7

Music, Media, and Cultural Relations between the United States and the Soviet Union

Musical exchanges between the United States and the Soviet Union were perhaps the most visible acts of cultural diplomacy of the era, capturing the imagination of audiences, musicians, and publics around the world. These exchanges took place in an environment of suspicion and skepticism. What Americans knew of the Soviets, and vice versa, was both limited and extreme, with demonizing portrayals proliferating on both sides. The Soviet state’s crackdowns on writers, composers, and other intellectuals were widely covered in the American press. Likewise, Soviet media made it known that the United States was a debauched, immoral society.1 Music was highly valued in both places: lacking verbal content, it appeared to stand apart from politics in a way that literature did not. Of course, it did not stand apart from politics. Rather, it provided a significant avenue for continuing diplomatic and personal contact between the peoples of the two superpowers. Both government-funded and privately sponsored musical exchanges were covered extensively in the print and broadcast media and soon thereafter in countless memoirs. These mediated contacts dramatized international relations concretely and meaningfully for the listening public.²

U.S.-Soviet cultural diplomacy programs have been interpreted in sharply contrasting ways. Many Western histories frame American cultural diplomacy as a form of infiltration in which Western culture undermined the Soviet Union, hastening the Cold War’s end.³ Some commentators even attribute the fall of Communism to the subversive influence of American culture, particularly rock music.⁴ In the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, where some kinds of music were suppressed by the state, the appeal of the forbidden did affect musical choices.⁵ Yet in practice U.S. cultural diplomacy brought to the USSR only performers whom Soviet authorities chose to allow into the country and genres of music that were already accessible there in some form. Official U.S.-Soviet musical exchanges were neither covert nor illegal, and the Soviet musical scene was changing far more through Soviet agency than through any artistic exchanges (let alone infiltrations) from the West.6 In the conversations about cultural diplomacy that took place during the Cold War, the idea of infiltration served particular purposes—but it does not accurately describe the music or the politics of cultural diplomacy. A second prevalent explanation of U.S.-Soviet cultural diplomacy focuses on “mutual understanding” and peaceful purposes.⁷ This model, too, fails to describe the practice of musical diplomacy. Although in-person meetings were important, they were typically too fleeting and constrained to bring about anything like a deep understanding of the other’s perspective. And, as we will see, musicians’ tours provided opportunities for rancorous competition as well as peaceful exchange.

Since neither the “infiltration” story nor the “understanding” story rings true, we must examine the evidence more closely to see how musical diplomacy was practiced and what it meant. In this chapter I argue that U.S.-Soviet musical diplomacy was an important symbolic ritual that enabled both superpowers to claim victories within a “safe” arena that would not lead to military escalation. At the same time, the practice of U.S.-Soviet exchange elicited a peculiar form of self-conscious participation. Widespread media coverage engaged state officials, journalists, and the public in various aspects of the enterprise, eliciting hope, excitement, and anxiety about contact with the enemy. The many forms of negotiation and communication that supported musical exchanges also made working relationships between the United States and the Soviet Union manageable and eventually routine, laying a foundation for détente. The people who made musical diplomacy were themselves changed by the experience, but they also altered U.S.-Soviet relations and how those relations were perceived all over the world.

POSTWAR BEGINNINGS

A major factor in Congress’s initial willingness to fund the Cultural Presentations program was a sudden expansion in Soviet cultural exports in the early 1950s. U.S. government officials worried that Soviet cultural initiatives would convince other peoples “that the USSR is devoting its efforts to the development of its cultural life while the Western world concentrates on building its military might.”⁸ As Soviet policy appeared to soften after Stalin’s death in 1953, the possibility that citizens of nonaligned or “free” countries might trust the Soviets’ peaceful intentions only seemed more real.⁹ Within the United States, citizens were on high alert amid fears that the twenty-five thousand members of the Communist Party U.S.A. were organized enough to infiltrate community organizations around the country.10 As U.S. newspapers described Soviet economic and technical alliances in the Middle East and Asian countries, it was easy for American citizens to imagine non-Soviet peoples as even more vulnerable to Soviet propaganda.

After the United States began routinely sending musicians abroad, its diplomats used the idea that the Soviets were “ahead” to make a case for increasing American investments in cultural diplomacy.¹¹ The PAO at the U.S. embassy in Cairo told the State Department that “the Soviet Bloc countries have been flooding Egypt during the recent months with an intensive and accelerated cultural offensive whose effectiveness cannot be denied.” The embassy requested, unsuccessfully, that the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra visit Egypt during its planned tour to other countries in the region.¹² A later telegram explained that the Bolshoi Ballet had staged five performances in Damascus, drawing thirteen hundred people each night, and asked the department to dispatch the San Francisco Ballet to counter the Soviet cultural presence.¹³ To prove that the United States should do more, the U.S. ambassador to Japan sent Washington a list of nearly a dozen musical attractions from the Soviet Union and its allies that were visiting Japan in 1959.¹⁴ Some public officials and concert organizers abroad used the Soviet threat to invite continued U.S. support. Hector Galvez, director of the National School of Music of Honduras, wrote gratefully to the U.S. embassy in Tegucigalpa after the joint 1958 appearance of the San Francisco Ballet and the Woody Herman Orchestra: “We want to thank you especially for the concert offered to the university students, a sector in which the pleasantness of art can create a better understanding between your great nation and the Honduran youth, a tie which is threatened at times by infiltration of foreign ideas.”¹⁵

The desire to compete with Soviet attractions became a major reason for expanding U.S. cultural diplomacy programs in the 1950s. During the first decade of the Cold War direct cultural exchange between the United States and the USSR remained sparse, difficult to organize, and in private hands. Because the Soviet state limited foreign influences, it was not easy to gain permission to enter the country.¹⁶ The few commercial tours that dared to enter the USSR faced the financial hardship of arranging bookings in a country where they could not be paid for their concerts in hard currency. A Ukrainian American entrepreneur and impresario, Sol Hurok (figure 15), who had been negotiating with Soviet authorities on and off since the 1920s, renewed his efforts to arrange tours of Soviet musicians to the United States soon after the war’s end—but the Soviet government, in turmoil, delayed permission repeatedly.17 Attempts at arranging visits and performances were stymied not only by Soviet isolationism but also by American fears. When in 1949 the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich was invited as part of a delegation to a peace conference in New York, Congressman Donald L. Jackson (R-CA) testified before Congress that “Mr. Shostakovich and his kind have the same right in this land of freedom as rattlesnakes in a Baptist church.”¹⁸ The McCarran Internal Security Act, passed in 1950, forbade Communists from entering the United States, and the McCarran-Walter Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 required that all persons applying for visas had to be fingerprinted.¹⁹ Soviet officials forbade the fingerprinting of Soviet citizens; thus, the two nations were at a stalemate. Because the United States and the USSR had not agreed to allow commercial air travel connecting the two countries, transportation was also difficult and expensive.

Figure 15. Sol Hurok. RG 306-AIP-176-49, National Archives.

Privately funded exchanges increased in 1955 and 1956, with visits to the United States by Soviet instrumental soloists Emil Gilels, David Oistrakh, and Mstislav Rostropovich. These individuals were given official diplomatic status to circumvent the fingerprinting requirement.20 Hurok subsidized the visits of instrumental soloists Isaac Stern and Jan Peerce to the Soviet Union in 1956, but moving a large group into the region was harder.²¹ Presidential aide C.D. Jackson, who was also a trustee of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, expressed frustration that the U.S. government was slow to encourage large American ensembles to tour the Soviet Union. Officials feared that if a large U.S. ensemble traveled, the Soviets would then request a reciprocal visit, thereby instigating new negotiations about fingerprinting and visas.²² The Soviet government invited a touring production of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess in 1956. The opera was presented commercially in most of Western Europe, but the State Department funded its travel in Yugoslavia, Egypt, Greece, Israel, Spain, and Latin America, and the Soviet state financed the Soviet portion of the tour. The show discomfited some on both sides with its complex messages about race, but it was broadly successful with audiences.²³ The Boston Symphony Orchestra, also sponsored by the Soviet government, gladly added Moscow and Leningrad to its European tour that same year. The orchestra was paid half in rubles and half in dollars, and the musicians performed one concert at no charge in exchange for their airfare.²⁴

The circulation of expensive and glamorous art music productions from the West would remain rare in the Soviet Union, and recorded performances were likewise difficult to obtain. By contrast, the imitation of American popular music and fashion was widespread in the USSR right after the war, and many recordings were in circulation. Soviet citizens knew and liked American jazz and popular music in the 1940s, but these kinds of music were carefully controlled.²⁵ A crackdown on jazz began in 1946 and continued until the de-Stalinization campaigns (1955 to 1957), although jazz-derived light music of Soviet origin was permitted sporadically.²⁶ After the populace demonstrated a great wave of interest in rock ’n’ roll in the mid-to-late 1950s, rock was criminalized. Bootleg recordings were produced on discarded X-ray films and distributed via illicit networks. Anyone handling these recordings received harsh penalties.²⁷ Despite their government’s disapproval, though, fans continued to pick up shortwave broadcasts from the West. Thus, the West’s popular music was both more commonly heard and more stringently forbidden than was its art music.

