, no. 2 (1956): 73. 2.  “Zapis' besedy s D. Oistrakhom o poezdke v Ameriku,” 14 December [1956], RGALI f. 2329, op. 8, d. 166, ll. 120–25, here ll. 123–24. This document will henceforth be cited as “Zapis'”. The original is dated 1955, but Oistrakh was still in the United States in December 1955; this debriefing clearly took place well after his return, so the 1955 date must be a typographical error.   3.  John Rodgers, Melbourne to LT VOKS, Moscow, 11 August 1955, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 165, l. 19.   4.  L. D. Kislova to V. T. Stepanov, 17 Aug 1955, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 165, l. 18.   5.  John Rodgers to V. G. Iakovlev, 19 August 1955, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 165, ll. 21–22 and ll. 15–17 (Russian translation); Charles Moses to John Rodgers, 17 August 1955, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 165, l. 23; and Rodgers to Moses (undated copy), RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 165, ll. 24–25. VOKS forwarded the packet to the Ministry of Culture on 3 September: K. A. Perevoshchikov to Stepanov, 3 September 1955, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8. d. 165, l. 20. Iakovlev was vice chairman of the VOKS board; Perevoshchikov headed the British Commonwealth Department of VOKS.   6.  Rodgers to Moses; Rodgers to Iakovlev, ll. 16, 22.   7.  Moses to Rodgers.   8.  Rodgers to Moses, l. 24, emphasis added.   9.  Rodgers to Iakovlev, l. 22. 10.  Stepanov to Kislova, 12 [September] 1955, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 165, l. 14. My notes have this memo dated 12 July 1955, an impossible date considering that it responds directly and explicitly to Rodgers’s 11 August telegram and 19 August letter and VOKS’s memos of 17 August and 2 September. The memo must have actually been dated 12 September. 11.  Larry Sitsky, Australian Piano Music of the Twentieth Century (Westport, 2005), 185. 12.  I am grateful to Sheila Fitzpatrick for recognizing Rodgers, questioning my characterization of him in an earlier draft of this chapter, providing some sources for learning more about him, and suggesting still others. For his wartime position as secretary of the Australia-Soviet Friendship League, see “Soviet Constitution,” The Age (Melbourne), 25 May 1942, 2. 13.  According to VOKS records generously provided to me by Sheila Fitzpatrick, the dates of his Soviet visit were 9 July to 7 August 1948: VOKS Otdel kadrov, “Svedeniia o zagranichnykh delegatsiiakh,” GARF, f. 5283, op. 8, d. 354, l. 42.

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14.  Perevoshchikov, report, 20 July 1948, GARF, f. 5283, op. 22, d. 76, ll. 153–55; P. A. Kapustin, report, GARF, f. 5283, op. 22, d. 76, ll. 155–57; and L. D. Kislova, report, 9 July 1948, GARF, f. 5283, op. 22, d. 76, ll. 168–80. Thanks to Sheila Fitzpatrick for allowing me access to her notes on all three documents. 15.  John Rodgers, Report on the Soviet Union (Melbourne, 1949). On Australian visitors to the Soviet Union, see Sheila Fitzpatrick and Carolyn Rasmussen, eds., Political Tourists: Travellers from Australia to the Soviet Union in the 1920s-1940s (Melbourne, 2008). 16.  See “Speech Was Not to Advocate Communism,” The Age (Melbourne), 22 February 1949, 3; “Australia-Soviet House Pernicious,” The Age (Melbourne), 23 February 1949, 3; “Town Hall Ban: Proceedings in Court,” The Age (Melbourne) 23 February 1949, 3; “Police Called to Meeting in Melbourne,” Sydney Morning Herald, 24 February 1949, 1; “Soviet House to Have Hall,” Sydney Morning Herald, 7 March 1949, 3; “Reprisals against City Councillors,” The Age (Melbourne), 11 March 1949, 3; “Hall Packed for Mr. Rodgers’s St. Kilda Meeting,” The Age (Melbourne), 22 March 1949, 3; and “Mildura Meeting,” The Age (Melbourne), 18 June 1949, 3. 17. On the accusations, see “ ‘John Rodgers a Secret Red,’ Sharpley Alleges: Names Others Too,” The Argus (Melbourne), 7 July 1949, 6. On his testimony before the Royal Commission, see “Permission to Reply to Allegations Sought,” The Age (Melbourne), 12 July 1949, 4; “Inquiry on Communism: Australia-Soviet House Director Denies Charge,” The Age (Melbourne), 11 August 1949, 4; “Sharp­ ley to Rest; Twenty-One Days In Box,” Sydney Morning Herald, 11 August 1949, 4; “Inquiry on Communism: Australia-Soviet House Finances Investigated,” The Age (Melbourne), 16 August 1949, 6; “Inquiry on Communism: Questions on Australia-Soviet House Finances,” The Age (Melbourne), 8 September 1949, 4; and “Inquiry on Communism: Australia-Soviet House Finances Investigated,” The Age (Melbourne), 9 September 1949, 4. For reporting on the commission’s findings, see “Communist Inquiry Report,” The Age (Melbourne), 1 May 1950, 3. 18.  “Cleric Says Aust Peace Congress Is ‘Phoney’,” The Daily News (Perth), 17 April 1950, 2; “Says England Australia Most Vulnerable Countries,” Advocate (Burnie, Tasmania), 18 April 18, 1950, 2; “Communists Speak Up at Peace Conference Melbourne, Tuesday,” The Canberra Times, 19 April 1950, 1; “Raid on Marx House Gave Clue to Red Peace Drive,” Sydney Morning Herald, 9 May 1950, 6; “Curtain Lifted on That University Visitor,” The Daily News (Perth), 27 September 1950, 5. 19.  “Aust-Soviet House Sold,” The Argus (Melbourne), 4 February 1950, 7. 20. On the Petrov Affair, see Evdokia Petrova and Vladimir Mikhailovich Petrov, Empire of Fear (New York, 1956); and Robert Manne, The Petrov Affair: Politics and Espionage (Sydney, 1987). 21.  See, for example, “Petrov Inquiry Told of Attempt to Influence Witness,” The Age (Melbourne), 11 September 1954, 1; “Doctor’s Story of His Meetings with Petrov,” The Age (Melbourne), 11 September 1954, 5; and “Alleged Bid to Discredit Petrov,” The Age (Melbourne), 22 February 1955, 10. 22.  For select coverage of the tour, see “Chinese Opera Coming,” The Canberra Times, 21 August 1956, 10; “Chinese Opera Uncertain on Australian Visit,” The Canberra Times, 18 October 1956, 8; “Dr. Evatt Attacks Ban on Theatre Company,” The Canberra Times, 19 October 1956, 6; Peter Russo, “Oh No! Not the Kiwis!” The

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Argus (Melbourne), 25 October 1956, 2; “Chinese Opera Rivals That of Western World,” The Canberra Times, 4 December 1956, 6; Peter Russo, “Now the Laugh Is on Us,” The Argus (Melbourne), 12 December 1956, 2. The political trickiness stemmed from the fact that Prime Minister Robert Menzies apparently did not want a theater company representing the People’s Republic of China to appear in Melbourne during the Olympic Games. The leader of the opposition, H. V. Evatt, considered that the Menzies government’s decision was a “foolish” one that “brought Australia into ridicule and contempt, culturally and internationally.” But the controversy appears not to have followed the troupe once the Olympics ended and the tour itself began. On J. C. Williamson Theatres, Ltd., as the dominant force in Australian theater in the first half of the twentieth century, see John West, Theatre in Australia (Stanmore, 1978), 114–19, 132, 142–45, 208–11. On the Princess Theatre as sometime competitor to the Williamson operation, its changing leadership, and the emergence and activities of Garnet H. Carroll, see ibid., 130, 182–84, 196–202. 23.  For one example from each city, see “Advertising,” The Canberra Times, 3 December 1956, 9; and “Advertising,” The Argus (Melbourne), 13 December 1956, 18. 24. Or could they? Phillip Deery cites circumstantial evidence derived from oral history conducted forty years later that Rodgers was a mole for Australian state security who had infiltrated the top levels of the Australian Communist Party leadership. Deery’s evidence appears to be that at least some of those leaders suspected he was a plant: Phillip Deery, “Communism, Security, and the Cold War,” in Battlers and Stirrers, ed. Ross Fitzgerald and Richard Nile (St. Lucia, 1997), 162–75. Thanks to Sheila Fitzpatrick for directing me to this article. If Deery’s evidence is correct, it could help explain why the ABC’s Moses would negotiate at all with such a constantly controversial leftist, even if he eventually intended for the ABC to take over negotiations completely. 25.  “To Meet Musician,” The Age (Melbourne), 5 June 1958, 5. 26.  Herbert Barrett to G. N. Zarubin, 26 August 1955, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 165, ll. 41–42; George A. Born to Soviet embassy, 22 August 1955, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 165, ll. 49–50; and Friede F. Rothe to Tchernychev [sic], 26 July 1955, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 165, l. 53. 27.  Rothe to Tchernychev. 28. Born to Soviet embassy. Born noted that Slenczynska performed piano works by Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, and Khachaturian, in addition to contemporary American composers, some of whom had dedicated works to her. 29. Barrett to Zarubin; Frank Dawes and Bryce Morrison, “Lympany, Dame Moura,” Grove Music Online, www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/ grove/music/17249 (accessed 30 April 2014). 30. For Pravda coverage of the London tour, see “Kontserty Londonskogo filarmonicheskogo orkestra v Moskve,” Pravda, 22 September 1956, 8; “Okonchanie gastrolei Londonskogo filarmonicheskogo orkestra v Moskve,” Pravda, 29 September 1956, 6; and especially Iu. Shaporin, “Dnevnik iskusstv: Gastroli Londonskogo orkestra,” Pravda, 7 October 1956, 6. Shaporin noted that Lympany’s playing showed “great taste, brilliant technical mastery, and subtle artistic feeling.” For a view from the Londoners’ perspective, see Maurice Pepper, “The London Philharmonic Orchestra in Russia,” The Musical Times 98, no. 1368 (1957): 67–69. Pepper was principal second violin for the tour, so the short article has the feel of

