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Guns and Roses, or, Dancing through the Cold War
At a time where the people of Eastern Europe couldn’t travel, endured state controlled media, and the risk of political imprisonment, a cultural diplomacy began to develop between East and West. Could culture actually win hearts and minds, as both sides hoped? And could the art of dance transcend the considerable cultural and language barriers that the separated two great powers? Tim Scholl offers a picture of the cold war mood and first attempts at cultural diplomacy.
In a 1946 speech delivered in the ‘heartland’ of America, Winston Churchill spoke of an ‘iron curtain’ that partitioned post-War Europe, separating the ‘free’ West from an Eastern Bloc the West would increasingly describe as an enormous gulag. Churchill’s metaphor became the Cold War’s most popular sound bite, even though his imaginary curtain described borders already well marked. Yet the image Churchill evoked had enormous impact. The two worlds it described largely internalized the rhetoric, and the borders began to mark more than geography, taking on ideological, social, and cultural dimensions. By the end of the Cold War – essentially, the disintegration of the Eastern Bloc in 1989 - Churchill’s ‘iron’ curtain was no more than a rusty gate, though the breach of its most tangible and formidable part (the Berlin Wall) still symbolizes its fall.
Looking back, the rigid division of East and West had an unintended effect, once the spell of Stalinism was broken in the mid 1950s. The decades after the Second World War now seem like Golden Age in the dissemination of culture, especially for dance, which had no need of words or translators. The Bolshoi Ballet made its first international tours in the 1950s, Merce Cunningham created works in the Royal Swedish Opera, and the New York City Ballet showed Balanchine’s choreography in the land of his birth. The new battle was for hearts and minds, after all, and the threat of nuclear war was sufficient to persuade government leaders on both sides to explore more than military options.
The Cold War marked the first, and only, large-scale US experiment in funding and exporting culture, and the cultural program the US government funded in the 1950s and ‘60s now reads like a list of the twentieth century’s greatest hits: Porgy and Bess, Jackson Pollock, Martha Graham, and West Side Story were among the offerings. The quality and scale of this extraordinary experiment in the exchange of cultures is even more surprising when one learns that many of the arbiters of taste were often agents of the Central Intelligence Agency.
The cultural Cold War began in Berlin, though the US made some earlier attempts to foster goodwill by exporting the arts. Nervous about the political leanings of Latin America during the Second World War, for example, the government sponsored a goodwill tour of Balanchine’s Ballet Caravan to countries in that region in 1941. Yet the immediate problem of administering Berlin after World War II led to a more ordered policy of influencing politics through culture. In a city where theater-goers could literally vote with their feet, choosing a play by Brecht or O’Neill on a given night, for example, the importance of managing the cultural offerings available became obvious to both sides.
In part, the American side wished to counter Nazi and Soviet charges that the US lacked culture. In fact, the newness of US culture proved an enormous advantage: musicals, abstract-expressionist paintings, and jazz, were novel, captivating forms, more substantive than Hollywood entertainment, but almost as appealing. Oklahoma! and the New York City Ballet both proved enormously popular entries in the arts festival the US sponsored in Berlin 1951 and 1952, for example, and helped establish the supremacy of musical theater, including dance, as a key weapon on the new cultural battleground.
The players in this game were a curious blend of American blue-bloods and Eastern European émigrés. Nicholas Nabokov, cousin of Vladimir, was Secretary General of the Congress for Cultural Freedom; Michael Josselson, a CIA agent born in Estonia, was its Executive Director. The involvement of so many prominent émigrés, as administrators and performers, created its own set of problems. The campaign took place against the backdrop of the Communist scare, and some of the early, secret funding by the CIA was in part, a matter of convenience: to avoid security clearances for an entire orchestra, for example. Yet the funding continued until 1966, the year before the CIA’s secret involvement in the operation was finally exposed.