THE LACY-ZARUBIN AGREEMENT

A breakthrough in Soviet-American cultural relations came with the approval in 1958 of the Lacy-Zarubin agreement, in which Ambassador William Lacy and Ambassador Georgii Zarubin regularized the exchange of persons and media between their countries.28 The United States had pressed for this agreement for years. At the Geneva conference in 1955, the Eisenhower administration put forward detailed proposals that would ensure the “free flow” of information and ideas. Still, the idea of large-scale cultural exchange with an enemy state remained unsettling. Eisenhower’s interagency security committee, the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB), had convened a working group in 1956 to discuss the possibility of the Philadelphia Orchestra visiting Moscow and the Bolshoi Ballet coming to the United States, but the working group could not decide whether the visits should be “encouraged or even permitted.”²⁹ U.S. negotiators expressed concern that if the fingerprinting requirement were repealed, the United States would need to prepare for a wave of Soviet applications to enter the country, amounting metaphorically to an “invasion.” Yet polling data suggested that a majority of American citizens supported the gradual resumption of exchanges with the East Bloc countries, and Ambassador Charles Bohlen, Lacy, and State Department staff agreed that a “cautious,” “unobtrusive” resumption of contact would be in U.S. interests.³⁰ Lacy recalled that when the U.S. government suddenly revoked its fingerprinting requirement, the Soviets were caught off guard, reluctantly acceding to a plan that would allow a limited number of exchanges each year, to be mutually approved in advance by the two governments.³¹

The agreement required reciprocal exchange: an equal number of major ensembles from each country would tour each year (for example, matching the Bolshoi Ballet with the Philadelphia Orchestra). Of course, the relationship remained asymmetrical because of the vastly different aims and organizational models of the two states. State-run Soviet ensembles would be exchanged for privately funded U.S. groups, and tours in the United States were arranged by impresarios seeking profit, as opposed to the state concert agency Goskontsert in the Soviet Union. Frans Alting von Geusau notes that reciprocity was not so much a principle as a “selective instrument,” to be deployed when it suited the purposes of each negotiator.³² Each government agreed to consider relaxing its more onerous regulations, though many of these lingered for some time after the agreement was settled. Neither side was willing to give up more than the bare minimum that would allow the program to function. Travelers’ ability to take photographs and the question of direct flights between the United States and the USSR remained to be negotiated.³³ In addition the agreement had to be renewed every two years. Since the negotiations were long and tense, this provision would keep U.S. and Soviet diplomats and concert agencies in nearly constant contact.³⁴

The news of the Lacy-Zarubin agreement was handled carefully by the State Department and reported differently in different areas of the world. Department officials realized that if America trumpeted the advantages of the agreement, the Soviets might lose face and withdraw, so they recommended “sober, objective, mutually advantageous” news coverage.35 Yet when Americans heard about the agreement, it did not seem advantageous enough: a deluge of letters and press coverage criticized the agreement. Joseph H. Dockow, a private citizen in Hicksville, New York, called it “a tremendous propaganda victory for them and a defeat for us.”³⁶ Congressman Michael Feighan (D-OH) believed it would allow Soviet spies to enter the United States.³⁷ Reverend A.W. Pritchard suggested that the Soviets might be capable of mass hypnosis, “using subtle powers in every hidden way that they can devise,” and that Americans exposed to Soviet ideas might be brainwashed.³⁸ Millionaire filmmaker Eugene W. Castle, who had created numerous propaganda newsreels for the U.S. government during World War II, explained that the project of molding the minds of foreigners was “a completely un-American technique,” that it was ineffective and harmful, that it would entrust American propaganda to “the worst misfits and softies,” and that it would turn the USIA into a “transmission belt” for importing Soviet ideas.³⁹ These ideas were mocked in the Soviet press: the Literaturnaia Gazeta (Literary Gazette) crowed that “not one of our newspapers would print such nonsense.”⁴⁰ After the first wave of interest more moderate fears persisted. An American reader of the Saturday Review wrote that any rapprochement between the superpowers seemed unwise: “I am afraid that in the many international handshakes and fraternizing toasts one might tend to forget that behind the current political and economical struggle lies a deep philosophical clash between the Communist and non-Communist world.”⁴¹

The first Soviet ensemble to travel under the Lacy-Zarubin agreement, the Igor Moiseyev State Folk Dance Ensemble, was greeted with cheers and positive reviews in its first performance at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York (figure 16). The dancers appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show on 29 June 1958: Americans were riveted.⁴² A resident of Miami Beach, Florida, objected: “We americans [sic] are about fed up with allowing all those Russian Red dancers on Ed Sullivan Program.”⁴³ Anne and Helen Bannon wrote to Secretary of State Dulles: “How can you be so naive and gullible as to think, or perhaps hope, that this troup [sic] is appearing in our great country as a gesture of genuine friendship when all past and present horrible performances of the Soviet Union indicate otherwise? . . . Do you want to wait until Americans right here in these United States suffer a like fate before you cease to be fooled by so-called ‘cultural pacts’?”44 The OCB and the State Department had anticipated this kind of criticism. The Department assured its critics that the agreement aimed to lessen international tensions and enhance mutual understanding, that it was enacted for only two years, and that it was under the authority of the president and subject to the Constitution and laws of the United States.⁴⁵

Figure 16. The Moiseyev Ensemble takes its final curtain call after its opening performance in New York, 1958. RG 59-G-95-203, National Archives.

If the agreement looked too much like a rapprochement with godless Communism to the American people, the State Department was aware that it might look still worse to people in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. After the brutal 1956 invasion and reoccupation of Hungary by the Soviet Union, for the United States to resume any kind of formal relations with the USSR could imply an acceptance of the new status quo in Eastern Europe. As Castle explained it, “our government has officially notified the world that we have abandoned and disowned millions of people who, for more than a decade, have had great faith in us,” even “stabbed them in the back.”⁴⁶ Ordinary Americans, too, understood this risk. A Florida citizen heard of the Lacy-Zarubin agreement on NBC’s flagship TV news show, The Huntley-Brinkley Report, and wrote to the State Department: “There are people in the East Berlin sector of Germany, and people in the satellite countries under Russian domination who could tell us something about Russian Inter Cultural Relationship.”⁴⁷ The State Department instructed its diplomats to emphasize that the United States was trying to increase the flow of information and people across the Iron Curtain—that is, conveying free information to captive peoples, as well as information about the captive to the free world—for the mutual benefit of all.48

The concern about how the U.S.-Soviet exchanges would look to Eastern Europeans was well-placed. With the Moiseyev performances State Department officials had their first warning that the implications of these exchanges were hard to control. In early July 1958, Hungarians were grappling with the news that the popular leader of the 1956 revolution, Imre Nagy, had been secretly tried and executed by the repressive Soviet-controlled regime that had quashed the revolution. Just at this time the Communist-controlled Hungarian press reported the success of Moiseyev’s ensemble in the United States. According to the American Legation in Budapest, the Hungarian press coverage made it seem as though all Americans welcomed the performances and admired the Soviet Union. Furthermore, the articles reminded Hungarians that although U.S. officials professed horror at the Nagy execution, they could not be relied on to come to Hungarians’ aid against the Soviet Union. The legation called these articles “a disheartening hint of American abandonment.”⁴⁹

Although the United States was entering into cultural and educational exchanges with the Soviet Union, not all U.S. officials agreed that Middle Eastern or South American countries should do likewise. In 1959 the U.S. embassy in Quito attempted to persuade the government of Ecuador to deny visas to a group of Russians traveling to an Ecuadoran film festival. It was difficult for the Americans to justify even an informal query to the Ecuadorans, for the United States had recently participated in the spectacular trade fair at Moscow’s Sokolniki Park, and the Bolshoi Ballet was then enjoying a sensational tour in the United States.⁵⁰ It hardly made sense for U.S. officials to prevent Ecuadorans from seeing Soviet performers who were permitted in their own country. A memo from the State Department claimed that the embassy’s effort to stop the Soviets’ visit was a misunderstanding of policy, not prompted from Washington.⁵¹ Perhaps the greater risk was that, as Latin Americans heard news of the Lacy-Zarubin agreement, they might reasonably interpret it as strengthening cultural ties within the Northern Hemisphere, leaving the Global South out of the conversation.⁵²

Both before and after the Lacy-Zarubin agreement was signed, Soviet officials declared certain cities off limits to touring performers and scientific delegations, allegedly because of transportation difficulties. More likely, they wanted to keep Westerners from seeing poor living conditions, industrial secrets, or military bases. In response the State Department arbitrarily designated certain U.S. cities closed, with the intent of giving the Soviets incentive to lift their ban. For example, the distinguished cellist Mstislav Rostropovich would be allowed to play in Philadelphia only if U.S. artists could also access one out-of-bounds city.53 In 1961 Secretary of State Dean Rusk told negotiators that the Moiseyev dance ensemble would not be able to tour in the United States if the University of Michigan Symphony Band was denied performance dates east of the Ural Mountains. When the Soviets threatened to go to the press regarding American intransigence, Rusk allowed the U.S. embassy in Moscow to respond with a similar threat.⁵⁴ Because the U.S. government was working with private entrepreneurs, not a state-run concert agency, conflicts often arose, with American promoters booking Soviet acts into cities, such as San Francisco or Detroit, that had been “closed” by the State Department. The ban on Soviet musicians’ travel to some cities was widely reported in the American press, and this publicity increased audience demand for the concerts. Fans objected most strenuously when a promoter was asked to cancel a booking made erroneously in a closed city.⁵⁵ The American musical public disliked the feeling of being used as pawns on a Cold War chessboard, and some complained to the State Department about being prevented from enjoying performances by the Bolshoi Ballet and other famous Soviet ensembles.⁵⁶

Alongside the high-profile government-run exchanges, privately funded tours continued, many of them arranged by Sol Hurok. From the signing of the Lacy-Zarubin agreement until the end of Hurok’s career, his entrepreneurship sometimes doubled as diplomacy, but just as often it complicated the State Department’s work. When in 1960 he negotiated directly with the Soviets to book two Soviet attractions for U.S. tours, he threw out of balance the one-to-one arrangement of exchanges by bringing the year’s total to four Soviet attractions, rather than the three the ambassadors had agreed on.⁵⁷ In 1967, when Soviet officials insisted that no major Soviet attractions could visit the United States as long as the bombing in Vietnam continued, Hurok traveled to confer with Russian officials, hoping to salvage the strained program. Hurok had a major financial investment in the continuation of exchanges: he had booked the Bolshoi Opera for a three-week stand at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House and stood to lose about $300,000 plus expenses. (He eventually brought only a few individual performers from the Bolshoi, a far cry from the spectacular production he had originally planned.)⁵⁸

U.S. government reports from the mid-1960s describe a consistent flow of Americans into the Soviet Union, many of them traveling to share a particular interest: equestrians, film specialists, radiologists, dancers, and musicians.59 The Soviet press warned that American tourists might engage in anti-Soviet behavior, yet the welcome granted to individuals was warm.⁶⁰ The American composer Peggy Stuart Coolidge traveled to Moscow under private arrangements in 1965. There she met Aram Khachaturian, and at his recommendation her compositions were brought before the Union of Soviet Composers for possible performance. A concert of her music was performed in Moscow after her departure, and she was awarded the medal of the Soviet Union of Workers in Art.⁶¹ By the 1970s, U.S. citizens could and did travel to the USSR in significant numbers.⁶² By contrast, most Soviet citizens would not be permitted to visit the United States; in 1961, for example, only 228 of them made the trip, most of them traveling as representatives of their professions.⁶³