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a report from the front, typically contrasting impressions of the immense appreciation and sophistication of Soviet audiences with the brutality of the Soviet regime’s invasion of Hungary, which occurred just after the orchestra left the Soviet Union. 31.  Zarubin to S. V. Kaftanov and A. I. Denisov, 28 September 1955, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 165, ll. 54–55. Handwritten marginalia indicate that copies of the proposals were sent only to the Ministry of Culture. VOKS was apparently copied only on the memo. 32. See “Dokumenty o kul'turnom sotrudnichestve s Iaponii,” 7 July–26 December 1956, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 384. 33.  Muraichi Horie (Japan-Soviet Friendship Society), Shichiro Ono (Mainichi Shimbun, Tokyo), and Jukichi Tsuriya (Wako Koeki Co., Ltd.) to Ministry of Culture and VOKS, 17 [August] 1956, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 384, ll. 27–28. 34.  James William Morley, “The Soviet-Japanese Peace Declaration,” Political Science Quarterly 72, no. 3 (1957): 370–79. 35.  Horie, Ono, and Tsuriya to Ministry of Culture and VOKS, 28. 36. Kaftanov to TsK KPSS, 4 February 1956, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 24, l. 19. An attached draft resolution set the length of the proposed tour at one month: RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 24, l. 20. 37.  D. A. Polikarpov and B. M. Iarustovskii to TsK, 15 February 1956, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 24, l. 21. 38.  Ibid., marginalia, 18 February 1956. 39.  O. Soroko, “Zapis' besedy s S. Isimuro—prezidentom kompanii “Progress Treiding,” undated, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 384, ll. 43–44. The conversation took place on 20 August; the notes were undoubtedly assembled shortly thereafter. 40. On the Stalin-era antecedent to “peaceful coexistence,” the “struggle for peace,” and especially its unpredictably varying domestic interpretations, see Timothy Johnston, “Peace or Pacifism? The Soviet ‘Struggle for Peace in All the World,’ 1948–54,” Slavonic and East European Review 86, no. 2 (2008): 259–82. 41.  Nikita S. Khrushchev, “On Peaceful Coexistence,” Foreign Affairs 38, no. 1 (1959): 1–18, here 5. For the U.S. response, see George F. Kennan, “Peaceful Coexistence: A Western View,” Foreign Affairs 38, no. 2 (1960): 171–90. 42.  On the domestic audience for “peaceful coexistence,” see Rosa Magnusdottir, “ ‘Be Careful in America, Premier Khrushchev!’ Soviet Perceptions of Peaceful Coexistence with the United States in 1959,” Cahiers du monde russe 47, no. 1/2 (2006): 109–30. 43.  G. F. Aleksandrov to TsK, 16 December 1954, RGANI, f. 5, op. 17, d. 494, l. 269. 44.  A. M. Rumiantsev and P. A. Tarasov to TsK, 21 December 1954, RGANI, f. 5, op. 17, d. 494, l. 270. Handwritten marginalia on ibid. indicate that the memos were archived after Aleksandrov was informed of the Central Committee’s agreement on 22 December. 45.  James Doolittle to Ministry of Culture, undated, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 166, ll. 112 (Russian translation) and 13–13a (original English). The awkwardly ungrammatical phrasing was typical in telegrams. The telegram must have been sent in late November for two reasons: the Moiseev Ensemble was in London for four weeks, beginning 8 November; and though it was sent from London, Doo­ little suggests that he should be reached in Vienna beginning 28 November. For

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Moiseev in London, see “Dance Ensemble from Russia,” The Times (London), 24 October 1955, 3. 46.  E. A. Ivanian, marginalia, 2 December 1955, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 166, l. 112. Eduard Aleksandrovich Ivanian had been named head of the Ministry of Culture Department on Western Europe and the Americas earlier that year; see “Ivanian Eduard Aleksandrovich,” www.rubricon.com/about_rubricon.asp?pid=6_1 (accessed 1 May 2014). 47.  “Guide to the Frederick C. Schang Papers,” 2006, 2, The New York Public Library of the Performing Arts, JPB 06–57, Music Division, www.nypl.org/sites/ default/files/archivalcollections/pdf/musschan.pdf; “CAMI History,” www.cami. com/?topic=history (accessed 1 May 2014); Harlow Robinson, The Last Impresario: The Life, Times, and Legacy of Sol Hurok (New York, 1994), 345–46, 356. 48.  For Schang’s ties to Robeson, see “Guide to the Frederick C. Schang Papers”; and “CAMI History.” The sources for Soviet attitudes toward Robeson are robust and deserving of scholarly attention; for two slight but typical examples, see “Spisok progressivnykh organizatsii i deiatelei po SShA,” 24 November 1948, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 464, ll. 112–14 and the accompanying memo, L. D. Kislova to B. N. Ponomarev, 24 November 1948, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 464, l. 111; and Vsevolod Aksenov, “S Robsonom v Stalingrade,” Sovetskoe iskusstvo, 18 June 1949, 4. Ponomarev was assistant head of the International Relations Department of the Central Committee apparatus. 49. Robinson, The Last Impresario, 345, 362. 50.  Ibid., 29. 51.  Ibid., 30–32. 52.  Ibid., 138. 53.  Parkson to Stepanov, 29 September 1955, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 165, ll. 89–91. These are three copies of the same letter, one the original English (l. 91), and the other two, Russian translations (ll. 89–90). 54.  Marginalia, Stepanov to A. M. Shvedov, 1 October 1955, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 165, l. 89. 55.  Parkson to Stepanov, 10 October 1955, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 165, l. 88. 56.  S. Hurok to Georgi N. Zaroubin [sic], 17 October 1955, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 166, ll. 101–2 and ll. 103–8. The latter constitute two copies of the Russian translation of the English original. 57.  Ross Parmenter, “Russian ‘Cellist Gets U.S. Tour Bid,” New York Times, 10 February 1956, 16. 58.  Howard Taubman, “Music: Russian Cellist in U.S. Debut,” New York Times, 5 April 1956, 25; Albert Goldberg, “Cellist from Russia Dazzling Virtuoso,” Los Angeles Times, 24 April 1956, 21; Goldberg, “The Sounding Board: Rostropovich Describes Musical Life in Soviet Union; Denies Political Influence on Composers,” Los Angeles Times, 13 May 1956, E5; Paul Hume, “Russian Has Cello Debut in Capital,” Washington Post and Times Herald, 15 April 1956, C9. For additional glowing reviews, see also Seymour Raven, “Russ Cellist Plays Debut in Chicago,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 8 May 1956, B3; and Howard Taubman, “Music: A Soviet Soloist,” New York Times, 20 April 1956, 20. 59.  Ivanian to N. A. Mikhailov, “Otchet o poezdke v SShA i Kanadu M. Rostropovicha, A. Dediukina i E. Ivaniana,” 25 June 1956, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 199, ll. 1–28, here ll. 24–25.

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60.  Ibid., l. 25. The paragraph from which this information is taken is crossed out in the original. My inexpert analysis of the pencils used to make annotations and sign the document suggests it was crossed out by Mikhailov. One can often make relatively confident guesses regarding the authorship of editorial changes and marginal commentary on documents such as these; this case, however, is not clear. 61.  Ibid., l. 25. On Guk as a KGB spy, see Tennent H. Bagley, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games (New Haven, 2007), 281. 62. Robinson, The Last Impresario, 347–49. The interview was conducted in Moscow on 24 March 1988; from a remove of some thirty years, Ivanian’s recollections about the exact course of events regarding the switch from Schang to Hurok appear to have been slightly faulty, when compared to the archival record, but the general picture and many other details are surely right—and very illuminating. 63. S. R. Striganov to Kaftanov, 30 November 1955, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 166, ll. 99–100. Striganov listed additional soloist tours that Hurok proposed, ending: “We recommend that you do not conclude any concrete agreements with Hurok regarding this question without consultation with us.” The recommendation to move to Hurok in 1955 was thus only partial. 64.  Zapis', l. 123. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid. 67.  Ibid., ll. 123–24. 68. Robinson, The Last Impresario, 351. 69.  Mikhailov to TsK, 19 September 1956, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 24, l. 114; and draft resolution, l. 115. 70.  Polikarpov and Iarustovskii to TsK, 25 September 1956, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 24, l. 116; and marginal notation on ibid., signed P. N. Pospelov, 27 September 1956. The ministry was informed of the negative decision the next day. Petr Nikolaevich Pospelov was a member of the Central Committee. 71.  Mikhailov to TsK, 28 November 1956, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 24, ll. 161–62. 72. Robinson, The Last Impresario, 351–52. 73.  S. Hurok to Georgi N. Zaroubin [sic], 17 October 1955, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 166, ll. 101–2, here l. 101. 74. Hurok to G. A. Orvid, 8 November 1956, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 24, ll. 164–65. Trumpeter Georgii Antonovich Orvid was deputy minister of culture and assistant department head in the Ministry of Culture (see “Orvid, G. A.,” Muzykal' naia Entsiklopediia, http://enc-dic.com/enc_music/Orvid-G-A-5349.html (accessed 1 May 2014). For Khrushchev’s thoughts on the fingerprinting issue, see Robinson, The Last Impresario, 353. 75.  “Proekt Postanovleniia TsK KPSS, “Vopros Ministerstva kul'tury SSSR,” RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 24, l. 163. 76. Robinson, The Last Impresario, 353. 77. The Associate Press report ran across the country. For two examples, see “U.S. Halts Soviet Cultural Trade to Protest Attacks on Hungary,” New York Times, 4 December 1956, 1; and “U.S. Cultural Exchange with Russia Halted,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 4 December 1956, 5. An abbreviated version of the same report ran in Los Angeles: “U.S. in Snub to Soviet Halts Cultural Exchange,” Los Angeles Times, 4 December 1956, 28.

