

The CIA Battled the Kremlin with Books and Movies - vinnyglennon
https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-cia-battled-the-kremlin-with-books-and-movies-53b62859513d

======
paganel
This article about how CIA supported (with money) modern American artists just
after WW2 was posted on HN before, but here it is:
[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-
cia-w...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-
weapon-1578808.html)

> The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the
> works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de
> Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a
> Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and
> promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more
> than 20 years.

For the life of me I still cannot understand how come some of these post-WW2
Soviet paintings
([http://www.allworldwars.com/Soviet%20War%20Paintings.html](http://www.allworldwars.com/Soviet%20War%20Paintings.html))
have not achieved the same cultural high-status (if not the same insane high
prices) as the works of Pollock or Rothko. For example this painting:
[http://www.allworldwars.com/image/008/SovietPictures065.jpg](http://www.allworldwars.com/image/008/SovietPictures065.jpg)
("The last letter") just gave me instant, huge goose-bumps.

~~~
blumkvist
Soviets tried to keep to common people away from culture. Culture is for smart
people (it makes you think). Smart people don't like communism. The few
exceptions were, of course, artists whose creations were commissioned by the
CPSU to support their agenda.

~~~
kiiski
According to wikipedia there seem to have been times when artists had more
freedom too. And it doesn't seem accurate to say that "the few exceptions ...
were commissioned by the CPSU", as the artist - who were not few - seem to
have had freedom to do their own thing within the limits of socialist realism.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_art](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_art)

> However, art exhibitions of 1935–1960 disprove the claims that artistic life
> of the period was suppressed by the ideology and artists submitted entirely
> to what was then called ‘social order’. A great number of landscapes,
> portraits, genre paintings and studies exhibited at the time pursued purely
> technical purposes and were thus free from any ideology. Thematic painting
> was also approached in a similar way

> ...

> The death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, and Nikita Khrushchev's Thaw, paved the
> way for a wave of liberalization in the arts throughout the Soviet Union.
> Although no official change in policy took place, artists began to feel free
> to experiment in their work, with considerably less fear of repercussions
> than during the Stalinist period.

> ...

> The most infamous incident regarding nonconformist artists in the former
> Soviet Union was the 1974 Bulldozer Exhibition, which took place in a park
> just outside of Moscow, and included work by such artists as Oscar Rabin,
> Komar and Melamid, Alexandr Zhdanov, Nikolai Smoliakov and Leonid Sokov. The
> artists involved had written to the authorities for permission to hold the
> exhibition but received no answer to their request. They decided to go ahead
> with the exhibition anyway, which consisted solely of unofficial works of
> art that did not fit into the rubric of Socialist Realism. The KGB put an
> end to the exhibition just hours after it opened by bringing in bulldozers
> to completely destroy all of the artworks present. Fortunately for the
> artists, the foreign press had been there to witness the event. The world-
> wide coverage of it forced the authorities to permit an exhibition of
> Nonconformist Art two weeks later in Izmailovsky Park in Moscow.

> ...

> By the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev's policies of Perestroika and Glasnost made
> it virtually impossible for the authorities to place restrictions on artists
> or their freedom of expression. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the
> new market economy enabled the development of a gallery system, which meant
> that artists no longer had to be employed by the state, and could create
> work according to their own tastes, as well as the tastes of their private
> patrons. Consequently, after around 1986 the phenomenon of Nonconformist Art
> in the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

~~~
blumkvist
There are a lot of contradictions in this article, which leads me to believe
it is edited by multiple people. It would be interesting to know how you
picked what to quote and why you chose to ignore paragraphs like

>The death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, and Nikita Khrushchev's Thaw, paved the
way for a wave of liberalization in the arts throughout the Soviet Union.
Although no official change in policy took place, artists began to feel free
to experiment in their work, with considerably less fear of repercussions than
during the Stalinist period.

Artists felt considerably less fear of being prosecuted? Prosecuted because
they painted something? Paintings are dangerous? I thought guns were
dangerous. Who fears paintings? Such a silly thing to fear.

Gorbachov's goal was to end the USSR, so no surprise his first reforms were in
the cultural realm.

Things were bad enough with visual arts, but very few people care about visual
arts or literature. If you deny those people completely, you would get more
trouble than if you just let them do their thing in solitude and simply spy on
them and take care of the most dangerous ones. Let the hippies have just a
little bit of freedom, just keep the commoners away. That's the equilibrium
you want to keep, if you desire a long utilitarian rule.

The really atrocious deeds were done in performance arts like cinematography
and music. Everything had to go through a censor. Almost every movie had to
support the class struggle or put the party in a good light. Commons people
don't stare at paintings. They watch films. They listen to music. In my
country, artists were repressed because they refused to sing praises to the
communist party. Their relatives thrown in jail. Their kids were refused
higher education. Obedient artists were promoted (and put on a piedestal),
even though they were of a lesser talent.

~~~
kiiski
I chose to quote paragraphs showing that there was also non-political art, and
therefore the policies of the Soviet Union don't alone explain why their art
is not known in the west.

------
rdtsc
And KGB battled back with disinformation -- fake news stories such as "USA
created AIDS":

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_INFEKTION](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_INFEKTION)

I remember hearing it from relatives and friends growing up.

------
wtbob
And the KGB was funding the counterculture movement in order to destabilise
the West.

~~~
dwiel
do you have any sources? I would be interested to read more.

~~~
wtbob
IIRC Ion Mihai Pacepa (former Romanian 3-star who defected in 1978) wrote a
good bit about it.