COMPETITION

When Roy Larsen and Glenn Wolfe evaluated the Cultural Presentations program in 1961 and 1962, they affirmed that assigning art the purpose of direct competition with the Russians and Chinese was “a denigration of all culture.”⁶⁴ Yet in practice, artistic competition remained important throughout the 1960s. U.S. diplomats abroad and in Washington monitored closely what Soviets were performing where, and for what audiences, and they attempted to estimate both Soviet expenditures and the resulting prestige. U.S. officials fretted that the resources at their disposal could not match the Soviet Union’s conspicuously well-funded program. When Senator Frank Carlson (R-KS) requested that the State Department fund the Centennial Choir of Baker University for a tour, a department official responded that his budget had been flat for the past five years. In 1958 the President’s Fund had been able to sponsor only thirteen performing arts projects; during that time the USSR had sent 118 arts delegations to the “free world” (countries outside the Soviet sphere of influence), and another eighty-two came from the Soviet-occupied East Bloc.⁶⁵

The competition raged not only in quantity but also quality. The provision in the Lacy-Zarubin agreement that the United States and the USSR trade ensembles of equivalent stature heightened the scrutiny. In October 1958, soon after the beginning of official exchanges, Frederick T. Merrill, director of the department’s East-West Contacts staff, explained to the ACA that a delegation of art-music composers was currently visiting the USSR—Ulysses Kay, Roger Sessions, Roy Harris, and Peter Mennin—but “you might be interested to know that the Russians felt that our delegation was not up to theirs. They had not heard of our composers.” In return the Soviets planned to send the composers they considered their best: Shostakovich, Aram Khachaturian, Konstantin Dankevich, and Tikhon Khrennikov, as well as musicologist Boris Yarostovsky, who was also an official in the Union of Soviet Composers.66

In 1963 the Clarion Concerts Chamber Orchestra, led by Newell Jenkins, was exchanged with the closely comparable Barshai Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Rudolf Barshai. Each ensemble was founded in 1955, and each specialized in both Baroque and contemporary music. A State Department report to Congress noted that the Clarion orchestra’s tour elicited “a lively preoccupation on the part of the critics and the musical public in comparing the two orchestras.” Sovetskaia Kultura (Soviet Culture) praised the ensemble’s “freshness and novelty,” the “rich quality of sound,” and the ensemble’s capacity to “form a single creative organism, welded together in the finest detail and shadings.”⁶⁷ The cultural attaché of the U.S. embassy reported that two pieces of American music were composed especially for this tour: “announcements to this effect were greeted by spontaneous audience-wide audible catching of breath in surprise and delight.”⁶⁸ These compliments were featured in the department’s report to Congress and quoted in the American press. A Chicago Tribune headline trumpeted, “Moscow Hails U.S. Orchestra.” It was important not only that the American orchestra do well in Moscow but also that it be seen to do well—that its triumph be acknowledged by the Soviet hosts and observed by the U.S. public.⁶⁹ When the Latvian conductor Arvids Jansons praised Jenkins, the New York Times identified him as a “Soviet” conductor who conceded the Americans’ excellence. (Perhaps the Times missed the nuance that a musician from the Soviet-occupied Baltics might have his own reasons for praising a foreign ensemble that could compete with the Soviets.)⁷⁰

Unusual in this instance is that the members of the two orchestras met: the Barshai ensemble was in the audience when the Clarion performed in Moscow. Afterward, the musicians “traded ideas, experiences and compliments” at a party.⁷¹ This meeting elicited multiple levels of musical and social performance. When a U.S. reporter asked (perhaps skeptically) how much the Soviet public cared about Barshai’s relatively obscure music, the Soviet conductor smilingly named several other chamber orchestras and explained that his own group had played in ninety cities across the USSR—a ready answer implying a stunningly high level of musical literacy.⁷² In an article after the Clarion orchestra’s homecoming, Jenkins made warmly positive remarks about Soviet hospitality and Goskontsert, the Soviet agency that administered the logistics of the tour. Jenkins framed the visit as a joint effort for peace, quoting the maxim of George Hamilton that “the arts are the only tangible proofs we have that mankind is not made for destruction.”73

Yet Jenkins’s assessment of his trip for the U.S. press was also full of invidious comparisons. He explained that in the Soviet Union, audio recordings and printed music were not widely available and that American musicians were “ahead” in adopting new trends of early music performance.⁷⁴ Soviet musicians lamented their inability to hear Western ensembles, except those few that traveled to the Soviet Union. For example, Jenkins was surprised that Anton Sharoev, conductor of a chamber orchestra in Kiev, had not heard of I Musici, the London Baroque Ensemble, or the Orchestre Jean-Marie Leclair. Jenkins’s comments were not merely a travelogue; rather, he emphasized that American musicians were far better off than their Soviet counterparts.⁷⁵ Jenkins’s statements about the discontent of Soviet musicians were well-founded: Barshai himself was unhappy enough to emigrate in 1977.⁷⁶ These comparative remarks surely gratified American readers politically as well as musically.

Having been to the USSR under official auspices also enhanced the reputation of the Clarion Concerts Chamber Orchestra upon its return. The Barshai orchestra had presented the score and parts of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Khorovod” to Jenkins during his Moscow visit. At the Clarion orchestra’s season-opening concert at New York’s Town Hall a few months after its homecoming, Jenkins conducted “Khorovod” and performed music the group had taken to the Soviet Union. He thereby reminded everyone of the orchestra’s prestigious trip and returned the compliment to the Soviets by playing a Soviet work in the United States.⁷⁷ Such compliments were sometimes even reciprocated. The Boston Symphony Orchestra left Walter Piston’s Sixth Symphony as a gift for orchestras in Moscow and Leningrad, and the USSR State Television and Radio Symphony Orchestra recorded the work in 1961.⁷⁸

Competition between the superpowers was particularly acute in the field of dance. Because the Soviet ballet had a long tradition and a worldwide reputation, U.S. officials knew that any dance they sent anywhere would be measured against the Soviet standard. The Soviet Union sent the Bolshoi Ballet to the United States in 1959, then the Kirov Ballet in 1961. The United States reciprocated with the American Ballet Theatre in 1960, the New York City Ballet in 1962, and the Robert Joffrey Ballet in 1963.⁷⁹ As of May 1960, the State Department and Hurok considered cancelling the American Ballet Theatre’s appearances, fearing the group would not meet Soviet standards.⁸⁰ The rivalry was not only felt in the two superpowers but also watched closely from other vantage points. A Swedish reviewer who saw the American Ballet Theatre before its Soviet visit remarked ominously that the group’s choreography might be unwelcome in the home of classic ballet: “Certainly this group can dance. Only, everything depends on what it dances. To cross the border to the East does not seem to be advisable—there, other qualifications for the dance are required.”81

The Americans certainly felt the weight of the Russian tradition. Some American dancers held the Soviet Union in awe and regarded a visit to the Mariinsky and Bolshoi Theaters as a pilgrimage.⁸² Many people in the dance world shared the preconception that U.S. ballet companies could not compete, and Soviet reviewers condescended to the dancers accordingly, sometimes damning them with faint praise. During the Joffrey Ballet’s 1963 tour, Soviet reviewers praised the troupe’s “energy, youthful temperament, enthusiasm” and “artistic closeness” yet still managed to convey the conclusion that the performances were not equal to Russian ballet. A writer in Sovetskaia Kultura explained that the ensemble was “not yet schooled in the observance of the strict rules of the classical dance and therefore it is very difficult to imagine the Joffrey Ballet in the performance of a classical ballet like Swan Lake.”⁸³ Another reviewer concluded derisively that the Joffrey Ballet’s art resulted from “all which is negative which the American Way of Life brings to art.”⁸⁴

Still, some Americans were willing to challenge the supremacy of the USSR, assuming the role of the modernizing upstart that challenges the old master. In 1962 an interviewer for Radio Moscow greeted the American choreographer George Balanchine, himself a product of the Russian Imperial Ballet School, with the words “‘Welcome to Moscow, home of classic ballet!’ Balanchine is said to have replied, ‘I beg your pardon. . . . Russia is the home of romantic ballet. The home of classic ballet is now America.’”⁸⁵ Likewise, after the Bolshoi Ballet’s performances in the United States, a critic for the Chicago Tribune pilloried them for their conservatism.⁸⁶ (This strategy worked both ways: Igor Moiseyev called New York’s Metropolitan Opera old-fashioned, too, after he visited in 1958.)⁸⁷ Some U.S. citizens who saw Soviet performers were eager to put them down. In a letter to the editor of the New York Times, an American who had traveled to Moscow described technically perfect but dull performances at the Bolshoi Opera, and one occasion at the Bolshoi Ballet where a ballerina fell twice but was still rewarded with lavish applause.⁸⁸ Still, the use of cultural exchange as an opportunity for jingoistic ritual praise had its downside. Charles Frankel, who would lead the Cultural Presentations program during the Johnson administration, claimed that the emphasis on competition was hurting U.S. interests: “It encourages people everywhere to believe that we take our cues only from what the Russians do, that we are, indeed, only the other side of the same coin and represent nothing but a negative anti-communism.”89 Frankel hoped that the arts of the United States could stand for something positive, on their own merits, apart from any ill-intentioned comparisons.

MEDIA

As the foregoing discussion implies, the media played a key role in these competitive ventures. Thanks to the detailed and extensive news coverage of each artistic event on both sides, the participants included not only those who witnessed the events directly but also those who heard broadcasts of the concerts, read reviews, saw discussion of the events on television, or heard rumors of them from neighbors. The success or failure of each performance offered an opportunity for officials and the public to assess the achievements of musical propaganda and for officials to make adjustments in tactics. The most celebrated tours, such as that of Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic to the USSR in 1959, offered particularly rich opportunities for mediated exchange of ideas, with coverage on television in both countries, as well as in the press.⁹⁰ The public’s interest in these tours encouraged the media to dramatize them, conveying opinions and provocative salvos that drew further official and unofficial response.