Cultural freedom was the ostensible goal of these operations; embarrassing the Soviets was the more practical aim. The chief strategy was to depict the US as a land of freedoms, including the freedom to create as one wished. If the Soviet state patronized realistic painting, narrative ballets, or tonal music, then the US would support abstraction and atonalism. The relatively radical nature of the some of the works on view did lead to problems at home. President Eisenhower, himself a Sunday portraitist who loved early-morning walks through the Old Masters halls of the National Gallery, found the paintings selected for a 1960 exhibit in Moscow ‘extreme.’ Southern senators objected to a fashion show depicting white and black couples socializing together (Hixson 172-3). Congressmen took little notice of the raft of highbrow magazines the CCF (and the CIA) were funding around the world. Encounterwas the best known of them, publishing Nabokov and Nancy Mitford, Borges, Auden, and Isaiah Berlin. Yet the scope of the operation rivaled that of a modern-day press baron: Preuves in French, Der Monat in German, Cuadernos, in Spanish, Tempo Presente in Italian, Quadrant in Australia, Quest in India, and Jiyu in Japan (Saunders 213-15).
In the end, magazines proved simpler to manage than performing artists. The process of selecting, funding, and exporting paintings and performers required nearly as much logistical support as conventional warfare, and a number of new organizations were created to carry out those tasks. The State Department became involved in promoting US culture in 1954, and chose the American National Theater and Academy to administer the tours. The State Department decided which nations and regions could benefit from an enhanced US cultural presence, but typically relied on panels of experts in music, theater, and dance to select appropriate groups and repertories (Prevots 45).
The roster of the dance panel reads like a who’s who of American dance in the twentieth century: Lucia Chase, the director of Ballet Theatre (now American Ballet Theatre), and Martha Hill, director of Julliard’s dance department, both served on the panel, as did Doris Humphrey, Lincoln Kirstein, Agnes de Mille, Hanya Holm, and most of America’s prominent dance writers. Minutes of their meetings reveal the care the members took to display the best of American dance to the world, though at times they were out of their league. The highly successful tour of the Moiseyev Dance Company, the USSR’s most prominent folk-dance ensemble, led to discussions of forming an American counterpart. Agnes de Mille tried to raise money for an ensemble that would showcase folk-based choreography by a variety of established US dance-makers, including Michael Kidd, Robert Fosse, Jerome Robbins, Anna Sokolow, Katherine Dunham, Hanya Holm, Gene Kelly and herself, but de Mille failed to raise the necessary money (and neither the State Department nor the CIA seemed interesting in establishing new groups to further their goals) (Prevots 118). The panel considered Native American dance as well, but had difficulties finding Native American dancers. (A Boy Scout Troup and various other white performers were considered.)
The ballet represented the arena of greatest anxiety for the Dance Panel. After all, how to send ballet to the Russians? Yet terms of the US/USSR cultural exchange dictated that the exchanges be equal in every respect: if the USSR sent a ballet troupe to the US, then the US had to send a similar company of equal status to the Soviets. The American side was naturally more comfortable sending Martha Graham or Katherine Dunham, but Soviet restrictions, mostly over the type of music that accompanied the dancing, made the export of much modern dance impossible. In fact, early US attempts to send ballet to Russia were rebuffed. In 1949, Ballet Theatre offered to tour Russia if the USSR would provide the orchestras. The First Secretary of the Soviet Embassy in Washington wrote a frosty letter in which he recommended that US dancers ‘acquaint themselves with the achievements of the ballet art in our country, which has stepped up to a new high level of perfection during the days of Soviet power’ (quoted in Caute, 469).
One problem was length: the Secretary maintained that Soviet audiences were unused to seeing the ‘miniature’ ballets on view in the West. (The very sort of dances to ‘serious’ music that Diagilev and his Ballets Russes had introduced to the West some decades earlier.) More importantly, the First Secretary's lesson in Soviet ballet history should be considered within the larger framework of the Soviet enlightenment project. The socialist path led to progress on all fronts, cultural as well as scientific or technical, and Soviet dance boasted a significant achievement by 1949: the drambalet. A contraction of 'dramatic ballet,' the drambalet was a multi-act work, usually based on a literary masterpiece (by Shakespeare, Pushkin, or Balzac), that eschewed traditional ballet mime in favor of a kind of 'psychologized' movement. The result was closer to silent film than to Shakespeare, but met the chief requirements of Stalin-era aesthetics: epic scale, high-art pretension, and a certain triumphalism. Next to a ballet adaptation of Lost Illusions, Balanchine's Serenade would seem slight.