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  78.  Iarustovskii to TsK, 12 December 1956, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 24, l. 172. Iarustovskii had been assigned to look into Mikhailov’s original request. He reported to his superiors that the Ministry of Culture had decided to withdraw it. The matter was closed the same day.   79.  Polikarpov and Iarustovskii to TsK, 2 December 1957, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 56, l. 63. An additional reason to limit tour lengths was reciprocity; U.S. tours lasted two to three weeks.   80.  On the landmark tour in the spring of 1958, a less successful follow-up by Berezka later that year, and the triumphant Bolshoi Ballet tour in 1959, see Robinson, The Last Impresario, 355–77.   81.  Hurok to Zaroubin, 17 October 1955, l. 101.   82.  Ibid., l. 102.  83. Robinson, The Last Impresario, 348.   84.  Lawrence to VOKS, 29 November 1954, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 163, ll. 59–60; and “A Proposal for a Tour of the United States and Canada by a Leading Ballet Company of the USSR,” RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 163, ll. 13–30. These sheets comprise a cover sheet and biographical sketches of the agents (ll. 13–14), a Russian translation of the proposal (ll. 15–20), and the English original (ll. 21–30). N. A. Vladykin was, by then, an experienced cultural attaché, having served as the main VOKS representative in Nanking in the 1940s (“Spisok upolnomochennykh VOKS,” 22 April 1947, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 258, ll. 399–99ob.).   85.  Lawrence to VOKS, 29 November 1954, 59.   86.  “Additional Proposals concerning Exchange of Artists of the USSR and the USA,” RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 163, ll. 31–45. For the Russian translation, see ibid., ll. 46–53.   87.  Peter Lawrence to Mr. Guk, 13 January 1955, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 163, ll. 62–63.   88.  Lawrence to VOKS, 29 November 1954.   89.  “Additional Proposals,” l. 38; Lawrence to VOKS, 29 November 1954.   90.  “Additional Proposals,” ll. 38–39.   91.  Lawrence to VOKS, 29 Nov 1954, l. 60.   92.  “Additional Proposals,” l. 42.   93.  Peter Lawrence to Mr. Guk, l. 63, emphasis added.   94.  “Additional Proposals,” l. 34.  95. Polikarpov, Tarasov, and Iarustovskii to TsK KPSS, 12 November 1955, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 4, ll. 26–27; L. D. Kislova, “Informatsiia o prebyvanii v SSSR direktora Natsional'nogo fonda iskusstva Karltona Smita” [19 October 1955], RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 4, ll. 22–25.   96.  Carlton Smith to Mikhailov, 21 September 1955, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 165, l. 35. For the Kiev trip, see Kislova, “Informatsiia,” l. 25.   97.  Polikarpov, Tarasov, and Iarustovskii to TsK KPSS, 12 November 1955, l. 27.   98.  Kislova, “Informatsiia,” l. 24.   99.  TASS, “Zhurnal ‘Varaieti’ o Karltone Smite,” 13 October 1955, RGANI, f. 5, op. 36, d. 4, ll. 17–20. The fraud extended even to Smith’s place of residence, which he claimed to be New York City but was actually Beaumont, Illinois. 100.  Kislova, “Informatsiia,” l. 25. 101. Ibid.

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102. Polikarpov, Tarasov, and Iarustovskii to TsK KPSS, 12 November 1955, l. 27. 103.  Kiril Tomoff, “Circuits of Empire: Soviet Musical Tours in Eastern Europe, 1945–1958” (paper presented at the National Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, New Orleans, LA, 2012). 104.  Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941 (Oxford, 2011). 105.  “Zapis' besedy s … Drishem,” 3. 106.  V. S. Pereslavtsev to V. S. Volodin, 21 January 1955, RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 93, l. 11. 107.  “Otchet o kul'turnykh sviaziakh SSSR so stranami amerikanskogo kontinenta v 1955 godu” [unsigned, undated, but early 1956], RGALI, f. 2329, op. 8, d. 82, l. 13. 108.  For details of some of the huge payouts to the Soviets by Sol Hurok, see Robinson, The Last Impresario, 346–48, 357, 369, 374–77. 109.  That mainstream German audiences trusted impresarios more than friendship societies is implicit in Driesch’s comments. For examples of local governmental hostility to friendship society activities in such disparate locales as Quebec, Canada, and Kiel, Germany, see “Russians Bypass Quebec: Artists ‘Can’t Rent Hall’—Red Propaganda, Duplessis Says,” New York Times, 28 April 1954; and “Tarnorganisation verboten,” Niederbayerische Zeitung, 25 February 1956, 7. For difficulties finding a venue, see discussion of John Rodgers’s lecture tour in Australia, discussed above, and “Russians Bypass Quebec.” For a local musicians’ boycott of Soviet musicians brought to Canada under friendship society auspices, see “Russians Visit Toronto: But Canadian Musicians Won’t Play with Touring Troupe,” New York Times, 21 April 1954, 36. Hostility to friendship societies was, of course, highly variable from place to place. The British Soviet Friendship Society, for example, seems to have had little comparable trouble, at least until the shock of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 caused it to postpone forty concerts: “Forty Concerts to Be Postponed,” The Times (London), 8 November 1956, 7. For a later period, see also Michael Paulauskas, “Sympathy for the Red Devil: Soviet-American Friendship Councils and Détente with the United States” (paper presented at the National Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Los Angeles, 2010). Epilogue

1.  Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, Khrushchev in America: Full Texts of the Speeches Made by N.S. Khrushchev on His Tour of the United States, September 15–27, 1959 (New York, 1960). 2.  “N. S. Khrushchev’s Reply to Letters and Telegrams Received on the Eve of U.S. Tour,” 14 September 1959, in Khrushchev in America, 9. 3.  Ibid., 10. 4.  “Speech by N. S. Khrushchev at Luncheon Held at Twentieth Century Fox Studios,” Los Angeles, 19 September 1959, in Khrushchev in America, 109. 5.  “Interview with Leaders of the U.S. Congress and Members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,” Washington, 16 September 1959, in Khrushchev in America, 32.

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  6.  “N. S. Khrushchev’s Speech at the Dinner Given in the Economic Club of New York,” 17 September 1959, in Khrushchev in America, 59–60.   7.  “N. S. Khrushchev Addresses Journalists at the National Press Club,” Washington, 16 September 1959, in Khrushchev in America, 31. The call to coexist and allow the Soviets their historically inevitable triumph was a constant refrain from the beginning of the tour to the end. For another example, see also his speeches in San Francisco, esp., ibid., 140.   8.  India was an early and prominent example; see Jeremiah Wishon, “Soviet Globalization: Indo-Soviet Public Diplomacy and Cold War Cultural Spheres,” Global Studies Journal 5, no. 2 (2012): 103–14.   9.  This vision was articulated as “two world markets” at the 1952 Party Congress. See Gu Guan-Fu, “Soviet Aid to the Third World, an Analysis of Its Strategy,” Soviet Studies 35, no. 1 (1983): 82. 10.  Oscar Sanchez-Sibony notes that 80 percent of Soviet trade was with “communist” countries, 16 percent with industrialized countries, and just 4 percent with developing countries (“Red Globalization: The Political Economy of Soviet Foreign Relations in the 1950s and 60s” [PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2009], 99). See his discussion of the reliability of the trade statistics he used in the calculations that support this statement in 99 n. 10. 11.  Ibid., 99–101. Scholarship on the Soviet Union’s outreach to the developing world is surveyed in David C. Engerman, “The Second World’s Third World,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 12, no. 1 (2011): 183–211. 12.  Guan-Fu, “Soviet Aid,” 84. 13.  On the Aswan High Dam project and the difficulties the Soviets had exporting their production system, see Elizabeth Bishop, “Talking Shop: Egyptian Engineers and Soviet Specialists at the Aswan High Dam” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1997). 14.  Sanchez-Sibony, “Red Globalization,” 115–21. On the appeal of economic development in the developing world, see also David C. Engerman, “The Romance of Economic Development and New Histories of the Cold War,” Diplomatic History 28, no. 1 (2004): 23–54. 15.  For a critical assessment of contemporary Anglo-American understanding of this shift to military aid, see Engerman, “The Second World’s Third World.” For the aid, see the many sources Engerman cites there and Guan-Fu, “Soviet Aid,” 72–76. 16.  Sanchez-Sibony, “Red Globalization,” 131–32. 17.  Sanchez-Sibony, too, notes that the Soviets constantly “mimicked” capitalist practices in relations with their own empire (ibid., 144). 18.  Guan-Fu, “Soviet Aid,” 84. 19.  On the mass housing campaign and its relation to consumption, see Steven E. Harris, Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin (Washington, DC, 2013). Releasing the pressure on the peasantry has long been acknowledged as one of the centerpieces of Khrushchev’s domestic policy. The classic text on the center point of (eventually disastrous) agricultural development is Martin McCauley, Khrushchev and the Development of Soviet Agriculture: The Virgin Land Programme 1953–1964 (London, 1976). 20.  On the Stalin-era principles of cultured consumption and the trade that was supposed to cultivate it, see Julie Hessler, A Social History of Soviet Trade: Trade Policy, Retail Practices, and Consumption, 1917–1953 (Princeton, 2004).