Individual American musicians or musical groups were often praised in the U.S. press for overt provocations against the Soviet regime. For example, Bernstein included on his concert programs works by Igor Stravinsky that were rarely or never heard in the Soviet Union. Bernstein even commented publicly on the music’s suppression, thereby making explicit the Western world’s disapproval of Soviet censorship.⁹¹ In another bold move Bernstein wrote to Boris Pasternak, the author of Doctor Zhivago, who was then out of favor with Soviet authorities. Bernstein invited Pasternak to the Philharmonic’s Moscow concert. Media coverage amplified the effectiveness of the gesture. Pasternak did not attend the single concert that was filmed for broadcast in the United States, but footage of his friendly encounter with Bernstein was later edited into the program, ensuring that the American audience would credit Bernstein with bringing Pasternak out of seclusion.⁹² Even today, American critics revel in provocation as a key feature of Americans’ presence in the Soviet Union: an account published in 2009 noted with enthusiasm that “Bernstein bearded the Soviet cultural officialdom” by bringing Pasternak into public again.⁹³ Meanwhile, Pasternak’s presence at the concert and his meeting with Bernstein were ignored in much of the Soviet press.94

As Bernstein planned the television coverage of his Moscow performances, he was careful to characterize the mission as “friendship thru art.” Throughout his Soviet tour he expressed respect for Soviet composers and their music, and he emphasized commonalities between Soviet and American styles of composition.⁹⁵ His reception was not entirely friendly: the Soviet press denounced Bernstein for lecturing audiences about the music and giving encores too freely.⁹⁶ But the Soviet composer Aram Khachaturian also published a positive review, praising Bernstein as an “outstanding” musician and stating that cultural cooperation could “melt the ice of the ‘cold war.’”⁹⁷ The Washington Post in turn cited Khachaturian’s review as evidence that the sharp words about the encores were merely ideological bluster. The extremely varied responses to Bernstein’s performances likely reflected genuine differences of opinion to some extent. This pattern of mixed reception, harsh criticism alongside delightful compliments, also typified U.S. responses to Soviet tours. Conducting these conversations in the realm of culture rather than politics permitted the voicing of hostility and contention in a safe space that would not result in military action. At the same time, participants on both sides claimed the moral high ground of peaceful motives by talking about “mutual understanding,” “melting the ice,” and the merits of the enemy’s music.

On the Soviet side the state filtered Western news reports about the exchanges. In remarks to the National Press Club in Washington, DC, in October 1959, Bernstein praised Soviet composers, who despite being “hamstrung” by the state remained “demonstrative, enthusiastic, talented, warm,” and “loving.” But most of his off-the-cuff remarks disparaged the Soviet system. He criticized Soviet musical bureaucracy as conservative, stemming from “the Czarist tradition,” and called socialist realist paintings “practically identical . . . like a row of sitting ducks,” compared to the “complete world” of art produced by American artists. Asked by a reporter if the Soviet Union was “ahead” of the United States in the field of music, Bernstein replied, “I think any nation that is free to do what it wishes about music or about anything is automatically ahead.”⁹⁸ Translated excerpts of Bernstein’s remarks were transmitted back to the USSR by Voice of America on 18 October 1959. According to the deputy director of the USIA, Abbott Washburn, the Soviet authorities were then following a practice of selective interference with U.S. broadcasts, choosing to switch on the jamming equipment when sensitive topics were discussed but letting other topics come through. Washburn wrote with amusement to Bernstein that the Soviets had allowed Bernstein’s positive comments to be heard but jammed his negative remarks, in an overt attempt to shape the nuances of the story.99 There is reason to doubt Washburn’s account: jamming particular phrases of a newscast would require precise timing and advance knowledge of the script. It is possible that the story was heard once by officials, and then when it was repeated, the jamming was adjusted at that point. If Washburn’s story can be believed, that Soviet authorities allowed any part of the broadcast to be heard testifies to the importance they placed on positive affirmation from abroad. In a world where “everyone is watching everyone else,” praise from the enemy showed citizens the success of their own government.¹⁰⁰

Even as the supposedly jammed broadcast suppressed the news of Bernstein’s negative comments at the Press Club, Soviet newspapers acknowledged those comments by refuting them. According to an embassy staff member, the West German newspaper Die Welt had published Bernstein’s remarks. A Soviet critic responded, calling attention to the discourtesy of speaking positively about Soviet composers while visiting but negatively afterward. The critic also pointed out that Bernstein performed Shostakovich, Prokofieff, and Khachaturian frequently, so his claim that they were outmoded could not be true.¹⁰¹ Incidents of this kind could also affect impressions and relations outside the superpower states. When the New York Philharmonic played in Italy at the Venice Biennale, soon after its Soviet appearances, Bernstein publicly criticized the Soviet Union. His comments were made in the context of a concert program including Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony that was broadcast on Eurovision. According to the PAO at the U.S. embassy in Rome, “many persons in the audience interpreted Mr. Bernstein’s remarks as propaganda and several persons afterwards expressed regret that he had mixed music with politics.”¹⁰²

By condemning the management of Soviet musical life, though, Bernstein fulfilled the expectations of his Western audience. Indeed, one might say that as he traveled and presented his thoughts to interlocutors, audiences, officials, and reporters, he was dramatizing various aspects of the U.S.-Soviet relationship (friendship, respect, critique, disdain, one-upmanship) for various constituencies. These cultural exchanges served as a relatively nonthreatening—but not low-stakes—way for officials and the public on both sides to envision the “enemy” and even practice connection with him. Through exchanges people tested the limits of peaceable coexistence, probed the differences between the two systems, and marked those differences for the world to see. Incessant comparisons about who was “ahead” let music serve as a proxy for the arms race while also allowing the competition to seem like a gesture of “friendship thru art,” thanks in part to the gracious customs of the concert hall. Yet the whole enterprise—the representation and rerepresentation of events, the arguments over what happened at a concert and what it meant, the framing of information to shed the best light on one’s own country—did to an extent take on a contrived aspect. When Alexander Medvedev, writing in Sovetskaia Kultura, complained that Bernstein’s performance “looked as if it was a show called ‘Leonard Bernstein Is Lifting the Iron Curtain,’” he may have objected to Bernstein’s ego in particular. But Medvedev’s comment also defines a staged, even stagey, quality—a distinctive characteristic of these highly mediated exchanges.103

As U.S.-Soviet cultural relations developed over time, extensive international media coverage even shaped local decisions about what music to play. Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson observed that the Soviets were walking a careful line as they chose which particular writers or styles would fall into or out of favor. In Thompson’s view the Soviet Communist Party leadership was sensitive to foreign reactions and was trying to cultivate a “liberal image that can be exploited abroad.” Thompson wrote in 1967 that the party was resisting a full-scale cultural crackdown precisely because such a crackdown would undermine the image of a reasonable, restrained government in the eyes of the West.¹⁰⁴ Here again, the point is not that the Soviets felt pressure to conform to an international norm but that the Americans knew the Soviets felt that pressure and that the Soviets knew the Americans knew. The situation was governed to a large extent by media possibilities and public opinion, not just by the wishes of the respective powers and publics. The ever-increasing visibility of cultural affairs constrained the actions of both countries, but Soviet officials likely felt the constraint more acutely.

INFILTRATION: JAZZ

The atmosphere of international tension and the widely known Soviet suppression of particular musical styles made it easy for people in the West to think of Soviet musicians as “the victims of shipwreck on a desert island, cut off for decades from civilization.”¹⁰⁵ Viewed from the West, the Iron Curtain could seem impenetrable, “hermetically sealed.”¹⁰⁶ Yet the ban on rock and jazz was never as coherent or comprehensive as it looked from abroad. Unofficial music clubs and private parties made it impossible for the state to exert complete control over musical life. The musical preoccupations of state officials waxed and waned, and enforcement was inconsistent. The restrictions were real, to be sure, but it was possible for some people to gain access to forbidden music through foreign connections or illegal copies.107

The idea of infiltration shaped Americans’ ideas about their musical diplomacy in the Soviet Union. Getting music, art, and literature into the forbidden zone became a goal in its own right, as a symbol of political support and solidarity and a way to challenge Soviet strictures.¹⁰⁸ To the U.S. public and to American musicians the idea of Soviet suppression of a particular musical style or genre seemed nonsensical and heightened the feeling that the West must break down those barriers by providing what was suppressed. Throughout the Cold War era, musical freedom served as a metonym for political and social freedoms. Shortly before the collapse of the Communist states in the late 1980s, five Czech citizens were convicted for participation in a jazz club. In response an American critic presciently exclaimed that the suppression of culture was “unnatural and cannot last.”¹⁰⁹ The idea of infiltration may have played an outsized role in Soviet internal propaganda, as well. Kristin Roth-Ey has pointed out that the KGB inflated estimates of oppositional activity, such as listening to foreign radio, because this idea could be used to mobilize patriotic and orthodox sentiments. Given that the United States was tracking the Russian news, the KGB’s inflated numbers also provided false feedback that led American officials to overestimate the effects of their actions on the Soviet musical and political scenes.¹¹⁰

U.S. officials made continuing efforts to place the most notoriously forbidden music (avant-garde art music, rock, and jazz) on the programs of American performers who would travel to East Bloc countries.¹¹¹ Some who heard American music in the USSR believed they were witnessing an act that could literally undermine the Soviet government. Truman Capote, for example, called the eroticism and religious overtones of Porgy and Bess “a test tube brimming with the kind of bacteria to which the present Russian regime is most allergic.”¹¹² The mixed-program strategy that had been effective in the developing world proved useful here, too. Flexibly constituted ensembles that primarily played concert music could also contain a pull-out jazz or rock combo. Jazz and other controversial music was thus frequently performed by ensembles specializing in more acceptable genres. At a reception during his Soviet tour, Bernstein performed a jazz improvisation with a percussionist and bassist from the Philharmonic.¹¹³ The University of Michigan Chamber Choir, which visited the USSR in 1971, brought mixed programs, including traditional European choral literature, Negro spirituals, and excerpts from Porgy and Bess—as well as more challenging items, Leslie Bassett’s electronic work Collect and Charles Ives’s “Psalm 90.” The Bassett work “met with Soviet resistance,” but after persistent negotiations between U.S. officials and Goskontsert, it remained on the program.114 It is difficult to know whether this practice was regarded by U.S. officials as “smuggling” the music in. That audience members asked specifically for repertoire items that were hard to obtain certainly increased the Americans’ belief that providing this music was vital.¹¹⁵

U.S. intelligence officials took any indication that forbidden music might once again become permissible as a marker of political progress. U.S. ambassador Llewellyn Thompson took Khrushchev’s attendance at a Benny Goodman concert in 1962 as evidence that the government was yielding to pressure from the populace, particularly youth, and that perhaps public opinion was becoming a factor in the governance of the country.¹¹⁶ By 1966 Thompson could report that positive news articles on Soviet jazz were appearing, and jazz festivals were taking place in Tallinn and Leningrad, as well as in Moscow. Performances of twelve-tone music and American classical music were on the rise, and compositions were being created in styles that would have been unheard of a few years before. Thompson viewed all this as “steady progress,” despite his observation that intellectuals were experiencing other kinds of unwelcome pressure.¹¹⁷ Today, we might observe that Thompson and others placed too much credence in music as a marker of progress. Soviet officials knew that the presence of “dangerous” music would be interpreted optimistically, drawing attention away from other abuses. The effectiveness of rock and jazz in U.S. diplomacy did not stem from their being a musical model of freedom or individuality, as was often claimed; rather, they looked particularly effective because, tautologically, U.S. officials had grown accustomed to seeing the music’s acceptance as a measure of success.¹¹⁸ The U.S. embassy in Moscow routinely reported to Washington on the vicissitudes of Soviet musical judgment as if they corresponded to other political matters.