Russia still felt it owned ballet in 1949. To prove the point, the diplomat jeered at the faux-Russian roots of many Western dancers, exposing Alicia Markova as Elisa Marx (actually, Alice Marks), and denounced Serge Lifar as a white émigré Hitlerite (470).
By the time formal cultural agreements had been signed between the US and the USSR in the 1950s, a more serious problem arose. Jerome Robbins’ Ballets U.S.A. enjoyed great success at Expo ’58 (the Brussels World’s Fair) and the dance panel was anxious to send his company, but the Robbins repertory featured one work titled Opus Jazz and another with no music at all (Moves). In the end, ‘Negro’ jazz represented the greater peril. In his famous visit to the Manège art exhibition in 1962 Khrushchev devoted most of his denunciations to the art on the walls (his critiques inevitably referred to bodily excretions), but reserved time for jazz as well: the Soviet leader likened it to ‘gas on the stomach’ or ‘static on the radio.’ Benny Goodman’s orchestra eventually toured the Soviet Union in 1962, but with a repertory mostly from the 1930s (Caute 460, 592).
The Soviet Ministry of Culture invited the New York City Ballet to tour four cities in the Soviet Union in 1958. But the New York City Ballet’s founder and chief choreographer was George Balanchine, who left the Soviet Union in 1924 on a short-term visa and never returned. Lincoln Kirstein, the company’s patrician co-founder and a member of the dance panel, reported to his fellow panelists that neither Balanchine nor his company would go. When the dance panel discussed the invitation again the following year, Kirstein added aesthetic objections: the Russians might criticize the NYCB’s spare modern aesthetic and ‘decadent’ music. Kirstein (and Balanchine?) feared the Russians would find the dances Balanchine staged ‘very peculiar’ (Prevots 74).
With the Bolshoi Ballet schedule to début in New York City in 1959, the US had to reciprocate, and the New York City Ballet’s refusal left only one option. American Ballet Theatre (the name changed in 1956), had long functioned as the nation’s more popular touring company. Its repertory was as mixed as its assemblage of dancers, techniques, and styles. The minutes of the dance panel in the years leading up to the tour reveal the enormous anxieties that showing US dance to the USSR represented. Should the company show new works or classics? If they showed new works, might this suggest that the company couldn’t properly perform Swan Lake? Could an American company risk showing Russian nineteenth-century classics to the Russians?
In November of 1959, Lucia Chase presented the dance panel with a list of ballets and dance she wished to take to Russia the following year. The dancers included Erik Bruhn, John Kriza, Nora Kaye, Violette Verdy, and Ruth Ann Koesun. They would dance Robbins’ Fancy Free and Interplay, de Mille’s Fall River Legend and Rodeo, Tudor’s Pillar of Fire and Jardin aux lilas, and Fokine’sLes Sylphides. In February of the next year, the panel suggested that Chase invite Maria Tallchief and Alicia Alonso as well, and Chase noted that new ballerina Toni Lander ‘although Danish, is connected with no one nationality’ (Prevots 76).
ABT’s tour of the Soviet Union was a success, with most of the hoped-for dancers and repertory items in place. Yet the official accounts of the dance panel, and the histories of cultural exchange leave out an important preparatory step for the USSR tour, and an altogether more human moment in the history of the Cold War.
Photos from the archives of the Finnish National Opera show dancers from American Ballet Theatre, the Finnish National Ballet, and the Kirov Ballet enjoying a dinner and dancing together in Helsinki’s Restaurant Royale (above the Swedish Theater) in May of 1958. The era’s biggest stars were there: Konstantin Sergeyev and Natalia Dudinskaya, Nora Kaye and Erik Bruhn. So was Alfons Almi, Finland’s leading tenor of the war years, the husband of ballerina Doris Laine, and in 1958, Director of the Finnish National Opera. It was Almi who arranged the dinner party when he realized that stars of both the American and Soviet ballets would be touring Finland that May.