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21.  On the construction of the normative Khrushchev-era consumer, see 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, no. 2 (2002): 211–52. 22.  For myriad examples, see David Crowley and Susan E. Reid, eds., Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc (Evanston, 2010); and Paulina Bren and Mary Neuburger, eds., Communism Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe (New York, 2012). For a related analysis of the automobile, see Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile (Ithaca, 2011). On the connection to leisure, see Diane P. Koenker, Club Red: Vacation Travel and the Soviet Dream (Ithaca, 2013). 23.  For a general introduction to the influence of Conover’s Jazz Hour in the Soviet empire, including the “rose-colored” point, see James Lester, “Willis of Oz: Profile of Voice of America Broadcaster Willis Conover,” Central Europe Review 1, no. 5 (1999), www.ce-review.org/99/5/music5_lester.html. 24.  Penny M. von Eschen, Satchmo Blows up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, MA, 2006). 25. Engerman, “The Second World’s Third World,” 201, citing Jean Pierre N’Diaye, Enquête sur les étudiants noirs en France (Paris: Éditions “Réalités africaines,” 1962), 243–52, 228–30. When asked in one study what was most attractive about the U.S. system, 26 percent of respondents answered “standard of living,” and 15 percent chose “jazz,” while just 9 percent mentioned “democracy” and a mere 7 percent “liberal economy.” 26.  On jazz, see the classic S. Frederick Starr, Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union 1917–1991, updated ed. (New York, 1994). On stiliagi in the Stalin period, see Mark Edele, “Strange Young Men in Stalin’s Moscow: The Birth and Life of the Stiliagi, 1945–1953,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 50, no. 1 (2002): 37–61; and Valerii Todorovskii, Stiliagi (2008). 27.  On the avant-garde, see especially Peter J. Schmelz, Such Freedom, if Only Musical: Unofficial Soviet Music during the Thaw (Oxford, 2009). On the bards, see J. Martin Daughtry, “  ‘Sonic Samizdat’: Situating Unofficial Recording in the Post-Stalinist Soviet Union,” Poetics Today 30, no. 1 (2009): 27–65; and Gerald Stanton Smith, Songs to Seven Strings: Russian Guitar Poetry and Soviet “Mass Song” (Bloomington, 1984). For one example of the connection between the Western rock opera Jesus Christ, Superstar and emerging religiosity among its fans, see Sergei I. Zhuk, “Religion, ‘Westernization,’ and Youth in the ‘Closed City’ of Soviet Ukraine, 1964–84,” Russian Review 67, no. 4 (2008): 661–79. 28.  Sergei I. Zhuk, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960–1985 (Washington, DC, 2010). 29.  On the rock scenes of Leningrad and Dniepropetrovsk respectively, see Polly McMichael, “ ‘After All, You’re a Rock and Roll Star (at Least, That’s What They Say)’: Roksi and the Creation of the Soviet Rock Musician,” Slavonic and East European Review 83, no. 4 (2005): 664–84; and Zhuk, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City. 30.  For another iteration of the claim that Western popular culture successfully subverted the Soviet system in the 1970s and 1980s, see Jaak Kilmi, Disco and Atomic War (2010). See also Sergei I. Zhuk, “Review of Film Disco and Atomic War, Directed by Jaak Kilmi and Kiur Aarma,” Slavic Review 70, no. 4 (2011): 902–3. 31.  Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900 (Cambridge, 1992); David MacFadyen, Red Stars: Personality and the Soviet Popular

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Song, 1955–1991 (Montreal, 2001); Tony Shaw and Denise J. Youngblood, Cinematic Cold War: The American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds (Lawrence, 2010); Sudha Rajagopalan, Indian Films in Soviet Cinemas: The Culture of Movie-Going after Stalin (Bloomington, 2009). 32.  Kristin Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire That Lost the Cultural Cold War (Ithaca, 2011). 33. This characterization is taken largely from Paulina Bren, The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring (Ithaca, 2010). Though Bren studies the case of Czechoslovakia, her argument is widely applicable across the entire Soviet empire. 34.  Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, 2005). Yurchak summarizes this condition as “when authoritative discourse became hypernormalized, its performative dimension grew in importance and its constative dimension became unanchored from concrete core meanings and increasingly open to new interpretation” (285) and “Soviet late socialism provides a stunning example of how a dynamic and powerful social system can abruptly and unexpectedly unravel when the discursive conditions of its existence are changed” (295). 35.  Randall W. Stone, Satellites and Commissars: Strategy and Conflict in the Politics of Soviet-Bloc Trade (Princeton, 1996), cited by Sanchez-Sibony, “Red Globalization,” 101–2. 36.  This analysis is derived directly from Valerie Bunce, “The Empire Strikes Back: The Evolution of the Eastern Bloc from a Soviet Asset to a Soviet Liability,” International Organization 39, no. 1 (1985): 1–46, here 28.

B i b l i og raphy

Archives and Published Archival Documents Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (State Archive of the Russian Federation, GARF) f.

kul'turnoi sviazi

s z ag r a n i t s e i

5283, V s e s o i u z n o e o b s h c h e s t vo (A l l -U n i o n S o c i e t y A b roa d , VOKS)

for

C u lt u r a l T i e s

op. 8, Otdel po priemu inostrantsev (Department for Receiving Foreigners), 1925–37, 1948–57 op. 22s, Dokumental'nye materialy (Documentary Materials), 1946–1957

Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, RGALI) f.

962, K o m i t e t p o d e l a m i s k u s s t v p r i S ov e t e SSSR (C o m m i t t e e o n A rt i s t i c A f fa i r s )

m i n i s t rov

op. 4, Glavnoe upravlenie uchebnykh zavedenii (Chief Directorate of Educational Institutions), 1932–1951 op. 5, Glavnoe upravlenie muzykal'nykh uchrezhdenii (Chief Directorate of Music Institutions), 1929–1952 op. 10, Sekretnaia chast' (Classified Section), 1927–1953 f.

2329, M i n i s t e r s t vo

k u l ' t u ry

SSSR (M i n i s t ry

of

C u lt u r e )

op. 3, Otdel muzykal'nykh uchrezhdenii (Department of Music Institutions), 1953–1963 op. 8, Upravlenie / Otdel vneshnykh snoshenii (Foreign Affairs Administration / Department), 1953–1956

Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii (Russian State Archive of Contemporary History, RGANI) f . 5, T s e n t r a l ' n y i ko m i t e t K o m m u n i s t i c h e s ko i pa rt i i S ov e t s ko g o S o i u z a (C e n t r a l C o m m i t t e e o f t h e C o m m u n i s t P a rt y o f t h e S ov i e t U n i o n , T s K KPSS)

op. 17, Otdel nauki i kul'tury (Department of Science and Culture), 1953–1957 op. 36, Otdel kul'tury (Department of Culture), 1955–1962 241

242    B i b l i o g r ap h y

Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial'no-politicheskoi istorii (Russian State Archive for Socio-Political History, RGASPI) f.

17, T s e n t r a l ' n y i

Vsesoiuznoi ( b o l ' s h e v i kov ) (C e n t r a l C o m m u n i s t P a rt y , T s K VKP[ b ]) ko m i t e t

ko m m u n i s t i c h e s ko i pa rt i i

Committee

of the

op. 3, Protokoly zasedanii Politbiuro (Politburo protocols), 1919–1952 op. 116, 117, 119, Orgbiuro i Sekretariat (Orgburo and Secretariat), 1939– 1952 op. 125, Upravlenie propagandy i agitatsii (Propaganda and Agitation Directorate), 1938–1948 op. 128, Otdel mezhdunarodnoi informatsii/Otdel vneshnei politiki/Otdel vneshnikh snoshenii/Vneshnepoliticheskaia komissiia (International Department), 1943–1952 op. 132, Otdel propagandy i agitatsii (Agitation and Propaganda Department, Agitprop), 1948–1953 op. 133, Otdel khudozhestvennoi literatury i iskusstva/Otdel nauki i kul'tury (Arts and Literature Department/Science and Culture Department), 1951–1953 “Guide to the Charles Recht Papers, TAM.176.” Charles Recht Papers; TAM 176. Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University. http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/tam_176/tam_176.html (accessed 6 April 2013). “Guide to the Frederick C. Schang Papers,” 2006. JPB 06–57, Music Division. The New York Public Library of the Performing Arts. www.nypl.org/sites/ default/files/archivalcollections/pdf/musschan.pdf. Mikhailov, N. A. “Zapiska ministra kul'tury SSSR N. A. Mikhailov s pros'boi razreshit' S. T. Rikhteru priniat' uchastie v torzhestvakh, posviashchennykh kompozitoru R. Shumanu.” In Apparat TsK KPSS i kul'tura, 1953–1957: dokumenty, edited by Z. K. Vodop'ianova, V. Iu. Afiani, E. S. Afanas'eva, Lotman-Institut für russische und sowjetische Kultur (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Federal'naia arkhivnaia sluzhba Rossii, and Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii, 504–5. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2001. “Obrashchenie 2-go Mezhdunarodnogo s"ezda kompozitorov i muzykal'nykh kritikov v Prage.” Sovetskaia muzyka 1948, no. 5 (1948): 7–8. Riurikov, B. S., and B. M. Iarustovskii. “Zapiska otdela kul'tury TsK KPSS s soglasiem sekretaria TsK KPSS o razreshenii pianistu S. Rikhteru priniat' uchastie v torzhestvakh, posviashchennykh 100-letiiu so dnia smerti Roberta Shumana.” In Apparat TsK KPSS i kul'tura, 1953–1957: dokumenty, edited by Z. K. Vodop'ianova, V. Iu. Afiani, E. S. Afanas'eva, Lotman-Institut für russische und sowjetische Kultur (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Federal'naia arkhivnaia sluzhba Rossii, and Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii, 512–13. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2001.