In any case musical infiltration was easier said than done. Any direct attempt at subversion had to be weighed against the possibility of backlash. In 1958 someone in the State Department floated a proposal that the United States send jazz records to the Soviet Union. Ambassador Thompson responded that he had serious doubts about such a project. First, all packages were inspected, so the result would be “to provide Soviet post office censors with best jazz collection in Soviet Union.” Second, articles would appear in the press accusing the United States of “flooding [the] country with jazz” in an effort to “corrupt Soviet youth.” Under this level of surveillance it was hardly worth the attempt to move large amounts of music into the hands of jazz aficionados.¹¹⁹ Likewise, as State Department officials planned Benny Goodman’s tour of 1962, they considered including a phonograph record of the band as an insert in Amerika, the department’s magazine for Soviet distribution. The embassy once again advised against it. Such a move would jeopardize the circulation of the magazine and give Soviet officials an opportunity to denounce America’s propaganda tactics. Further, the flimsy plastic on which such a disc insert could be pressed would give the Soviets an opportunity to criticize the quality of U.S.-produced recordings.120

The importance of jazz as an implement of propaganda was evident to Felix Belair, a political journalist who in 1955 dubbed jazz a “secret sonic weapon.” Belair reported with considerable hyperbole that “men actually have risked their lives to smuggle recordings of it behind the Iron Curtain and by methods that the profit motive cannot explain.”¹²¹ Branding jazz as a weapon generated excitement, then and since, yet reference to music as a “weapon” or “arsenal” is more common in today’s writings than it was at the time. Although music was sometimes called a “weapon” during the Second World War, that usage was rare in the language of State Department officials during the Cold War.¹²² A significant exception was Heath Bowman’s assertion that “trumpets and ice skates already have proved they are among the most effective weapons of the cold war”—a statement made to drum up congressional support for an increase in the Cultural Presentations budget.¹²³

Similar calls for the government to deploy jazz came from other sources. Jazz fans campaigned for the music’s use in propaganda to the East. Californian jazz critic Ralph Gleason suggested that the State Department should include jazz, “our own, best international language,” as a featured element at the Moscow fair in Sokolniki Park in 1958. Gleason understood that it would be a challenge to secure the Soviet government’s consent—but “if the Russians offer any objection, this matter should be so important to our State Department that it should fight for the right to present jazz.” He urged his readers to write letters to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to request the inclusion of jazz.¹²⁴ Some of Gleason’s readers did write: they received a response saying that jazz was “prominent among the possibilities currently being considered.”¹²⁵ Ambassador William Lacy, who had negotiated the Lacy-Zarubin agreement, had proposed sending American jazz to the USSR during his talks with his Soviet counterpart. He noted in 1958 that “although the Soviets had said jazz was unacceptable, he had not given up on the subject.”¹²⁶

Soviet entertainment bands employed a variety of homegrown and imported jazz practices. U.S. officials knew that jazz had a “firm foothold” in the Soviet Union.¹²⁷ Even the American public had some access to information about Soviet jazz, which received fairly regular coverage in Down Beat magazine.128 When jazz critic Leonard Feather went to the Soviet Union to observe Goodman’s tour in 1962, he found that Soviet musicians played chord changes “all wrong” in the American jazz standards they knew, but they were capable players and personally invested in jazz performance. By the early 1960s, any regular reader of Down Beat would have known of highly sophisticated Soviet jazz artists who played a good deal of original music.¹²⁹ Feather understood that liking the music did not necessarily imply an embrace of American political values: “Every friend made for jazz in any country is, of course, another link in a chain of worldwide amity. This is not to imply that the Soviet admiration for U.S. jazz connotes any desire to emulate another way of life or to discard their own political and social values; it is rather that the differences become unimportant, and the desire to effect closer ties with their idols 5,000 miles away becomes the dominant emotion.” Feather made sure that Americans knew that jazz was permitted, even as he acknowledged its cachet: “The fruit is no longer forbidden, but the memory of the long veto still makes it taste sweeter.”¹³⁰

Yet the idea that the Soviets banned all jazz persisted. When Earl “Fatha” Hines and his band played a concert in Novorossiisk in 1964, tickets sold out in two days. The capacity audience of fifteen hundred persons, 90 percent of them estimated to be under thirty years of age, was characterized in the embassy’s report as “surprisingly knowledgeable about jazz music”—even though the embassy’s surprise was unwarranted.¹³¹ Despite the evidence, both the American public and U.S. officials continued to believe well into the 1960s what was true in 1948—that jazz was senselessly (and fruitlessly) forbidden in the Soviet Union.

“INFILTRATORS” FIND A WARM WELCOME

The first American jazz musicians to play in the Soviet Union after 1948 certainly conceived of their project in terms of infiltration. Willie Ruff and Dwike Mitchell traveled not under official auspices but covertly, as members of the Yale Russian Chorus that toured the Soviet Union in 1959.¹³² Ruff recalled years later that the idea of bringing jazz into a place where it was forbidden had great appeal: “We had gone, I suppose, mostly because it was there. We wanted the experience of visiting a foreign country that had been sealed tight to American modernism.”¹³³ Ruff and Mitchell planned meticulously. They became members of the choir, and Ruff studied Russian and prepared a lecture on the history of jazz. When Mitchell and Ruff walked into the Moscow State Conservatory and offered to give a lecture-demonstration about jazz, their offer was happily accepted. They were invited back to the conservatory for a more formal concert the following week and subsequently played for the Leningrad jazz club as well, drawing an audience of four hundred there on short notice.134 In conversation with everyday Russians, Ruff was surprised by Soviets’ statements: “they were absolutely unaware that it was their government that refused to permit Louis [Armstrong] to play. Many of them didn’t believe it. They knew of no objection to jazz, only that there was a lack of it.”¹³⁵ Ruff expressed his amazement that the duo was allowed to play for Lev Vlassenko, who was professor of piano at the conservatory, asking “how such a performance could be ventured when Soviet authorities had turned thumbs down on jazz.” Vlassenko replied, “But the authorities just do not like bad jazz.”¹³⁶

It is telling that Ruff’s new acquaintances in the Soviet jazz community were aware of the terms in which jazz was discussed in the American press. When Ruff asked them what Americans could do to support jazz in Russia, the Soviet musicians requested that Americans stop making jazz so political; stop referring to it as a “supersonic secret weapon”; and stop trying to send in recordings through programs such as “Jazz Lift USA.” Ruff reported that a musician told him, “If you call jazz a weapon, of course, our government will look at it with a suspicious eye.”¹³⁷ These interlocutors, mostly musicians, were justly offended by the idea that their country had to be infiltrated to stimulate musical progress. When the New York Times heralded Ruff’s and Mitchell’s Soviet debut as “a major breakthrough in a field where the State Department and the Soviet Ministry of Culture have long been hopelessly deadlocked,” it was hard for American readers to see that Soviet policy did not restrict jazz per se, but rather its performance by Americans on Soviet soil. The exhilaration of having breached the enemy stronghold took precedence over such subtleties.¹³⁸

The first official tour of the USSR by an American group known for jazz was that of Benny Goodman’s ensemble in 1962. American jazz fans had long thought Goodman’s conservative swing style out of date, and the choice of a white bandleader for this milestone tour was troubling to them.¹³⁹ Senator Jacob Javits (R-NY) contacted the State Department after hearing from constituent and record producer Bernard Stollman, who called Goodman’s selection “a colossal breach of the rules of taste and ethics.” Assistant Secretary of State for Congressional Relations Frederick G. Dutton acknowledged that Goodman was not the most representative choice but responded that “the Goodman group was the only exponent of the jazz medium which the Soviet Union would accept after many years of patient negotiation” and that the Goodman ensemble included several African American performers.140 Dutton also explained the State Department’s hope that this tour would clear the way for other bandleaders, including Duke Ellington.¹⁴¹ By contrast, a reporter for Jet magazine interviewed the first secretary of the Soviet embassy, who attributed the choice entirely to the State Department: “we accepted what you sent us.” Frank Siscoe, the department’s director of Soviet and East European Exchanges, spoke frankly with Jet about the selection of Goodman: “We realize he is regarded as a pale imitation of true American jazz but we have to get our foot in the door first.”¹⁴² One wonders whether Soviet officials thought it safer to bring in a white-led, conservative band so that Soviet propaganda about U.S. race relations would not be contradicted by the presence of a large number of African Americans. U.S. officials likely chose Goodman’s conservative style as an attempt to reach broad audiences, fearing that the Soviet public might not appreciate modern jazz.¹⁴³ Down Beat magazine defended the State Department’s choice, saying that this compromise was far better than to have no jazz in the Cultural Presentations program and calling Goodman’s Soviet tour a “major break-through” for jazz.¹⁴⁴