Almi’s seating chart had Russians and Americans alternating with Finns, meant to serve as cultural and linguistic intermediaries. The photographs reveal a relaxed, happy group conversing with one another and performing social dances after the dinner. Still, they raise as many questions as they answer: was Almi acting on his own behalf? Did the event have an impact on the cultural exchanges that followed?
The photos from the dinner (as well as the generosity of Finnish dancers Doris Laine and Heikki Värtsi, and ABT star Violette Verdy in sharing their recollections of the evening) help fill in some details missing from the larger canvas of Cold-War cultural history. Curiously, ABT’s tour of Finland is not mentioned in US histories of cold-war cultural exchange or in the company’s impressionistic histories of itself, though the decision to ‘preview’ the company’s repertory and dancers in the nation next-door to Russia makes perfect sense. Soviet dancers routinely appeared in Finland, and Finnish audiences and critics would have provided an ideal ‘test market’ for a tricky tour.
The photos, kindly supplied by the press office of the Finnish National Opera, lend a human dimension to a story usually told through diplomatic papers and newspaper reviews. Almi’s dinner party was the first meeting of dancers from the two sides of Churchill’s fire curtain, with the Cold War’s front-row audience, the Finns, as hosts. In a time of drawn-out diplomacy and many failed initiatives, Almi’s invitation to dinner was likely so unexpected it couldn’t be properly refused. And the provocation worked. The dancers chatted amiably and danced the two-step. Helsinki Sanomat reported that the event began stiffly, but quickly warmed: the social dancing lasted until the early hours of the next morning.
Cultural exchange, like the Cold War itself, waxed and waned over the following three decades, until the presence of Russian dancers in New York or American jazz musicians in Moscow became almost routine and obviated the need for high-level government involvement. Less inhibited social interaction between the two sides – of the sort that Almi began to foster – would take longer. But in the end, the objectives of the cultural exchange process won the Cold War, long after the spies who implemented them were forgotten.
Sources
Caute, David. The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy During the Cold War. Oxford University Press, 2003.
Hixson, Walter J. Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945-1961. St. Martin's Press, 1997.
Prevots, Naima. Dance for Export: Cultural Diplomacy and the Cold War. Wesleyan University Press, 1998.
Saunders, Frances Stonor. The Cultural Cold War. The New Press, 1999.
Tim Scholl is Professor of Russian, Oberlin College and Docent and the Department of Theatre Research at Helsinki University
In a 1946 speech delivered in the ‘heartland’ of America, Winston Churchill spoke of an ‘iron curtain’ that partitioned post-War Europe, separating the ‘free’ West from an Eastern Bloc the West would increasingly describe as an enormous gulag. Churchill’s metaphor became the Cold War’s most popular sound bite, even though his imaginary curtain described borders already well marked. Yet the image Churchill evoked had enormous impact. The two worlds it described largely internalized the rhetoric, and the borders began to mark more than geography, taking on ideological, social, and cultural dimensions. By the end of the Cold War – essentially, the disintegration of the Eastern Bloc in 1989 - Churchill’s ‘iron’ curtain was no more than a rusty gate, though the breach of its most tangible and formidable part (the Berlin Wall) still symbolizes its fall.
Looking back, the rigid division of East and West had an unintended effect, once the spell of Stalinism was broken in the mid 1950s. The decades after the Second World War now seem like Golden Age in the dissemination of culture, especially for dance, which had no need of words or translators. The Bolshoi Ballet made its first international tours in the 1950s, Merce Cunningham created works in the Royal Swedish Opera, and the New York City Ballet showed Balanchine’s choreography in the land of his birth. The new battle was for hearts and minds, after all, and the threat of nuclear war was sufficient to persuade government leaders on both sides to explore more than military options.