Memoirs Gouzenko, Igor. The Iron Curtain. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1948. ——. This Was My Choice. Montreal: Palm Publishers, 1948.

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Papanin, Ivan Dmitrievich. Life on an Ice Floe: Diary of Ivan Papanin. Translated by Helen Black. New York: Messner, 1939. Paperno, Dmitrii. Notes of a Moscow Pianist. Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1998. Petrova, Evdokia, and Vladimir Mikhailovich Petrov. Empire of Fear. New York: Praeger, 1956. Plisetskaia, Maiia Mikhailovna. Ia, Maiia Plisetskaia. Moscow: Novosti, 1994. Plisetskaya, Maya. I, Maya Plisetskaya. Translated by Antonina W. Bouis. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Valois, Ninette de. Come Dance with Me: A Memoir, 1898–1956. London,: Readers Union, 1959. Vishnevskaia, Galina Pavlovna. Galina: Istoriia zhizni. Paris: La Presse Libre i Kontinenta, 1985. ——. Galina: Istoriia zhizni. Moscow: Novosti, 1991. ——. Galina: Istoriia zhizni. expanded edition. Moscow: Vagrius, 2006. Vishnevskaya, Galina. Galina: A Russian Story. Translated by Guy Daniels. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984.

Audio Recordings and Films Hackford, Taylor. White Nights. Columbia Pictures, 1985. Kilmi, Jaak. Disco and Atomic War. Icarus Films, 2010. Lubitsch, Ernst. Ninotchka. MGM, 1939. Mendelssohn, Felix. Violin Concerto; W. A. Mozart. Violin Concerto No. 4. D. F. Oistrakh (violin). Eugene Ormandy (conductor). Recorded 1955. Columbia ML 5085, 1956, LP. Mendelssohn, Felix, W. A. Mozart, and J. S. Bach. Violin Concertos. David Oistrakh (violin). Eugene Ormandy (conductor). Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra. Recorded 1955. Naxos 8.111246, 2007, compact disc. Moulian, Rouben. Silk Stockings. MGM, 1957. Oistrakh, David, et al. I. Brams—A. Dvorzhak. Kontserty dlia skripki s orkestrom. Recorded 1951, 1952. Gramzapis GCD 00212, 1991, compact disc. ——. Violin Concertos by Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky. Recorded 1956, 1959. Sony Classics 700812, 2007, compact disc. Oistrakh, David, and Isaac Stern. Bach and Vivaldi Violin Concertos. Recorded 1955. Columbia ML 5087, 1956, LP. Shostakovich, Dmitry. Shostakovitch: Violin Concerto Op. 99. First Recording. David Oistrakh (violin). Dimitry Mitropoulos (conductor). New York Philharmonic. Recorded 1956. Columbia Masterworks ML 5077, 1956, LP. Todorovskii, Valerii. Stiliagi. Russia, 2008. Wellman, William A. The Iron Curtain. Twentieth Century Fox, 1948.

Court Cases Dmitry Shostakovich et al., v. Twentieth-Century Fox Film Corporation, Supreme Court of New York, Special Term, New York County, 196 Misc. 67; 80 N.Y.S. 2d 575; 1948 N.Y. Misc. LEXIS 2618; 77 U.S.P.Q. (BNA) 647. Dmitry Shostakovich et al. v. Twentieth-Century Fox Film Corporation, Supreme Court of New York, Appellate Division, First Department, 275 A.D. 692; 87 N.Y.S. 2d 430; 1949 N.Y. App. Div. LEXIS 4047.

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Société Le Chant du Monde v. Société Fox Europe et Société Fox Americaine Twentieth Century, Cour d’appel, Paris, 13 January 1953, D.A. 1954, 16, 80.

Websites “Announcing the Fiftieth Anniversary Celebration of Van Cliburn’s Win at the First Tchaikovsky Competition,” 11 February 2008. www.cliburn.org/ press-room/press-releases/announcing-the-50th-anniversary-celebration-ofvan-cliburns-win-at-the-first-tchaikovsky-competition. “ARD Music Competition: Springboard for a Career from 1952,” 24 January 2012. www.br.de/radio/br-klassik-english/ard-music-competition/prize-winners/ index.html. “CAMI History.” www.cami.com/?topic=history (accessed 1 May 2014). “Concours de Genève | Search Laureates.” www.concoursgeneve.ch/list_laureates/ search (accessed 24 April 2014). “Concours de Genève | The Competition.” www.concoursgeneve.ch/sections/ the_competition (accessed 24 April 2014). “Concours Musical International Reine Elisabeth de Belgique: Palmarès du concours de 1951 à 2013.” http://perso.fundp.ac.be/~jmlamber/re/re.html (accessed 24 April 2014). “David Oistrakh.” www.cmireb.be/cgi?lg=en&pag=1698&tab=102&rec=164&frm= 0&par=secorig1680&par2=atvorig0 (accessed 29 April 2014). Dawes, Frank, and Bryce Morrison. “Lympany, Dame Moura.” Grove Music Online. www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/17249 (accessed 30 April 2014). “Dorothy Buffum Chandler.” www.musiccenter.org/about/About-The-MusicCenter/History—Archives/Dorothy-Buffum-Chandler (accessed 29 April 2014). “From 1943 to 1990—Concours Long Thibaud.” www.long-thibaud-crespin .org/en-gb/fondation/l-histoire/de-1943-a-1990.html (accessed 24 April 2014). Geffen, Paul. “Sviatoslav Richter Discography.” http://trovar.com/str/RichterD.html (accessed 29 April 2014). “Gian Battista Viotti—International Music Competition—Vercelli.” www.concor soviotti.it/page.php?id=ba937e69e22147eaab5810ea7189ae8a&page_id=372 d6d2c29449068f2e87f97ce0230fc (accessed 30 January 2013). Gorbenko, Galina. “Nezabvennyi russkii bas: Vspominaia Ivana Petrova.” Belcanto. ru. 21 January 2004. www.belcanto.ru/article21012004.html. “The Gouzenko Affair.” CBC Digital Archives. www.cbc.ca/archives/categories/ war-conflict/cold-war/the-gouzenko-affair/topic-the-gouzenko-affair.html (accessed 19 April 2014). “Hall of Fame | Filharmonia Budapest Nonprofit Ltd.” www.filharmoniabp.hu/en/ hall_fame (accessed 30 January 2013). “Harvey Levan ‘Van’ Cliburn.” The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. www.kennedy-center.org/explorer/artists/?entity_id=3707&source_type=A (accessed 26 April 2014). “Historical Background—Foundation International Piano Competition Ferruccio Busoni.” www.concorsobusoni.it/en-94–1984.aspx (accessed 30 January 2013).