Soviet audiences showed enthusiasm for Goodman by clamoring for tickets and demanding encores.¹⁴⁵ Soviet jazz musician Yuri Vikharieff commented that he and his fellow fans were disappointed: they had assumed the first American jazzman to enter the country would be an African American, perhaps Duke Ellington or Count Basie. Vikharieff explained that he wanted to counter the prevailing Soviet idea of jazz as light dance music by showing jazz as art. He worried that Goodman would not achieve this purpose.¹⁴⁶ The members of the band, who had more direct contact with audiences than did Goodman, explained that they were “bombarded by the local modern jazz enthusiasts with criticism of the Goodman style, as being too old fashioned.” On occasions when the band faced lukewarm audiences, the musicians blamed Goodman for not allowing more modern music on the program. Soviet officials commented that Soviet audiences were not used to programs consisting only of instrumental music, and they said Goodman should have brought singers and dancers or other variety artists to hold the audience’s attention. Goodman himself believed that the audiences were purposely filled with people indifferent to jazz in order to prevent real fans from having access to the Americans.¹⁴⁷

This example demonstrates that the U.S. government was caught between the constraints imposed by Soviet negotiators and the demands of Soviet jazz fans: a problem we have already seen wherever the State Department tried to please expert fans while also winning new ones. A devoted group of experts wanted to hear the modern jazz that was not typically allowed in their own clubs. Voice of America radio programs gave them enough access to recent innovations in jazz to know about, and want to hear, the modern styles played in the United States. What their government would accept was not what the fans wanted. When Goodman’s band offered a “history of jazz” program, a reviewer in Tbilisi was not impressed. The reviewer found the program naive and condescending, consisting of “not very cleverly put together excerpts of works performed by various orchestras.” “It was clear to many,” he continued, “that the evolutionary journey of jazz was much more interesting and, naturally, complicated than was depicted by our guests.”148 There was a risk that the State Department would go to the expense and the public-relations fuss of “infiltrating” only to find that they had disappointed some fans. Still, the overall impression was of increasing freedom: “You Americans couldn’t hold down the Negro,” said one young Soviet commentator, “and we Soviets couldn’t suppress their music.”¹⁴⁹

What Soviet jazz fans did get from Goodman’s visit was the opportunity to meet American musicians, who talked and played with their counterparts. On the Goodman band’s first night in Leningrad, the manager of the hotel dining room asked them to jam, and a Soviet alto saxophonist and pianist joined in.¹⁵⁰ In Sochi, a resort town on the Black Sea, “an articulate group of jazz fans and musicians amazed the Americans with their expert knowledge of jazz in general and, specifically, of the careers of the Americans themselves. . . . As one musician said: ‘These cats know more about us than we do!’” Band members visited the apartment of a jazz enthusiast to listen to his tapes of Voice of America jazz broadcasts, and a fan asked detailed questions about the “new jazz artists” ratings published in Down Beat.¹⁵¹ The plan to “infiltrate” appears to have become instead friendly engagement in a common interest.

MANAGING THE PERMISSIBLE

The idea of infiltration did not always describe what was happening, but it did reflect the curious push-pull of U.S.-Soviet cultural diplomacy. Getting music “into” the Soviet Union was a vital element of negotiations for the United States—and keeping some of that music out, or limiting its effectiveness, remained important for Soviet officials. Throughout the 1960s, Soviet officials rejected many American modern dance and jazz proposals, but they also accepted some programs that would contain these elements and then sought to minimize the potential harm in other ways.¹⁵²

Amanda Aucoin has characterized the Soviet reception of exchanges from the West as “ideological disinfection”; indeed, there are many signs that the influence of cultural diplomats was carefully managed.153 When the Earl Hines jazz band came in 1966, members were informed midtour that they could not perform in the major cities of Leningrad, Moscow, and Alma-Ata as originally scheduled: these were replaced with smaller cities. Although the cancellations were not officially explained, Ambassador Foy Kohler inferred that the cancellations resulted from the band’s stunning successes: ten thousand people came to each of four concerts in the Kiev Sports Palace and an average of between three and four thousand to each of the Tbilisi concerts. (Despite the cancellations, Hines did visit the Moscow Youth Café, heard a Soviet jazz sextet, and sat in on a jam session that lasted well beyond the official closing time of 11 p.m.)¹⁵⁴

Almost all American ensembles reported extreme logistical difficulties with luggage and accommodations, which in many cases hampered their ability to perform effectively. More often than not, suitcases and instruments arrived late or not at all, forcing the musicians to rely on whatever could be borrowed on the spot. The Boston Symphony Orchestra Chamber Players played the first three cities on their 1967 Soviet tour with no music, no suits, and borrowed instruments. Their contract specified that single rooms were to be provided for the musicians. In L’vov the escort officer and tour manager haggled with the hotel for five hours and threatened to book tickets to leave the city before the rooms were eventually provided. The musicians reported a “sleepless night on straw-filled mattresses.”¹⁵⁵ In addition Goskontsert did not plan the group’s travel properly, and the Goskontsert tour manager then blamed the players for concert cancellations that resulted from their inability to arrive on time. Ambassador Thompson reported to Washington that “Goskontsert had planned travel by ship from Odessa to Yalta on a day on which there is not (and never has been) a scheduled sailing, and that the train trip from Baku to Tbilisi was planned for a day on which there is not (and never has been) a train.” He strongly suspected that the faulty travel arrangements, along with Goskontsert’s practice of booking the group into poorly equipped concert halls, was “an attempt to play down the group’s presence.”¹⁵⁶

John Garvey, who directed the University of Illinois Jazz Band on its 1969 Soviet tour, noticed the large presence of military men in the band’s audiences; this seemed a sign that audiences were filled with people the government believed were reliable. The University of Illinois Jazz Band was billed as an “estrada” orchestra (a “stage” or “variety” ensemble)—that they were an American jazz band was not always known to audiences ahead of time. In each place they visited, the first night’s concertgoers had no special connection to jazz. On subsequent nights, however, word had circulated that the group was an American jazz band, and halls filled to capacity. What the band was permitted to do, and how it was allowed to engage with locals, varied widely from place to place: sometimes the group could hand out brochures about its performance during intermission, sometimes only before the concert outside the theater. Because Goskontsert reserved the right to handle publicity, there was little the musicians could do about the arbitrary imposition of rules.157 The band found that backstage doors were locked or guarded, preventing fans from coming to meet them.¹⁵⁸

The Duquesne University Tamburitzans toured the Soviet Union in 1969 with mixed programs that even included rock ’n’ roll. This case, too, suggests that Soviet officials thought it was not always prudent to forbid the importation of foreign music. The Tamburitzans were a university folk music and dance ensemble, specializing exclusively in the music of Eastern and Southeastern Europe, particularly Bulgaria. When they toured Latin America for the State Department in 1968, they were asked to add some American-themed numbers to their programs. When they were invited to tour the USSR in 1969, the State Department asked them to build an entire program of American music, a complete change in repertoire for them. At first reluctant, they engaged choreographers and arranged a program of American music and dance selections from 1776 to 1969, leaving their Slavic numbers to be used as encores. The first half of the program presented subcultural groups: a Wild West set with square dances; New England contra dance; Spanish, Native American, Hawaiian, and Eskimo dances; and Negro spirituals. The second half proceeded chronologically through trends in American popular music: a barbershop quartet, the polka, the Charleston, Broadway numbers, and rock and disco. The decision to arrange the dances chronologically placed rock ’n’ roll (an Elvis impersonation) and a discotheque number, based on Stevie Wonder’s “Uptight (Everything’s Alright),” in the finale. “Including rock was our idea,” said the director, Walter Kolar. “It was a big part of our culture, so of course we were going to show that,” added Patricia French, who was Duquesne’s director of special activities and accompanied the group on the tour.¹⁵⁹ “It was not our intent to smuggle rock in[to] the USSR,” recalls David Kolar, a member of the ensemble. As specialists in Bulgarian music, David Kolar recalls, the Tamburitzans typically stayed away from “touchy aspects” of the music that had the capacity to offend, such as nationalistic songs.¹⁶⁰

By the late 1960s the United States had begun allowing Soviet officials to audition the ensembles it offered to send under the Lacy-Zarubin agreement. In the 1968 negotiations to renew the agreement, the Soviet Union had refused jazz and insisted on approving each musical number that would be sent.161 American officials objected to the idea that Soviets would judge their selections in such detail, but they assented in order to keep the program alive.¹⁶² Thus, in spring 1969 Vladimir Golovin, deputy director of Goskontsert, traveled to Pittsburgh to meet with the director of the Tamburitzans and review the specific songs and dances planned for their Soviet tour that summer.¹⁶³ Golovin disliked the discotheque number. After some negotiation it was decided that the Tamburitzans could leave it in the program but not conclude with it; rather, it would close the first half, and the Charleston would be moved to the end of the evening.¹⁶⁴ (Golovin would later that year evaluate the University of Illinois Jazz Band, expressing concern about some members’ Afro hairstyles and the possibility that the vocalists would “wriggle in a provocative or otherwise unacceptable way.”)¹⁶⁵

Still, when the Tamburitzans opened in Moscow, the audience demanded an encore after the discotheque number, much to the displeasure of Goskontsert. According to David Kolar, the Tamburitzans performed the discotheque number in the same spirit as the Americana, that of presenting what America had to offer.¹⁶⁶ The next day, Golovin chastised escort officer Mary Patzer and Foreign Service officer Yale Richmond: there was to be no more screaming “like a monkey,” no encores “which were not a straight repeat of what went before,” “no wild dancing,” and “no clapping in a way to encourage the audience to participate.” Golovin then apologized for being harsh and added that he hoped the Americans would understand the situation. Richmond commented that “much wilder rock was accepted if it came from Eastern Europe.”¹⁶⁷ After U.S. ambassador Jacob Beam confirmed the need for compromise, director Walter Kolar “did tell them to tone it down, but they didn’t completely”—“they just watched certain things.”¹⁶⁸ The ambassador thought that the decision to close with the Charleston instead of the rock number was good for everyone: apart from that first Moscow audience, many people seemed constrained and unsure how to react to the rock music and dancing, and the Charleston provided a better outlet for audience enthusiasm.¹⁶⁹

Curiously, the Tamburitzans’ “secret weapon” was not rock or jazz at all; rather, it was their ability to perform well in genres known to their Soviet and Eastern European audiences. In Bucharest David Kolar performed a famous virtuoso violin number that the audience recognized immediately: it “brought the house down.”¹⁷⁰ As an encore, they routinely performed the popular song “Bud’te zdorovy” (Be healthy)—which was greeted with excited whistling and stamping of feet.¹⁷¹ In Tbilisi they borrowed costumes and performed an athletic traditional dance, the lezginka, to enthusiastic applause.¹⁷² The Tamburitzans had long been fans of the Osipov State Russian Folk Orchestra; they had heard recordings and even copied their arrangements. The Tamburitzans asked to meet the Osipov ensemble and were permitted to attend a rehearsal. David Kolar recalls that “they had no idea who we were, or why [we were there].” When the Osipov ensemble took a break during rehearsal, the American students picked up their instruments and played Russian music for their counterparts. This moment of engagement with fellow musicians was one of very few occasions on this tour when the American musicians were allowed any personal contact with Soviet citizens.173 Most of the time, especially in the larger cities, they were hurried onto their tour buses or seated in private dining rooms in restaurants to prevent conversation with bystanders.¹⁷⁴ The demonstration of a shared musical repertoire allowed the Tamburitzans to connect with fellow musicians and audiences—and this connection was likely more significant than the presence of rock or disco on their program.