The Cold War marked the first, and only, large-scale US experiment in funding and exporting culture, and the cultural program the US government funded in the 1950s and ‘60s now reads like a list of the twentieth century’s greatest hits: Porgy and Bess, Jackson Pollock, Martha Graham, and West Side Story were among the offerings. The quality and scale of this extraordinary experiment in the exchange of cultures is even more surprising when one learns that many of the arbiters of taste were often agents of the Central Intelligence Agency.
The cultural Cold War began in Berlin, though the US made some earlier attempts to foster goodwill by exporting the arts. Nervous about the political leanings of Latin America during the Second World War, for example, the government sponsored a goodwill tour of Balanchine’s Ballet Caravan to countries in that region in 1941. Yet the immediate problem of administering Berlin after World War II led to a more ordered policy of influencing politics through culture. In a city where theater-goers could literally vote with their feet, choosing a play by Brecht or O’Neill on a given night, for example, the importance of managing the cultural offerings available became obvious to both sides.
In part, the American side wished to counter Nazi and Soviet charges that the US lacked culture. In fact, the newness of US culture proved an enormous advantage: musicals, abstract-expressionist paintings, and jazz, were novel, captivating forms, more substantive than Hollywood entertainment, but almost as appealing. Oklahoma! and the New York City Ballet both proved enormously popular entries in the arts festival the US sponsored in Berlin 1951 and 1952, for example, and helped establish the supremacy of musical theater, including dance, as a key weapon on the new cultural battleground.
The players in this game were a curious blend of American blue-bloods and Eastern European émigrés. Nicholas Nabokov, cousin of Vladimir, was Secretary General of the Congress for Cultural Freedom; Michael Josselson, a CIA agent born in Estonia, was its Executive Director. The involvement of so many prominent émigrés, as administrators and performers, created its own set of problems. The campaign took place against the backdrop of the Communist scare, and some of the early, secret funding by the CIA was in part, a matter of convenience: to avoid security clearances for an entire orchestra, for example. Yet the funding continued until 1966, the year before the CIA’s secret involvement in the operation was finally exposed.
Cultural freedom was the ostensible goal of these operations; embarrassing the Soviets was the more practical aim. The chief strategy was to depict the US as a land of freedoms, including the freedom to create as one wished. If the Soviet state patronized realistic painting, narrative ballets, or tonal music, then the US would support abstraction and atonalism. The relatively radical nature of the some of the works on view did lead to problems at home. President Eisenhower, himself a Sunday portraitist who loved early-morning walks through the Old Masters halls of the National Gallery, found the paintings selected for a 1960 exhibit in Moscow ‘extreme.’ Southern senators objected to a fashion show depicting white and black couples socializing together (Hixson 172-3). Congressmen took little notice of the raft of highbrow magazines the CCF (and the CIA) were funding around the world. Encounterwas the best known of them, publishing Nabokov and Nancy Mitford, Borges, Auden, and Isaiah Berlin. Yet the scope of the operation rivaled that of a modern-day press baron: Preuves in French, Der Monat in German, Cuadernos, in Spanish, Tempo Presente in Italian, Quadrant in Australia, Quest in India, and Jiyu in Japan (Saunders 213-15).
In the end, magazines proved simpler to manage than performing artists. The process of selecting, funding, and exporting paintings and performers required nearly as much logistical support as conventional warfare, and a number of new organizations were created to carry out those tasks. The State Department became involved in promoting US culture in 1954, and chose the American National Theater and Academy to administer the tours. The State Department decided which nations and regions could benefit from an enhanced US cultural presence, but typically relied on panels of experts in music, theater, and dance to select appropriate groups and repertories (Prevots 45).
The roster of the dance panel reads like a who’s who of American dance in the twentieth century: Lucia Chase, the director of Ballet Theatre (now American Ballet Theatre), and Martha Hill, director of Julliard’s dance department, both served on the panel, as did Doris Humphrey, Lincoln Kirstein, Agnes de Mille, Hanya Holm, and most of America’s prominent dance writers. Minutes of their meetings reveal the care the members took to display the best of American dance to the world, though at times they were out of their league. The highly successful tour of the Moiseyev Dance Company, the USSR’s most prominent folk-dance ensemble, led to discussions of forming an American counterpart. Agnes de Mille tried to raise money for an ensemble that would showcase folk-based choreography by a variety of established US dance-makers, including Michael Kidd, Robert Fosse, Jerome Robbins, Anna Sokolow, Katherine Dunham, Hanya Holm, Gene Kelly and herself, but de Mille failed to raise the necessary money (and neither the State Department nor the CIA seemed interesting in establishing new groups to further their goals) (Prevots 118). The panel considered Native American dance as well, but had difficulties finding Native American dancers. (A Boy Scout Troup and various other white performers were considered.)
