The Magical Chorus

the threat of Islam a thousand years ago, Western civilization is on the defensive.”¹¹ Two years later, President Harry Truman stressed the importance of the propaganda aspect in standing up to the Soviet Union: “This is a struggle, above all else, for the minds of men. Propaganda is one of the most powerful weapons the Communists have in this struggle.”¹²

The doctrine of “containment,” elaborated by George F. Kennan, was adopted as the instrument of American policy toward the Communist bloc. Kennan later stressed that he had meant political and ideological containment of Soviet expansion. Projected into the sphere of cultural counterpropaganda, this doctrine was quite successful.

Jazz, one of the most important manifestations of American culture, was used right away as a propaganda weapon. Charles Bohlen, the American ambassador to the Soviet Union, had noticed the popularity of Voice of America jazz programs in Moscow and at his suggestion in 1955 the station began a special project, Music USA, devoted to jazz. The theme music of the show, hosted in a soothing baritone by Buffalo native Willis Conover, who became the idol of several generations of shtatniki, was Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train.”

By that time, production of radios that could receive shortwave transmissions from the United States and other Western countries was banned in the Soviet Union, but many homes still had prewar or trophy radios; besides which, Conover’s shows were in English, so they were jammed less than the Russian-language news on Voice of America. (The jamming of Western radio transmissions, which involved building powerful stations all over the USSR, cost the Soviet government a pretty penny.)

Conover’s programs gave audiences their first taste of the music of Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman and became an underground encyclopedia of jazz for Soviet youth. The business of recording “music on bones” was born: X-ray films were used as recording material and these homemade records of jazz and later of rock and roll were sold on the black market, inspiring budding jazz musicians all over the Soviet Union.

The Americans did not forget about “high” culture, either. Knowing the Russians’ penchant for classical music (Stalin began sponsoring participation of Soviet musicians in international competitions in the 1930s), the best American symphony orchestras were sent to the USSR—the Boston in 1956, the Philadelphia in 1958. The twenty- five-year-old Canadian pianist Glenn Gould appeared in Moscow and Leningrad in 1957 with eye-opening programs (besides Bach, he played the modernist works of Paul Hindemith and Anton von Webern, banned in the USSR then), and for many stunned professionals, as one of them put it, life was divided into pre-Gould and post- Gould.¹³

The culmination of the musical duel between the two superpowers (the violinist Oistrakh and the pianist Gilels made triumphant debuts at Carnegie Hall in 1955 and the pianist Richter in 1960) was the sensational victory by Van Cliburn, twenty-three, at the Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow in 1958. Tall, gawky, with a dreamy gaze, the infinitely charming pianist whom Muscovites dubbed with a loving diminutive, “Vanechka,” instantly won over the audiences (women in particular). More importantly, Cliburn also won over the competition jury, chaired by Gilels, which consisted of such authoritative Russian musicians as the great interpreter of Scriabin, Vladimir Sofronitsky, who sensed a fellow romantic in Cliburn, and the musical patriarch Alexander Goldenveizer, favorite musician and chess partner of Leo Tolstoy. Goldenveizer compared Cliburn to the young Rachmaninoff.

When the prizes were decided, the Soviet members of the jury had to get Nikita Khrushchev’s secret approval before crowning Van Cliburn.¹⁴ The young American’s victory at the competition, which had been covered on a daily basis by The New York Times, was front-page news all over the world. Being a political sensation, the victory also had a major impact on Russian cultural life.

For the first time, Russian musical emigres were acknowledged: after all, Cliburn’s teacher at the Juilliard School in New York was Rosina Lhevinne, a graduate of the Moscow Conservatory. Cliburn popularized the emigre composer Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto. This paved the way for the triumphant tours of the USSR by Igor Stravinsky and George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet in 1962, when the Soviet establishment had to welcome and hail the former emigres, by now trendsetters of international high modernism.

Another important American program that expanded the cultural horizons and influenced the worldview of the Soviet elite was the publication of books in Russian. Several American publishing houses were established for that purpose with subsidies from government and private sources; among them, Chekhov Press in New York, which printed Russian-language volumes by Bunin, Remizov, Zamyatin, Tsvetaeva, and Nabokov, and had a Ford Foundation grant of $523,000.¹⁵ According to The New York Times, at least a thousand titles were sponsored,¹⁶ covering a wide range from translations of poetry and essays by T. S. Eliot, to the collected oeuvres of Gumilev and Mandelstam, and works by Pasternak, Akhmatova, Zabolotsky, and Klyuev.

The absence of ideological preference is remarkable. The most varied movements are represented: traditional and experimental prose, Acmeism, Dadaism, neo-peasant poetry. Anti-Sovietism was not the main criterion, as might be expected (for example, Zabolotsky’s neoprimitivist poems would be hard to call “anti-Soviet”); rather, the predominant desire was to return into circulation within the Soviet Union the works of authors who were banned for one reason or another.

Books by Russian authors that were published in the West were called tamizdat (“published there” like samizdat, “self-published”) in the Soviet Union. In Russia (brought by foreign tourists, Soviet seamen, and Soviet citizens who traveled abroad in official delegations), these books were worth their weight in gold. They were copied by typewriter or hand (there were no accessible copying machines in the USSR in those days); this expanded the range of samizdat, for many years one of the main reservoirs of intellectual opposition.

Gradually the cultural space inside the Soviet Union, especially in big cities, was filled with books in Russian published in the West. You could come across them in the most unexpected places, belonging to the most unexpected people.

I remember being at a birthday party for the daughter of an important cultural bureaucrat in Moscow in the early 1970s; taking a furtive look at his impressive home library, I reached for a volume, accidentally bringing down an avalanche of books that revealed, tucked behind them, a recent Western edition of Gorky’s Untimely Thoughts, a collection of his anti-Bolshevik articles, which had not been reprinted in Russia since 1918 and was well hidden in Soviet libraries in “special archives.” I quickly started putting back the books, simultaneously feverishly flipping through the precious volume of Gorky. I read as much as I could and it changed my perceptions of the writer.

In 1972, Yevtushenko tried to bring in a large number of tamizdat books when returning to Moscow from a trip to the United States. Since Soviet customs agents were most interested in cultural contraband, every attempt to bring it in was a risky undertaking, punishable by the full extent of the law. There were times when Yevtushenko (like many other, less famous travelers) got away with it, but this time the poet was caught.

The confiscated books included works by the Bolshevik leaders Trotsky and Bukharin, killed by Stalin; poetry by Gumilev, shot by the Bolsheviks, and Mandelstam, who died in the camps; philosophical studies by members of the Russian “religious renaissance,” Berdyaev and Shestov; the prose of the emigre Nabokov and Cursed Days, the anti-Bolshevik diary of the first Russian Nobel laureate, Bunin. Along with the books, they confiscated Yevtushenko’s photographs taken with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.