EXPERIENCING U.S.-SOVIET DIPLOMACY

U.S.-Soviet exchanges opened many possibilities for contact and mutual problem-solving—including embarrassing instances that arose when citizens did not behave as instructed. Musicians were given long lists of what to do and what not to do. An American traveling to the USSR was asked to bring no drugs; no money except what was given in the per diem; no blue jeans; and no religious reading matter except for personal use. They were not to photograph anything that might be considered sensitive.¹⁷⁵ These warnings had to be issued because “every well-read tourist” knew to bring jeans and Beatles albums to the Soviet Union.¹⁷⁶

Despite the warnings, of course, musicians would behave impulsively, sometimes requiring their governments to act on their behalf. An American student member of the Eastman Philharmonia was arrested in Leningrad in 1962 for illegal sale of clothing and other articles. He was released after writing a confession and a statement listing favorable impressions of life in the Soviet Union. The student and a few others apparently had political rather than pecuniary motives: they were seeking contacts through their black-market connections.¹⁷⁷ Likewise, Gennadii Petrovich L’vov, accordionist for the Beriozka State Academic Folk Dance Ensemble, was caught shoplifting at Macy’s in New York in 1959. The Russian embassy protested and charged the United States with creating a “provocation” against the Soviet Union. The State Department refused to defend L’vov (on grounds that he had actually stolen the items), but Macy’s decided to drop the charges, presumably to avoid an international incident.¹⁷⁸

The American musicians who traveled to the Soviet Union had heard and read a great deal about the USSR, but to experience it personally was different. Even under these extremely politicized conditions, U.S. artists persisted in believing their role was not, in the main, political. For the students there was an element of naiveté: Rudy Grasha, who performed with the Tamburitzans, said that “at 18 or 19 years old, it feels like a game—you don’t worry what you say.”179 As performers, the American visitors were not necessarily in a position to spend much time thinking about the political situation. To maintain their health and equipment so as to perform well under a grueling travel schedule consumed a good deal of their attention. Suki Schorer, a dancer with the New York City Ballet, reported emphatically that “we weren’t political. . . . Our agenda was just to present dance.”¹⁸⁰ Yet at the same time, the performers’ experiences on tour allowed them firsthand knowledge of the Soviet Union that was both political and transformative.

Some of the traveling Americans were fearful about entering “enemy territory.” Interviews conducted by Clare Croft reveal the anxiety of dancers from the New York City Ballet who performed in the Soviet Union at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. On one hand, the fact that tours were not cancelled seemed like a sign that war was not imminent; on the other hand, access to news was minimal, so fears multiplied. Dancer Kay Mazzo recalled that “the rumors going around the company were ‘Don’t worry. They have a way of us all escaping from here. We’ll get out. We know we’ll be able to get out,’ which was the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard of. Here we were in Moscow; that wasn’t going to happen.”¹⁸¹ Lincoln Kirstein, who was managing the tour, went so far as to present embassy officials with a potential escape plan. The American CAO said simply: “You don’t have plans. You leave when we tell you to leave.”¹⁸²

The visiting Americans understood that part of their diplomatic mission was to make personal contact with Soviet citizens, and they were frustrated and fascinated by the complexity of this task. The Boston Symphony Orchestra Chamber Players reported in 1967 that “we were visited at our hotels individually and collectively by numerous players in every city.”¹⁸³ The players “spent many hours giving lessons to budding Soviet musicians backstage and/or in their hotel rooms.” One member of the ensemble, Gino Cioffi, reportedly gave all his free time to students, “often coaching them until ten or eleven at night and distributing hundreds of clarinet reeds.”¹⁸⁴ By contrast, the Chamber Players’ bassoonist, Matthiew Ruggiero, recalls that Soviet citizens were willing to have brief public discussions with him, but they were reluctant to visit with him in his hotel room because they were afraid to be seen there.185 It is thus difficult to ascertain the depth of engagement that was possible; undoubtedly, it depended on local circumstances at the time of each visit. For almost two months in 1964, the early music group New York Pro Musica Antiqua toured Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union; the escort officer estimated that “members of the group made ‘soul to soul’ contacts with about 20 Soviet citizens, mostly by Noah Greenberg in a few long talkfests. Significant contacts on a medium-depth basis, involving friendly conversations of 30 minutes or more, numbered perhaps 300.”¹⁸⁶ In these cases it was interested fellow musicians, not the citizenry at large, who most eagerly sought the company of the Americans.

On the 1969 University of Illinois Jazz Band tour, a Soviet boy was chased away from the Americans, likely by members of the Komsomol, the official Communist youth organization: “several young Soviets were chatting with band members in the lobby of the hotel. It was observed by other band members looking on that a young Soviet on the edge of the group was pulled away by a couple of vigilante types and taken to a room off the lobby. Some time later this boy emerged and walked quickly out of the hotel, showing no sign he recognized the Americans he had been talking to on the street and backstage.”¹⁸⁷ Nonetheless, the U.S. ambassador observed that attempts to discourage contact were frequently unsuccessful. Although the authorities intervened to prevent two of the band’s four planned jam sessions with Soviet musicians, two took place, one in Leningrad and one in Moscow.¹⁸⁸

The Oberlin College Choir toured in 1964, a relatively open moment. The American students were told that they were the first group permitted to participate in arranged meetings with Soviet students.¹⁸⁹ They valued these interactions, but even more important were the informal moments of contact. Ten years after the tour, Donna Beik Wulff recalled the “sidewalk seminars,” spontaneous gatherings that formed around the Americans: “it was the Russians who were the avid questioners, eager to learn about us, about our country, about our educational system and our way of life. They already knew far more about America than we knew of the Soviet Union, yet they invariably pressed us for more. Lacking their intense curiosity, we all too easily fell into the role of V.I.P.’s at a press conference, dispensing information as best we could in response to the endless stream of eager questions.”¹⁹⁰

Not that all the conversation was comfortable: an Oberlin student also recalled “listening to the Young Pioneers tell us they loved us and our people, and then having them show us pictures of the devastation produced by our American bombers.” Another remembered the “brief but flaming love affair I had with Sascha in Kiev.”191 State Department officials took every opportunity to document the Oberlin students’ interactions. As Tim Scholl has noticed, the photos taken during the tour highlight this conversational aspect rather than the performances (figure 17), and the photos were a featured item in the Cultural Presentations program’s report to Congress that year.¹⁹² The photos strongly suggest that the State Department had “gotten in” messengers who had successfully made meaningful personal contacts.

Figure 17. At the Leningrad Conservatory, Sheila Allen (foreground) and the rest of the Oberlin College Choir chatted and sang informally with Soviet students, 1964. Courtesy of the Oberlin College Archives.

Despite the hindrances, some Soviet students approached the American singers eagerly. Lee Irwin, a member of the Oberlin College Choir, recalls meeting a student who carried books in Hebrew. The student declined to discuss the books but appeared simply to want the Americans to recognize him as Jewish. Another choir member, Barbara Muller, had brought her guitar and a collection of printed sheet music, including copies of Sing Out! Magazine and John and Alan Lomax’s Folk Song: USA. Russian students eagerly borrowed these items to copy them. The students returned the items along with a large bouquet of flowers and a collection of Russian and Romanian folk music, which Muller treasured. Barbara Dee Silva, another choir member, corresponded with Soviet students for several years after the tour.¹⁹³

Under these circumstances cultural exchange cultivated a more human view. This is not to say that many participants became friends—most would not stay in touch—but they could engage one another through personal conversations and the participatory medium of musical performance. Such a humanizing effect was not a given at the outset of Soviet-American exchange. A participant in a 1959 exchange of journalists explained that he had traveled to the Soviet Union because “the most important thing an American can do is wake up his country to a knowledge of the enemy.”194 Eugene Castle believed that meaningful exchange would be impossible with the “robot scholars and subversive agents of a godless police state like Russia.”¹⁹⁵ Yet once cultural exchange became more commonplace, friendly contacts were possible. The Duquesne Tamburitzans were in Tbilisi in July 1969 when the United States’ spacecraft Apollo 11 landed on the moon. Walter Kolar and Patricia French recall that the day after the news arrived, they couldn’t go anywhere without hearing congratulations from people who recognized them as visiting Americans. They even found champagne on their table at breakfast. The tone was not jealous but warmly admiring—a remarkable gesture at a time of competitive national ambitions. These encounters left the visitors with fond memories.¹⁹⁶ Whether such interactions were permitted varied by time, place, and circumstance. One recalls that at other moments the Duquesne students were hustled onto their buses without opportunity for conversation.

These examples reveal that cultural exchange visits were not only a form of competitive media theater but also a means of experiencing the “enemy” in other ways. Some accounts suggest that exposure to Americans’ behavior did matter to their Russian counterparts. One Soviet musician suggested that how the Americans held themselves and moved was illuminating: “these people were free. They were relaxed and when they entered for the concert, they did not do it in formation. They entered when they felt like it, tuned, talked amongst themselves. We could not do this, we could not talk. We had to sit still.”¹⁹⁷ Soviet visitors to the United States were awed by the vast array of consumer goods available, as well as the liberties taken by ordinary citizens.¹⁹⁸ The U.S. government negotiated at length to keep cultural diplomacy programs in place, even when Soviet officials made onerous demands, in part because contact offered highly beneficial comparisons that were difficult to refute. It was useful to the United States that the Soviets observed the Americans’ ease and affluence and that the Americans noticed the surveillance, drabness, and constraints of Soviet life. These concepts were further reinforced by the State Department’s briefings, which urged the musicians to expect these conditions and bear them graciously.

