Enemy Number One: The United States of America in Soviet Ideology and Propaganda, 1945–1959 by Rosa Magnúsdóttir, and: Liberty's Tears: Soviet Portraits of the "American Way of Life" During the Cold War by Alan Ball (review)

It was an assumption of the Cold War that communist propagandists were better informed about liberal democracies than the other way around. The knowledge gap's cause was not espionage but media. While Western reporters relied on governments for information about Soviet life, Soviet media could deride America in the U.S. press's own words.

As Rosa Magnúsdóttir acknowledges in her study of Soviet media's reckoning with the United States between 1947 and 1959, the historiography of the cultural Cold War reflects a similar imbalance between East and West to the one seen in the press. U.S. propaganda organs like the Voice of America, the United States Information Agency, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom have inspired at least one monograph apiece since the 1990s, while Soviet counterparts like Intourist or the World Peace Council figure prominently in occasional chapters in edited volumes. The USSR's prewar campaigns to curry favor with foreign intellectuals are well documented. But the post-1945 debates discussed in Magnúsdóttir's book, between Soviet "cultural bureaucrats" over how to handle "enemy number one," are for the most part new ground. The disputes that figure most prominently in Enemy Number One concern propaganda for export, or how to mollify U.S. public opinion. But the book's most intriguing insights pertain to the same question that drives Alan Ball's provocative and illuminating anthology of Soviet magazine articles, Liberty's Tears: how did Soviet propagandists package America for domestic consumption?

Enemy Number One makes three arguments, each of which bears directly on Soviet social history. The first adds an element of continuity to the conventional two-phase narrative of Soviet culture in the early Cold War. Magnúsdóttir does not dispute that a sea change occurred between high Stalinism (1947-1953) and the Thaw that followed. She even structures the book around it, by dividing six chapters evenly between the two periods. What Magnúsdóttir does question is the assumption that Soviet civilians changed their opinions on the United States as quickly as Soviet ideology and propaganda did theirs. In the late 1940s, an anti-American media blitz culminated in The Russian Question, a blockbuster play about an American journalist's failed effort to tell the truth about life in the USSR. Yet the Soviet public remembered the U.S. much more favorably, as their principal ally in the Second World War. Under Stalin's successor, argues Magnúsdóttir, the blitz subsided, and Soviet media realigned themselves with popular memory. At the book's climax, Nikita Khrushchev honored the U.S.-Soviet wartime alliance in a speech at Andrews Air Force Base, just outside Washington D.C.

The book's second thesis argues that Soviet citizens and officials saw, read, and heard too many portrayals of America to know which to believe. In the end, though, "all these narratives" (11) boil down to two. The World War II ally combined good government, Franklin Roosevelt's, with a good people, represented by the GIs who met Soviet soldiers on the Elbe in April 1945. The orthodox Marxist-Leninist narrative, by contrast, pitted the same "two Americas" against each other, as Rooseveltian plutocrats versus the downtrodden masses. Magnúsdóttir's inference from the two narratives is logical, if difficult to pin down in the sources provided. The more Americas that the propagandists conjured up, it argues, the less stock the general public placed in any of them.

Enemy Number One's third argument lays ultimate blame for the Soviet "cultural bureaucracy's" failure...