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“Historique.” www.theatre-du-capitole.fr/1/le-concours-international-de-chant/ concours-international-de-chant/historique-du-concours/historique-124. html?lang=fr (accessed 30 January 2013). “International Competition for Young Conductors.” www.concours-besancon. com/en (accessed 30 January 2013). “International Henryk Wieniawski Violin Competition.” www.wieniawski.com/ ivc.html (accessed 24 April 2014). “Internationaler Beethoven Klavierwettbewerb—PreisträgerInnen.” www.mdw.ac.at/ beethoven-competition/ruckblick/preistragerinnen (accessed 20 April 2014). “Ivanian Eduard Aleksandrovich.” www.rubricon.com/about_rubricon.asp?pid=6_1 (accessed 1 May 2014). “Kazantseva Nadezhda Apollinarievna.” Muzykal'naia entsiklopediia. Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1974. “The Kitchen Debate: An Exploration into Cold War Ideologies and Propaganda.” www3.sympatico.ca/robsab/debate.html (accessed 30 January 2013). Lebrecht, Norman. “The Clapped-Out Legacy of Karajan That Impoverished Classical Music.” The Independent, 6 April 2008. www.independent.co.uk/voices/ commentators/norman-lebrecht-the-clappedout-legacy-of-karajan-thatimpoverished-classical-music-805141.html. Mann, William S. “Legge, Walter.” Grove Music Online. www.oxfordmusiconline. com/subscriber/article/grove/music/16297 (accessed 29 April 2014). “Maria Canals—Introduction.” www.mariacanals.org/en/concurs/presentacio.html (accessed 30 January 2013). Matzner, Antonín. “History of the Festival.” www.prague-spring.net/historie (accessed 26 October 2009). Mery, David. “Fighting Torture with Copyright.” The Register, 21 March 2007. www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/21/fighting_torture_with_copyright. “Nede˘ le 02. Cˇerven 1946.” http://old.festival.cz/program5ea9.html?id_program= 15&akce=prehled&typ=datum&hodnota=1946–06–02&menu=1 (accessed 9 December 2012). Niewierowska, Barbara. “O konkursie: Mie˛dzynarodowy Konkurs Pianistyczny im. Fryderyka Chopina.” http://konkurs.chopin.pl/pl/about/competition (accessed 24 April 2014). “Online NewsHour Report: Pianist Van Cliburn Reminisces.” PBS, 11 April 2008. www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june08/vancliburn_04–11. html. “Orvid, G. A.” Muzykal'naia entsiklopediia. http://enc-dic.com/enc_music/OrvidG-A-5349.html (accessed 1 May 2014). Parloff, Roger. “Tormenting Gitmo Detainees with Copyrighted Music: Is Torture a ‘Fair Use?’ ” Fortune, 27 March 2007. http://legalpad.blogs.fortune. cnn.com/2007/03/27/tormenting-gitmo-detainees-with-copyrighted-musicis-torture-a-fair-use. Potter, Tully. “Mendelssohn / Mozart / Bach, J.S.: Violin Concertos (Oistrakh, Ormandy) (1955).” www.naxos.com/mainsite/blurbs_reviews.asp?item_code= 8.111246&catNum=8111246&filetype=About%20this%20Recording& language=English (accessed 8 January 2013). “Premio Paganini.” www.paganini.comune.genova.it/premio_premiopaganini_eng. htm (accessed 30 January 2013).

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“Prone to Violins: Robert Virovai.” http://pronetoviolins.blogspot.com/2011/09/ robert-virovai.html (accessed 25 January 2013). “Queen Elisabeth Competition, 1937–2013: Violin, Piano, Voice, Composition,” 2013. www.cmireb.be/Concours2/documents/Palmares1937201319863.pdf. “Queen Elisabeth Competition Violin 1951 Candidates.” www.concours-reineelisabeth.be/cgi?usr=sgn64au9tc&lg=en&pag=1992&tab=108&rec=96&fr m=0&par=aybabtu&id=5083&flux=15939216 (accessed 29 January 2013). Stockhem, Michel. “A Half-Century of Emotion.” Translated by J. Drake. www. cmireb.be/en/p/5/41/44/50ans.html (accessed 9 December 2010). “Time Magazine Cover: Van Cliburn—May 19, 1958.” http://content.time.com/ time/covers/0,16641,19580519,00.html (accessed 26 April 2014). “Van Cliburn at the First Tchaikovsky Competition.” www.nicklewis.org/vancliburn-at-the-1st-tchaikovsky-competition (accessed 9 November 2009). “Van Cliburn: Treasuring Moscow after Fifty Years: NPR.” NPR.org, 1 March 2008. www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87771963. “Vianna Da Motta International Music Competition.” www.vdamotta.org/ PstJuries.htm, www.vdamotta.org/PstWinner.htm, and www.vdamotta.org/ compHist.htm (accessed 26 October 2009). Winter, Edward. “Interregnum.” Chess Notes (2004). www.chesshistory.com/ winter/extra/interregnum.html. World Federation of International Music Competitions. “Competition Info: International Beethoven Piano Competition Vienna.” www.wfimc.org/ Webnodes/en/Web/Public/Competitions/Competition+info?org=16677 (accessed 20 April 2014). Yampol'sky, I. M. “Petrov, Ivan.” Grove Music Online. www.oxfordmusiconline.com/ subscriber/article/grove/music/O002700 (accessed 29 April 2014).

Books, Articles, and Dissertations Adorno, T. W. “A Social Critique of Radio Music.” The Kenyon Review 7, no. 2 (1945): 208–17. Ali, S. Omar, and Zehra F. Peynirciogˇlu. “Intensity of Emotions Conveyed and Elicited by Familiar and Unfamiliar Music.” Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal 27, no. 3 (2010): 177–82. Ament, Suzanne. “Sing to Victory: The Role of Popular Song in the Soviet Union during World War II.” PhD diss., Indiana University, 1996. Apor, Balázs, Péter Apor, and E. A. Rees, eds. The Sovietization of Eastern Europe: New Perspectives on the Postwar Period. Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2008. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Arndt, Richard T. The First Resort of Kings: American Cultural Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century. Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2005. Babiracki, Patryk. “Staging the Empire: Soviet-Polish Initiatives in Propaganda, Science, and the Arts, 1943–1953.” PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2009. Bagley, Tennent H. Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

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Barghoorn, Frederick Charles. The Soviet Cultural Offensive: The Role of Cultural Diplomacy in Soviet Foreign Policy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960. Bartlett, Rosamund. Wagner and Russia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Beck, Peter. “Britain and the Cold War’s ‘Cultural Olympics’: Responding to the Political Drive of Soviet Sport, 1945–58.” Contemporary British History 19, no. 2 (2005): 169–85. Beissinger, Mark R. “Rethinking Empire in the Wake of Soviet Collapse.” In Ethnic Politics and Post-Communism: Theories and Practice, edited by Zoltan D. Barany and Robert G. Moser. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005, 14–45, 235–41 (notes). ——. “Soviet Empire as ‘Family Resemblance.’ ” Slavic Review 65, no. 2 (2006): 294–303. Berend, Iván T. Central and Eastern Europe, 1944–1993: Detour from the Periphery to the Periphery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Bhosys, Waldemar. “Oboe Reed Standardization.” Woodwind Magazine 2, no. 5 (1950): 5. Bischof, Günter, and Saki Dockrill, eds. Cold War Respite: The Geneva Summit of 1955. Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 2000. Bishop, Elizabeth. “Talking Shop: Egyptian Engineers and Soviet Specialists at the Aswan High Dam.” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1997. Bittner, Stephen V. The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw: Experience and Memory in Moscow’s Arbat. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. Bowman, William D., Frank M. Chiteji, and J. Megan Greene. Imperialism in the Modern World: Sources and Interpretations. New York: Prentice Hall, 2006. Brand, Harry. “Vital Statistics concerning The Iron Curtain,” n.d. typescript production notes provided to the author by Twentieth-Century Fox. Bren, Paulina. The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. Bren, Paulina, and Mary Neuburger, eds. Communism Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Brower, Daniel R. The World in the Twentieth Century. 6th ed. New York: Prentice Hall, 2006. Bunce, Valerie. “The Empire Strikes Back: The Evolution of the Eastern Bloc from a Soviet Asset to a Soviet Liability.” International Organization 39, no. 1 (1985): 1–46. Burbank, Jane, and Frederick Cooper. Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Castillo, Greg. Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Caute, David. The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Clark, Katerina. Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. ——. The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

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Connelly, John. Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher Education, 1945–1956. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Crowley, David, and Susan E. Reid, eds. Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010. Cusick, Suzanne G. “Music as Torture / Music as Weapon.” Trans: Revista Transcultural de Música 10 (2006). www.sibetrans.com/trans/articulo/152/music-as-torturemusic-as-weapon. Daughtry, J. Martin. “  ‘Sonic Samizdat’: Situating Unofficial Recording in the Post-Stalinist Soviet Union.” Poetics Today 30, no. 1 (2009): 27–65. David-Fox, Michael. “Multiple Modernities vs. Neo-Traditionalism: On Recent Debates in Russian and Soviet History.” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 54, no. 4 (2006): 535–55. ——. Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918–1929. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. ——. Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Day, Richard B. Cold War Capitalism: The View from Moscow, 1945–1975. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1995. Deery, Phillip. “Communism, Security, and the Cold War.” In Battlers and Stirrers, edited by Ross Fitzgerald and Richard Nile. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1997, 162–75. Dobrenko, Evgeny. Political Economy of Socialist Realism. Translated by Jesse M. Savage. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. ——. The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. Dubinskii, Rostislav. Stormy Applause: Making Music in a Worker’s State. New York: Hill and Wang, 1989. Duiker, William J. Twentieth-Century World History. 4th ed. New York: Wadsworth Publishing, 2006. Dunoyer, Cecilia. Marguerite Long: A Life in French Music, 1874–1966. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Edele, Mark. “Strange Young Men in Stalin’s Moscow: The Birth and Life of the Stiliagi, 1945–1953.” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 50, no. 1 (2002): 37–61. Edelman, Robert. Serious Fun: A History of Spectator Sports in the USSR. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. ——. Spartak Moscow: A History of the People’s Team in the Workers’ State. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. Edmunds, Neil. The Soviet Proletarian Music Movement. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2000. Eitan, Zohar, and Roni Y. Granot. “Growing Oranges on Mozart’s Apple Tree:‘Inner Form’ and Aesthetic Judgment.” Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal 25, no. 5 (2008): 397–418. Eley, Geoff. “Historicizing the Global, Politicizing Capital: Giving the Present a Name.” History Workshop Journal 63, no. 1 (2007): 154–88. Elias, Robert. The Empire Strikes Out: How Baseball Sold U.S. Foreign Policy and Promoted the American Way Abroad. New York: The New Press, 2010. Engerman, David C. “The Romance of Economic Development and New Histories of the Cold War.” Diplomatic History 28, no. 1 (2004): 23–54.