Most Americans who visited the Soviet Union found that their movements were restricted more than they had ever imagined possible. Shelley Gruskin, who toured the Soviet Union with the New York Pro Musica Antiqua in 1964, laughingly reported that “we did feel almost like spies behind enemy lines.”199 They knew from their State Department briefings that their guides and translators were reporting on their behavior and that they should expect their hotel rooms to be “bugged” with hidden microphones.²⁰⁰ Many musicians recall enjoying variants of the very same joke. They would greet the lamps in hotel rooms or the flowers on restaurant tables out loud, assuming the presence of a microphone in them: “Are you listening, bug?” or “Didja hear that, bug?”²⁰¹ (British tourists were in on the joke, as well.)²⁰² One might understand the prevalence of this joke as simply making light of an uncomfortable situation—but it was also a form of folklore, in which each subsequent generation of tourists performs the same lines before their fellow Americans and a presumed audience of watching Soviets.

Tim Edensor, who studies tourism, has identified two contrasting kinds of tourist performance that are relevant for our purposes: one is the performance of a disciplined ritual, consisting of the expected and appropriate actions, the carrying out of customary duties with little room for improvisation, as when one follows precisely the directions in the tour book. Another is the improvised performance, in which the travelers rely on some given guidelines, but they choose within those limits where to go and how to behave.²⁰³ As a form of travel experience, U.S.-Soviet musical diplomacy has elements of each of these. It was a guarded performance, constrained by government rules and supervision, assigned duties, and the musicians’ prior ideas about their role. But as we saw in the cases of Leonard Bernstein or the Oberlin students’ interactions with citizens, participants also could react individually to what they were witnessing. In the case of the bug jokes these reactions felt spontaneous even though they were part of a ritual in which many travelers reacted in similar ways to the experience of surveillance.

Over many tours, the spontaneity of “sidewalk seminars” and impromptu interactions combined with the accumulation of repeated experiences to change how American visitors and their Soviet hosts perceived one another. The visitors of the 1960s were able to cast off the exaggerated imaginings of the early Cold War enemy in favor of a more resigned approach to political difference. The humor with which the Americans sometimes approached Soviet politics is telling. Leonard Garment, a clarinetist and Nixon appointee who traveled to the Soviet Union with Willis Conover in 1969, recalled the visit of the U.S. delegation to the Café Pechora, Moscow’s main jazz club: “The K.G.B. agent assigned to cover Russian jazz types—and known, congenially, to all of them—swung along with the music, occasionally jotting a confidential note on his little spy pad. (‘Korsky out of tune,’ I imagined him scribbling. ‘Also, too many choruses on “Stella by Starlight.” Firing squad.’”)204 The jokes about the hidden microphones have a similar quality. These jokes were more than just whistling in the dark: they also acknowledged that the Americans’ view of the Soviets was a caricature, albeit one based in real differences between the two countries. Americans did not think Soviet repression was a joking matter; rather, the strained relationship between the two nations had settled into something familiar, stable enough to be joked about.

NORMALIZING RELATIONS

In the early years of U.S.-Soviet exchange, concerts by musicians from the faraway country known only as an enemy seemed a great novelty. A 1965 article in High Fidelity magazine recalled the excitement occasioned by Emil Gilels’s first U.S. tour: “Ten years ago this month, when Emil Gilels made his American debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra playing Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, the audience could not have displayed more curiosity about the exotic soloist had his place at the keyboard been occupied by a mermaid.”²⁰⁵ Over time, though, the exchanges became routine. The High Fidelity essay waxed rhapsodic about the effects of musical exchange between 1955 and 1965: an “aura of friendship and goodwill” and the “emergence of a nonpolitical entente.” Sending musicians back and forth had become an accustomed pattern. There was still some competition for supremacy, but the tours appeared to have built a sense of musical community across the hostile divide. Listeners were now interested in these musicians as musicians, not solely as curiosities.²⁰⁶

Cultural diplomacy made contact between the hostile superpowers first possible and then commonplace. Recurring lapses in negotiations, practical arrangements, and etiquette were all noticed and publicized, yet the practice of exchange persisted. The development of state-to-state exchanges helped build a world where peaceful coexistence could be imagined, for the process of resolving conflicts established routines for managing those conflicts. The more individuals were able to observe the opposing system and meet their counterparts on human terms, the more they were able to accept the differences between the systems. American travelers continued to find Soviet restrictions on communication and expression bizarre, but the accumulated experiences of cultural diplomacy led them to accept the situation without surprise. According to a U.S. embassy official in Moscow, the exchange program created “a general impression that relations must not be desperately bad if a regular stream of interchange continues.” The concerts allowed ordinary citizens to believe in stability for the present and the possibility of improved relations in the future. In all these ways “the Cold War appeared increasingly ‘normal’”—and musical diplomacy played an important role in helping people grow used to the stalemate.207

The mid-1960s saw a shift in the foreign policies of both superpowers away from the endless escalation of hostilities toward a more stable coexistence, later referred to as “détente.” Neither government arrived at détente easily. Although the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis had demonstrated the unsustainability of the arms race, it remained difficult for policy makers and publics to trust the other side enough to stop the escalation.²⁰⁸ President Kennedy attempted in 1963 to shift the conversation away from conflict toward a focus on common interests: “As Americans, we find communism profoundly repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and dignity. But we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements—in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture and in acts of courage.”²⁰⁹ Khrushchev invested heavily in portrayals of the Soviet Union as peaceful, but he also characterized any American proposal for “peaceful coexistence” as a ruse: “The enemies of communism would like to see us ideologically disarmed. And they are trying to achieve this insidious purpose of theirs through propaganda of the peaceful coexistence of ideologies, the ‘Trojan horse’ which they would be happy to sneak in to us.”²¹⁰ At the same time, Soviet officials also saw the advantages of more open trade and scientific communication. After years of hostility the idea of tolerating the enemy “as is” engendered both fear and hope.

Scholars of political history disagree about when détente began. Some date the concept to the early 1970s; others trace its roots to the early 1960s.²¹¹ Yet cultural diplomacy began the work of détente sooner than that. Georges-Henri Soutou and Wilfried Loth have characterized détente as an “interesting mix of confrontation and cooperation.”²¹² As we have seen, U.S.-Soviet musical diplomacy is an excellent example of that “interesting mix,” combining competition and critique with praise for the other’s achievements and amicable sharing of common interests. The Clarion-Barshai exchange, the tour of Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, and many visits by other collegiate and professional ensembles all shared in some measure this strange collection of qualities.

In May 1972 Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev affirmed a set of agreements on armaments, science, space programs, the environment, and other issues. In their “Basic Principles of Relations between the Soviet Union and the United States” they stated “their intention to deepen cultural ties with one another and to encourage fuller familiarization with each other’s cultural values,” agreeing to improve bilateral arrangements for cultural exchange and tourism.213 In theory this agreement was to give stability and permanence to the exchanges already covered by the Lacy-Zarubin agreement. The Soviet regime had little interest in expanding cultural relations, however. Its focus was primarily on the arms agreement and on profiting from scientific and economic relations.²¹⁴ Despite repeated assurances from both sides, investments in cultural diplomacy declined: the expansion of relations in other areas meant that culture was no longer the only possible form of peaceful engagement, and both sides sought to further their interests through these other means. Yet it seems likely that cultural diplomacy—practiced throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, while other kinds of exchange remained relatively rare—had helped to create the social norms that made this expansion of relations practical.

Throughout the heyday of cultural exchange, even during the period of détente, the idea of infiltration remained important as a means of explaining U.S.-Soviet musical diplomacy. Robert Shaw took his professional choral group to the Soviet Union in 1962. Shaw’s programs in the USSR consisted almost exclusively of religious music—as he put it, “first, because that is the historical nature of the great choral repertoire, but also because their ministry of ‘un-theistic’ culture had specifically requested Bach’s Mass in B Minor.” Even more astonishing to Shaw, a concert of this music was broadcast in the Soviet Union, and “for three hours the only radio fare available to this ‘materialistic,’ ‘atheistic’ audience was a monument of Christian creed, philosophy and art.” Shaw reveled in the choir’s warm reception: Bach’s music was praised in the Soviet press as “uplifting,” “simple and majestic, clear and infinitely wise.”²¹⁵ Repeating the story years later, in 1981, Shaw took care to tell his fellow Americans that the Soviet enemy was not as it seemed—his story recast not only the Soviet people but also some in the government as art-loving, perhaps even God-fearing people, very “like us.” Just as other commentators retrospectively ascribed the fall of Communism to U.S. cultural interventions, Shaw’s triumphalist story highlights music’s power to unlock the Soviets from their oppression—offering support to the myth that all Soviet citizens longed for liberation by the West.²¹⁶ Shaw’s retelling the story to his own people, even years after the tour, was part of the ritual, enhancing Americans’ pride in the music and their imagined power to change the behavior of the Soviet state.

Musical exchange had become a key symbolic ritual of the Cold War. Through this ritual Americans could continue to believe they were doing something real to foster the freedom of the Soviet people. As relations between the United States and the USSR stabilized into détente, rendering it even less likely that the United States would engage in substantial political action to change the status quo, such symbolic action became more important. The belief in cultural infiltration was not propagated by the state alone but also by media commentators and the public—a useful coping strategy as the Cold War seemed to settle into permanence. American journalists’ persistent praise for American musicians’ provocative criticisms of the Soviet Union also justified the Cultural Presentations program’s continuing existence. To keep funding the program, members of Congress had to believe that they were getting real subversive value for the money they spent. Likewise, some of the American public needed assurance that by agreeing to détente, the U.S. government was not selling out Eastern Europe by softening its long-standing resistance to Soviet occupation. Even though U.S. budgets for cultural diplomacy declined in the 1970s, the idea that music should be an instrument of change persisted.217

U.S.-Soviet cultural diplomacy was thus a special case for the Cultural Presentations program, eliciting the greatest expectations about what music could do. The fundamental paradox remained the same as ever: the short-term aim of using music as a direct instrument of U.S. power undercut the long-term aim of winning friends through “mutual understanding.” The efficacy of cultural diplomacy relied to a great extent on belief in the power of music to accomplish political ends and denial of that very power. Or, as President Lyndon Johnson told a group of musicians and other artists: “Your art is not a political weapon. Yet much of what you do is profoundly political.”²¹⁸