Music in America’s Cold War Diplomacy by Danielle Fosler-Lussier, and: Virtuosi Abroad: Soviet Music and Imperial Competition during the Early Cold War, 1945–1958 by Kiril Tomoff (review)

Like vast planetary bodies in the cold-war-studies solar system, the Soviet Union and United States exert a magnetic fascination for Anglophone scholarship. Taken into the cultural realm, cold war exchanges open up a rich interdisciplinary field, embracing a spectrum reaching from espionage to identity politics, with the two superpowers fighting for supremacy in a battleground comprising most of the rest of the inhabited world. Though historians have for decades been publishing the fruits of archival work, interviews with defectors and long-retired agents, politicians, and diplomatic staff, there is still an enormous amount of information to be uncovered. Access to KGB records in Moscow, for instance, is next to impossible for most researchers, and other sensitive files previously available have been restricted in recent years. As Russia and the West move into a new relationship that feels, to many of us, like a new cold war in all but name, research in Russian archives has become increasingly difficult, making publications such as Kiril Tomoff’s Virtuosi Abroad all the more precious. Many fine post-Soviet publications would now be impossible to countenance: achievements such as Diane P. Koenker and Ronald D. Bachman’s Revelations from the Russian Archives: Documents in English Translation (Washington, DC, 1997) and Fridrikh I. Fersov, Harvey Klehr, and John Earl Haynes’s Secret Cables of the Comintern, 1933–1943 (New Haven and London, 2014) belonged to a prescribed period in Soviet studies whose fragility is now acutely felt.

Yet cold-war studies embraces a field much larger than the Soviet Union and United States alone, even if they are a constant background presence. Danielle Fosler-Lussier’s broad-ranging account of the United States’ Cultural Presentations programme during the 1950s and 1960s shows us just how extensive America’s cultural reach was, and opens up rich avenues for further exploration into the nations whose populaces both superpowers sought to impress. Both Tomoff and Fosler-Lussier show crucial details of the cultural arms race running alongside the higher-stakes political manoeuvres and nuclear proliferation; each of them gives us an inside, even at times intimate, portrait of how the two titans of the cold war slogged it out in such ‘innocent’ venues as concert halls and recording studios. For behind the scenes, both superpowers felt a deep sense of cultural insecurity vis-à-vis their international standing, and they both wished to present themselves as the epitome of learning, cultural sophistication, and peaceful intentions towards other nations. As Amy C. Beal has shown, America’s uncertainty about how it was regarded world-wide emerged during the immediate post-war ‘Zero Hour’ cultural reconstruction of Germany, in which the Soviet Union and America first recognized each other as no longer allies, but hostile and competing powers (Amy C. Beal, New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2005). During the remainder of Stalin’s lifetime, the Soviet Union was caught in a kind of cultural semi-freeze, reluctant to allow its best ambassadors to cross its borders, yet just as fearful of allowing foreigners in. But with Stalin’s death in 1953, the battle for cultural domination began in earnest, and what both Tomoff and Fosler-Lussier show is precisely how those battles were fought: over which countries, which audiences; how repertory choices were agonized over; and which cultural ambassadors to entrust with their missions.

While Tomoff’s study focuses on Soviet artists performing in the West, Fosler-Lussier presents a history of the American State Department’s Cultural Presentations programme...