The ballet represented the arena of greatest anxiety for the Dance Panel. After all, how to send ballet to the Russians? Yet terms of the US/USSR cultural exchange dictated that the exchanges be equal in every respect: if the USSR sent a ballet troupe to the US, then the US had to send a similar company of equal status to the Soviets. The American side was naturally more comfortable sending Martha Graham or Katherine Dunham, but Soviet restrictions, mostly over the type of music that accompanied the dancing, made the export of much modern dance impossible. In fact, early US attempts to send ballet to Russia were rebuffed. In 1949, Ballet Theatre offered to tour Russia if the USSR would provide the orchestras. The First Secretary of the Soviet Embassy in Washington wrote a frosty letter in which he recommended that US dancers ‘acquaint themselves with the achievements of the ballet art in our country, which has stepped up to a new high level of perfection during the days of Soviet power’ (quoted in Caute, 469).
One problem was length: the Secretary maintained that Soviet audiences were unused to seeing the ‘miniature’ ballets on view in the West. (The very sort of dances to ‘serious’ music that Diagilev and his Ballets Russes had introduced to the West some decades earlier.) More importantly, the First Secretary's lesson in Soviet ballet history should be considered within the larger framework of the Soviet enlightenment project. The socialist path led to progress on all fronts, cultural as well as scientific or technical, and Soviet dance boasted a significant achievement by 1949: the drambalet. A contraction of 'dramatic ballet,' the drambalet was a multi-act work, usually based on a literary masterpiece (by Shakespeare, Pushkin, or Balzac), that eschewed traditional ballet mime in favor of a kind of 'psychologized' movement. The result was closer to silent film than to Shakespeare, but met the chief requirements of Stalin-era aesthetics: epic scale, high-art pretension, and a certain triumphalism. Next to a ballet adaptation of Lost Illusions, Balanchine's Serenade would seem slight.
Russia still felt it owned ballet in 1949. To prove the point, the diplomat jeered at the faux-Russian roots of many Western dancers, exposing Alicia Markova as Elisa Marx (actually, Alice Marks), and denounced Serge Lifar as a white émigré Hitlerite (470).
By the time formal cultural agreements had been signed between the US and the USSR in the 1950s, a more serious problem arose. Jerome Robbins’ Ballets U.S.A. enjoyed great success at Expo ’58 (the Brussels World’s Fair) and the dance panel was anxious to send his company, but the Robbins repertory featured one work titled Opus Jazz and another with no music at all (Moves). In the end, ‘Negro’ jazz represented the greater peril. In his famous visit to the Manège art exhibition in 1962 Khrushchev devoted most of his denunciations to the art on the walls (his critiques inevitably referred to bodily excretions), but reserved time for jazz as well: the Soviet leader likened it to ‘gas on the stomach’ or ‘static on the radio.’ Benny Goodman’s orchestra eventually toured the Soviet Union in 1962, but with a repertory mostly from the 1930s (Caute 460, 592).
The Soviet Ministry of Culture invited the New York City Ballet to tour four cities in the Soviet Union in 1958. But the New York City Ballet’s founder and chief choreographer was George Balanchine, who left the Soviet Union in 1924 on a short-term visa and never returned. Lincoln Kirstein, the company’s patrician co-founder and a member of the dance panel, reported to his fellow panelists that neither Balanchine nor his company would go. When the dance panel discussed the invitation again the following year, Kirstein added aesthetic objections: the Russians might criticize the NYCB’s spare modern aesthetic and ‘decadent’ music. Kirstein (and Balanchine?) feared the Russians would find the dances Balanchine staged ‘very peculiar’ (Prevots 74).
