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Reviewed by:
  • Cold War Cultures: Perspectives on Eastern and Western Societies ed. by Annette Vowinckel, Marcus M. Payk, Thomas Lindenberger
  • Stephen J. Whitfield
Annette Vowinckel, Marcus M. Payk, and Thomas Lindenberger, eds., Cold War Cultures: Perspectives on Eastern and Western Societies. New York: Berghahn Books, 2012. 385pp. $95.00.

During the major phase of the Cold War, could the arts and the mass media in Western Europe flourish without the inflection of geopolitics? Or did the global struggle for power and influence inevitably affect what was presented on screens, in books, on canvases? Could ideas and images reach audiences in Western Europe and elsewhere, as though insulated against the threat of war, especially nuclear war? The regimes in Eastern Europe were of course notorious for the restrictions they imposed on thought and creativity. But could pockets of resistance be discerned, if only in retrospect? Were there signs of artistic or intellectual independence that betokened the ideological collapse of Communism?

This book inspires such questions, though not all of its essays seek to answer them. An international team of seventeen scholars has been assembled to provide case studies of the impact of the Cold War on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Cold War Cultures pays special attention to instances of interaction (e.g., the world youth festivals under Communist auspices, the impact of gymnast Olga Korbut at the 1972 Olympics) and of contrast (e.g., nationalist disputes in the northern Adriatic, television programs about espionage). The book contains essays on radio and religion, civil defense pamphlets and automobile advertisements, May Day floats, and permanent [End Page 249] memorials. The collection is uneven but is invaluable in informing English-language readers how Czechs, Romanians, Russians, Swedes, Austrians, Italians, Slovenes, and (more than any other nationality) Germans experienced the travail of a divided continent.

No overarching theme emerges from Cold War Cultures, other than the bromide that the historiography on the era needs to be made more nuanced. Such a claim is indisputable, given the diversity of the countries that must be understood, and given the range of political and social institutions and configurations that each of the contributors is obliged to explicate. Hence the editors’ insistence that the noun in their title must be pluralized, even though they warily add that a study of Europe in the second half of the twentieth century also yields “similarities and commonalities” (p. 16). The editors in their introduction offer a clear, crisp summation of each essay in the book. No review can do justice to the full scale of the research upon which this anthology draws, but a couple of responses highlight how polychromatic the book is.

For example, chapter 2 gives a curious answer to the perennial question of when the Cold War began. For Olga Voronina, the Jacques Duclos declaration of international class warfare in Cahiers du Communisme in the spring of 1945, or Winston Churchill’s reverberant speech in Fulton, Missouri a year later, may not suffice. Instead she cites the famous rendezvous that Isaiah Berlin had with Anna Akhmatova in Leningrad in November 1945. Voronina writes that, for Akhmatova, “apart from a Polish translator whom she had met during the war, Berlin was the first foreign visitor since 1917” (p. 58). (Talk about an iron curtain!) The Russian-speaking Berlin was “the guest from the future,” but he was also a British diplomat, and their meeting may have triggered Soviet officials’ concerns that foreign intelligence would contaminate Soviet culture. In the summer of 1946, Iosif Stalin had hoped to obtain a sizable U.S. loan, which went to Great Britain instead. That decision may have deepened the paranoia and hostility of his regime. Hence, Andrei Zhdanov’s allegation that Soviet intellectuals were guilty of “servility toward the West” (p. 70) was not only aimed at domestic targets but was also intended to draw an international line in the sand. Voronina is not so foolish as to accept Akhmatova’s later claim that Berlin’s visit to her apartment had inaugurated the Cold War. But this essay in Cold War Cultures does deepen the historical meaning of that episode.

The moral ambiguities that contrast with, say, Checkpoint Charlie are nowhere more...

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