Red Apple: Communism and McCarthyism in Cold War New York

4. The Composer

Dimitri Shostakovich at the Waldorf Astoria, 1949. (© CORBIS.) 113 4 The Composer Dimitri Shostakovich At NewYork’s opulent Waldorf Astoria hotel in March 1949, the internationally famous Soviet composer Dimitri Shostakovich experienced “the worst moment in my life.”1 His nadir occurred when he was asked publicly if he supported Pravda’s recent denunciation of several Russian composers.2 Forty years later, the American playwright Arthur Miller still remembered that moment:“It is the memory of Shostakovich that still haunts my mind when I think of that day.”3 William Barrett saw him as“unhappy”and“nervous,”4 while to Nicolas Nabokov“he seemed like a trapped man.”5 According to another participant at that conference, Dwight Macdonald, Shostakovich was “very pale . . . [and] sat hunched over,eyes downcast,often with hand over mouth or shading eyes;unsmiling .” He was “truly a tragic figure.”6 This chapter focuses on Shostakovich’s encounter with McCarthyism in NewYork. It examines why he went to the United States in 1949, why he experienced such extreme discomfort—“I still recall with horror my first trip to the USA”7 —and what it suggests about the paradoxical position of the creative artist from a communist country during the early Cold War. Using Shostakovich as its primary focus, the chapter reveals the contradictions between his officially sanctioned role and his private doubts and misgivings. Because the first subsumed the second, the costs were considerable: his creative work diminished and his self-respect suffered . This public/personal disjuncture was most acute from February 1948, associated with the ideological assault on his music led by Andrei Zhdanov, until the death of Josef Stalin in March 1953. In March 1949 it 114 The Composer: Dimitri Shostakovich reached its apotheosis. In this chapter we also see how the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace (or Waldorf conference, as it is commonly termed) became, at least for NewYork intellectuals, a critical and defining moment in the cultural Cold War. Significance of Waldorf The ostensible, if naïve, intention of theWaldorf conference was the promotion of cultural exchange across international boundaries,peaceful coexistence ,and the diminution of the growing tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States. Its more specific aim was to gather artists, intellectuals,and scientists“to meet,to discuss and to seek a basis for common action on the central question of peace as it affects our work and our aspirations in the various fields of culture.”8 It was initiated either by the National Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions (NCASP), whose leading light was the left-leaning but non-communist Harvard University astronomer Harlow Shapley,9 or by the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) with Soviet backing.10 A State Department official who escorted the Soviet delegation confirmed the former:“I had the impression that the conference was not actually communist-run” and that it was primarily run by “naïve, well-meaning, and vague [Henry] Wallaceites.”11 By taking much—far too much—of the credit, Howard Fast confirmed the latter. He claimed that he was “the major stimulating force for the Waldorf conference.” In short,“It was my idea.”12 This was a gross overstatement. But his comment that it was “a conference created by the Communist Party . . . and no-one [sic] at the conference had any illusions as to who the organizers were”13 is more telling.While there was a twisted rather than straight line from Wrocław to Waldorf, and while claims that “Moscow gold” bankrolled it are fanciful, there is no doubt that the CPUSA was central to the organization ofWaldorf.14 One example :Hannah Dorner,the executive secretary of the NCASP and a driving force behind Waldorf, was undoubtedly a party member.15 According to one observer, she “insistently” whispered directions to Shapley, which he apparently took, during the conference proceedings.16 The assessment of Mary McCarthy, the noted author and literary critic, approximates the reality:“There’s no doubt of its having been a Stalinist engineered affair. But it was not the type of totalitarian affair pictured by Sidney Hook.”17 It is not the purpose here to settle conclusively this vexed question; however , the weight of evidence suggests that Waldorf was a Communist The Composer: Dimitri Shostakovich 115 Party “front” initiative with the blessing of the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform). Irrespective of whether its origins were local or international,theWaldorf...