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In dex

Agosti, Guido, 95 – 96 Akselrod, Gleb, 56, 73 Aleksandrov, Georgii, 78 – 79, 157 All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad. See VOKS Anderson, Marian, 159, 163 anticosmopolitanism, 15, 32, 77 – 79 appropriation, 9, 11 – 12, 91 – 92, 108, 115 – 16, 118, 124 – 26 arts, role in Soviet society, 7 – 10, 14 Ashkenazy, Vladimir, 73 – 74, 78 Australia, 148 – 53 Austria, 43 – 44, 50 – 55, 72, 117, 132, 157 Belgium, 34 – 35, 71 – 73, 89, 95, 117, 119, 143 Berezka Ensemble, 130 – 31, 163 – 64 Bespalov, Nikolai, 43, 54, 84 – 90, 96 Black, Helen, 22 – 27, 29 – 33, 35 – 37, 41 – 42, 44,  152 Bolshoi Theater, 77, 85 – 87, 97, 138 – 39, 158 – 59, 163,  167 Boston Symphony Orchestra, 115, 140 – 42 Brezhnev, Leonid, 136, 182, 185 Carnegie Hall, 121, 124, 126, 159, 165 Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR, 23 – 25, 30, 72 – 74, 78, 84, 87 – 92, 95 – 106, 122 – 24, 129 – 36, 155 – 56, 162 – 65,  171 bureaucracy of, 38, 54, 73, 79, 87 – 88, 96, 100, 105, 130, 134 – 37,  155 Chandler, Dorothy, 127, 140

Chant du Monde, 30 – 34, 37, 39, 41, 69 – 70 Chavez, Carlos, 153 – 54 chess, 14, 112 Chicago Symphony Orchestra, 121, 124 China, 84 – 85, 94, 137, 152 – 53, 181 Chopin Competition. See International Chopin (Fryderyk) Piano Competition Classical Theater of China, 152 – 53 Cliburn, Harvey Lavan “Van,” Jr., 1 – 2, 17, 82 – 83, 99, 101 – 3,  112 Cold War, 5, 20 – 21, 31, 39 – 40, 47, 56 cultural competition during, 2, 6 – 7, 11 – 17, 20 – 22, 47, 53, 56, 62, 66 – 69, 84, 94, 99, 103, 110 – 11, 115 – 16, 126 – 27, 143 – 44, 174, 178 economic development and, 180 – 82 technology in, 178 – 80 terms of conflict, 22 collapse of the Soviet Union, 3, 22, 40, 42, 176, 184 – 86 Columbia Artists Management, 121, 124, 128, 158 – 61, 173 Committee on Artistic Affairs, 23 – 24, 43 – 44, 51 – 54, 57 – 62, 70 – 71, 76 – 77, 83 – 84, 87, 111, 132 reorganization of, 44 competitions, international music, 7, 13, 16 – 17, 46, 80, 89 development of system, 47 – 50, 55 national dynamics of, 47, 56 – 62, 73 – 74, 80, 91 – 93, 102,  109 organization of, 51 – 55, 89 – 98

257

258    I N D E X

competitions, international music (continued) preparations for, 76 – 77, 80, 89 – 98, 104 – 5,  109 Soviet attitude toward, 52 and Soviet domestic institutions, 47, 63, 72 – 76, 79 – 80, 83, 89 – 91, 103 – 8, 111 – 12 Soviet domination of, 49 – 50 See also individual competitions Composers’ Union, 38, 77 – 78, 87 concert tours, 17 finances of, 120, 127 – 28, 131, 146 – 47, 156, 160 – 62,  173 material abundance and, 126 – 27, 138 – 40 planning, 128, 166 – 71 restrictions on, 129 – 38, 144 – 45,  174 unintended consequences of, 138 – 40, 144 – 45,  176 copyright, 16, 22, 25 – 30, 37, 45 international regulation of, 39 – 41 moral right and, 29, 37, 41 Soviet, 37 – 39 cultural diplomacy, 12, 84, 88 – 90, 96, 100 – 101, 108, 112, 115 – 20, 125 – 26, 129, 138, 177 – 80 administration of, 23 – 24, 43 – 44, 166, 171, 173 before World War II, 10 – 11 as component of transimperial relations, 164 developing countries and, 181 financial aspects of, 173 globalization and, 6 good will and, 128, 153 – 56 obstacles to, 168, 175 propaganda and, 50 – 51, 68 – 69, 80, 85, 107, 144 Western popular music and, 183 – 84 See also cultural exchange cultural exchange, 15 – 18, 23, 98, 118, 123 – 24, 127, 137, 141, 169 – 70, 173 – 74 See also cultural diplomacy Czechoslovakia, 48, 73, 77, 89, 132, 134 – 35 Czerny-Stefanska, Halina, 59

Davidovich, Bella, 59 – 60 Denisov, Andrei, 42, 167 developmentalism, 4 – 5, 77 – 78,  98 Dorliak, Nina, 136 – 37 Driesch, Kurt, 118, 172 economic development, 3, 19 empire, 3 – 5, 15, 111 cultural, 10 – 11, 15, 57, 66, 84, 93, 98, 105, 109, 116 – 17, 130 – 34, 144, 172, 176, 183 England. See United Kingdom Entremont, Philippe, 65 – 68 film, 14, 20 – 21 Finemann, Gustav, 119 France, 30 – 37, 63 – 74, 89, 95, 101, 130, 183 Francescatti, Zino, 96, 140 friendship societies, Soviet, 18, 23 – 24, 34 – 35, 43, 51, 69, 94, 117, 121 – 22, 150 – 53, 172 – 75 Gamsjäger, Rudolf, 52 – 55, 109 Germany, 132 Federal Republic of Germany (West), 117 – 19, 129, 135, 137 German Democratic Republic (East), 84 – 85, 89, 118 – 19, 129 – 30, 134 – 36 Gilels, Emil, 75, 111, 130 – 31, 138 – 40 as competitor, 47, 111 as juror, 111 as organizer of Tchaikovsky Competition, 90 – 96 on tour, 117, 120 – 21, 125 – 28, 132 – 34, 153 – 60, 163 – 67,  171 globalization, 2 – 3, 5 – 6, 13 – 15, 19, 22, 121, 147, 175 – 77, 185 – 86 defined, 5 – 6 mass culture and, 184 Soviet role, 5 – 6, 14 – 17, 22, 40 – 41, 83 – 84, 106 – 16, 120, 124 – 26, 140 – 45, 177 – 78,  181 theories of, 189 nn,15 – 19 Goldenveizer, Aleksandr, 93 – 94

I N D E X     259

Gouzenko, Igor, 20 – 21 Guk, Iurii, 161, 167 Harasiewicz, Adam, 73 – 74 Heifetz, Jascha, 96, 132, 141, 158 homogenization of musical style. See standardization: musical style Hungary, 94 – 97, 102, 132, 135, 164 Hurok, Sol, 18, 133, 137 – 38, 157, 161 – 64, 167 – 68, 173,  175 biographical information, 158 – 59 ideal Soviet partner, 165 – 66 Iampolsky, Vladimir, 63, 117 Iarustovsky, Boris, 98, 123, 130 – 35 Ibert, Jacques, 65, 68 impresarios, 18, 45, 117 – 20, 132 – 33, 147, 173 effectiveness of, 173 as imperial intermediaries, 157 – 66, 172 – 74 unsuccessful, 166 – 71 integration cultural, 12 – 13, 17, 68, 83, 115, 120 – 21, 124 – 27, 140 – 45, 177 – 78,  184 economic, 2, 15 – 18, 22, 40, 45, 120, 138, 145 – 47, 172 – 78, 182, 185 – 86 legal, 2, 15 – 16, 22, 28, 37 – 41, 178 intelligentsia, as elite, 7, 10, 14, 38, 41, 85, 116, 138 intermediaries, imperial, 53, 70, 118 – 19, 127 – 29, 132 – 33, 147 – 48, 152 – 53 choosing, 44 – 45, 120, 166 – 71 financial interests of, 149 – 50 role in policy formation, 42 Soviet dependence on, 22, 25 – 26, 29 – 32, 41, 44, 62, 171 Soviet musicians as, 81, 85, 115 types of, 174 – 76 See also impresarios International Chopin (Fryderyk) ­Piano Competition, 46 – 47, 56 – 62, 72 – 76,  78

International Tchaikovsky Competition, 12, 16 – 17, 82 – 88 cello division, 104 piano division, 1, 101 – 3 preparations for, 89 – 98 progress of, 98 – 103 selection of contestants for, 92 – 94, 105 – 6,  108 violin division, 2, 99 – 100 Iron Curtain, The (film) 16, 69, 147 cast, 20 critical reception, 21 – 22 legal challenge in France, 30 – 34, 36 – 37 legal challenge in U.S., 27 – 30 negotiations regarding soundtrack of, 25 – 27 New York premier, 20 – 21 protests against, 20, 34 – 36 Italy, 24, 72, 89, 95 – 96, 117 Ivanian, Eduard, 160 – 62, 166 Japan, 94, 117, 130, 154 – 55 jazz. See popular music Jouvenel, Renaud de, 30 – 32, 35, 41, 44, 70 juries behavior of, 59, 62, 65 – 68, 73 – 74, 81, 99, 101 – 2 formation of, 50 – 51, 54, 57 – 58, 64, 71 – 77, 81, 86 – 87, 92, 95 – 96 objectivity of, 62 – 68, 73 – 74, 81, 99 (see also objectivity, Soviet notions of) standardization of performance style, 109 – 10 Kabalevsky, Dmitrii, 63 – 70, 72 – 74 Karajan, Herbert von, 121 – 23, 128 – 29, 158, 173 Kazantseva, Nadezhda, 50, 52 Kemenov, Vladimir, 30 – 33, 42 KGB, 18, 136 – 37, 145, 151 Khachaturian, Aram, 16, 21, 25, 118, 126, 154, 163 Khrushchev, Nikita, 2, 40, 88, 98 – 99, 113, 156, 164, 178 – 86

260    I N D E X

Klimov, Valerii, 73, 99 Kogan, Leonid, 72, 92, 117, 148, 163 – 65 Kondrashin, Kirill, 99, 141 Kuznetsov, I. G., 58 – 61 Langbein, Otto, 50 – 52 Lawrence, Peter, 167 – 70 Lebedev, Polikarp, 58 – 62, 71 Lebedev, Viktor, 60 – 62 Legge, Walter, 133 Lelchuk, Nina, 73, 78 Lhévinne, Rosina, 103 London Philharmonia, 121 – 22, 129, 133 Long, Marguerite, 65 – 68, 95 Long (Marguerite) and Thibaud (Jacques) International Music Competition, 48, 63 – 73 Madison Square Garden, 165 Malenkov, Georgii, 43, 88 Malinin, Evgenii, 63 – 69 Menuhin, Yehudi, 121, 123, 158 Metropolitan Opera (New York), 165 – 68 Mezhdunarodnaia kniga, 70, 178 Miaskovsky, Nikolai, 21, 25 Michelangeli, Arturo, 95 – 96 Mikhailov, Nikolai, 89 – 96, 99 – 107, 110, 122 – 24, 133 – 37, 163 – 64 Ministry of Culture, 38, 44, 56, 88 – 90, 95 – 99, 104 – 7, 118, 122 – 24, 127 – 29, 132 – 33, 136 – 37, 145 – 50, 154 – 56, 159 – 67, 172 – 75 tension with Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 166 Ministry of Finance, 33, 38 Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 23, 30 – 31, 43 – 44, 51 – 56, 61 – 62, 71, 122 – 24, 128, 157, 166, 171 tension with Ministry of Culture, 166 Minsk Conservatory, 77, 93 Mitropoulos, Dimitri, 115, 125, 142

Moiseev Folk Dance Ensemble. See State Academic Folk Dance ­Ensemble of the USSR Moscow as administrative center, 26, 35, 42, 61, 78 as center of global culture, 10 – 12, 76 – 78, 83 – 94, 97 – 98, 104, 111 – 12,  116 Moscow Conservatory, 1, 73 – 79, 97, 103, 122, 130 Moscow Musical Holiday, 17, 83 – 89,  111 Moses, Charles, 148, 150 Motta (Vianna de) International Piano Competition, 55 – 56 Mravinsky, Evgenii, 87, 117 Munch, Charles, 66, 115, 142 Neuhaus, Stanislav, 63 – 69 New York City Center Opera Company, 167 – 68 New York Philharmonic, 115, 124 – 25,  142 Nixon, Richard, 2, 113 objectivity, Soviet notions of, 60 – 62, 65, 70, 79, 81 See also juries: objectivity of Oborin, Lev, 75, 87 as competitor, 46, 58 as juror, 50 – 52, 56, 58 – 60, 63 – 65 on tour, 69, 117, 154 – 55 Oistrakh, David, 17 – 18, 75, 87, 107, 111, 130 – 31, 138 – 40, 167, 174 – 76 as competitor, 46 first U.S. tour, 114 – 15, 120 – 29, 141 – 43, 146, 158 – 62,  173 as juror, 50 – 52, 63 – 64,  71 as organizer of Tchaikovsky Competition, 90 – 92 other tours, 69, 116 – 20, 133, 148 – 55, 163,  167 Oistrakh, Igor, 48, 148 Olympics. See sport

I N D E X     261

Orchestra Hall (Chicago), 121, 124 Ormandy, Eugene, 114 – 15, 125 – 27, 140 – 43,  158 Paperno, Dmitrii, 73 – 79 partners, foreign. See intermediaries, imperial Philadelphia Orchestra, 114 – 15, 125, 127, 140 – 43 Piatnitsky Choir, 85, 130 Plisetskaya, Maya, 139 – 40 Poland, 56 – 62, 72 – 78, 89, 132, 135 – 37 policy formation, 42 – 44 Polikarpov, Dmitrii, 123, 130 – 31, 133 Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR, 23, 42, 71 popular culture, 3, 19 See also popular music popular music, 7, 183 – 85 See also popular culture Portugal, 55 – 56,  94 Prague Spring International ­Music Competition, 48, 77, 117, 132, 134 Primrose, William, 140 – 41 Prokofiev, Sergei, 12, 16, 21, 25, 87, 118, 126, 158 property, intellectual, 20, 29, 32, 37 – 41 Queen Elisabeth International Music Competition, 46 – 47, 71 – 72, 116 – 17 Recht, Charles, 27 – 30, 37, 41, 44 recordings, 18, 69 – 70, 82, 99, 108 – 11, 114 – 15, 118, 132 – 33, 140 – 45, 162, 174, 177, 184 Reiner, Fritz, 121, 125 repertoire domestic Soviet, 108 international standardization, 109 – 10 of touring musicians, 12 – 13, 107, 115 – 16, 121, 124 – 26

Richter, Stanislav, 17 – 18, 92, 101, 115, 117, 129, 131 – 38, 176 parents, 134 – 35,  137 Riurikov, Boris, 135 – 36 rock and roll. See popular music Rodgers, John, 148 – 53, 157, 165, 175 Rostropovich, Mstislav, 48, 111, 119, 125 – 26, 132, 139, 158 – 61,  176 royalties, 32, 38 transformation of Soviet system of, 38 – 39 Rubinstein, Arthur, 64, 132, 159 Sakharov, Dmitrii, 73, 78 Schang, Frederick C., 121, 132 – 33, 158 – 67,  170 Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR, 42, 72, 88 Serebriakov, Pavel, 58 – 60 Shkolnikova, Nelli, 63 – 64, 67 – 69 Shostakovich, Dmitrii, 12 – 13, 16, 21, 25, 41, 91, 124 – 26 as organizer of Tchaikovsky Competition, 87, 90 – 93, 99, 104, 118 Shtarkman, Naum, 56, 73, 78 Siialova, Irina, 73, 75, 78 Smith, Carlton, 170 – 71 Sobolevskii, Rafail, 63 – 64, 69 socialist consumption, 2, 182 – 83 socialist realism, 7 – 11, 57, 71, 84 – 86, 178 – 79 soft power, 11 – 12, 84, 89 – 90, 120 Sokorski, Włodzimierz, 57 – 58 Spaak, Paul-Henri, 34 – 35 sport, 13 – 14, 79 – 82, 112,  152 Stalin, Iosef, 8 – 9, 15, 31, 78 standardization, 14, 114 musical collaboration and, 110 musical style, 14, 17 – 18, 83, 108 – 11 orchestral sound, 114 – 16, 120, 140 – 45 See also juries: standardization of performance style; repertoire: international standardization

262    I N D E X

State Academic Folk Dance Ensemble of the USSR, 85, 130 – 31, 138, 157 – 67 State Academic Russian Folk Choir, 85, 130 State Department (United States), 158, 164 – 65, 168, 170, 183 State Symphony Orchestra of the USSR, 85, 141 Stern, Isaac, 114 – 15, 132, 141 – 43, 159 superiority, Soviet assumptions of, 2, 12 – 13, 16 – 17, 22,  40 Suslov, Mikhail, 33, 54, 87 – 88, 136 Sveshnikov State Academic Russian Choir, 130 – 31 Tarjus, Blanche, 64, 69 Thibaud, Jacques, 67, 69 See also Long (Marguerite) and Thibaud (Jacques) International Music Competition Tverdokhlebov, Nikolai, 51 – 54, 87, 170 Ulanova, Galina, 121, 167 United Kingdom, 95, 117 – 19, 132 – 34, 137, 154, 159 United States of America, 94 – 95, 99, 114 – 15, 119 – 29,

132 – 33, 137, 141 – 42, 146, 153 – 54, 157, 160 – 63, 167 – 71, 179 – 80 Vishnevskaya, Galina, 139 – 40 Vladimirsky, Boris, 90, 96 – 97 VOKS, 23 – 24, 30 – 39, 44, 51 – 55, 61, 70, 148 – 49, 154, 161, 167, 170 – 73 reorganization of, 24 – 25, 42 – 44 Vyshinsky, Andrei, 32 – 33 Wallner, Ulbrich, 117 – 18 Wellman, William A., 16, 20 Wieniawski (Henryk) Violin ­Competition, 46, 116 World Youth Festivals, 73, 94 Ysaÿe (Eugéne) International ­Violin Competition. See Queen Elisabeth International Music Competition Zarubin, Georgy, 124, 128, 154, 159 – 65, 170 – 71 Zecchi, Carlo, 95 – 96 Zhdanov, Andrei, 8, 15, 31 Zimbalist, Efrem, 99, 158 – 59