With the Bolshoi Ballet schedule to début in New York City in 1959, the US had to reciprocate, and the New York City Ballet’s refusal left only one option. American Ballet Theatre (the name changed in 1956), had long functioned as the nation’s more popular touring company. Its repertory was as mixed as its assemblage of dancers, techniques, and styles. The minutes of the dance panel in the years leading up to the tour reveal the enormous anxieties that showing US dance to the USSR represented. Should the company show new works or classics? If they showed new works, might this suggest that the company couldn’t properly perform Swan Lake? Could an American company risk showing Russian nineteenth-century classics to the Russians?
In November of 1959, Lucia Chase presented the dance panel with a list of ballets and dance she wished to take to Russia the following year. The dancers included Erik Bruhn, John Kriza, Nora Kaye, Violette Verdy, and Ruth Ann Koesun. They would dance Robbins’ Fancy Free and Interplay, de Mille’s Fall River Legend and Rodeo, Tudor’s Pillar of Fire and Jardin aux lilas, and Fokine’sLes Sylphides. In February of the next year, the panel suggested that Chase invite Maria Tallchief and Alicia Alonso as well, and Chase noted that new ballerina Toni Lander ‘although Danish, is connected with no one nationality’ (Prevots 76).
ABT’s tour of the Soviet Union was a success, with most of the hoped-for dancers and repertory items in place. Yet the official accounts of the dance panel, and the histories of cultural exchange leave out an important preparatory step for the USSR tour, and an altogether more human moment in the history of the Cold War.
Photos from the archives of the Finnish National Opera show dancers from American Ballet Theatre, the Finnish National Ballet, and the Kirov Ballet enjoying a dinner and dancing together in Helsinki’s Restaurant Royale (above the Swedish Theater) in May of 1958. The era’s biggest stars were there: Konstantin Sergeyev and Natalia Dudinskaya, Nora Kaye and Erik Bruhn. So was Alfons Almi, Finland’s leading tenor of the war years, the husband of ballerina Doris Laine, and in 1958, Director of the Finnish National Opera. It was Almi who arranged the dinner party when he realized that stars of both the American and Soviet ballets would be touring Finland that May.
Almi’s seating chart had Russians and Americans alternating with Finns, meant to serve as cultural and linguistic intermediaries. The photographs reveal a relaxed, happy group conversing with one another and performing social dances after the dinner. Still, they raise as many questions as they answer: was Almi acting on his own behalf? Did the event have an impact on the cultural exchanges that followed?
The photos from the dinner (as well as the generosity of Finnish dancers Doris Laine and Heikki Värtsi, and ABT star Violette Verdy in sharing their recollections of the evening) help fill in some details missing from the larger canvas of Cold-War cultural history. Curiously, ABT’s tour of Finland is not mentioned in US histories of cold-war cultural exchange or in the company’s impressionistic histories of itself, though the decision to ‘preview’ the company’s repertory and dancers in the nation next-door to Russia makes perfect sense. Soviet dancers routinely appeared in Finland, and Finnish audiences and critics would have provided an ideal ‘test market’ for a tricky tour.
The photos, kindly supplied by the press office of the Finnish National Opera, lend a human dimension to a story usually told through diplomatic papers and newspaper reviews. Almi’s dinner party was the first meeting of dancers from the two sides of Churchill’s fire curtain, with the Cold War’s front-row audience, the Finns, as hosts. In a time of drawn-out diplomacy and many failed initiatives, Almi’s invitation to dinner was likely so unexpected it couldn’t be properly refused. And the provocation worked. The dancers chatted amiably and danced the two-step. Helsinki Sanomat reported that the event began stiffly, but quickly warmed: the social dancing lasted until the early hours of the next morning.
Cultural exchange, like the Cold War itself, waxed and waned over the following three decades, until the presence of Russian dancers in New York or American jazz musicians in Moscow became almost routine and obviated the need for high-level government involvement. Less inhibited social interaction between the two sides – of the sort that Almi began to foster – would take longer. But in the end, the objectives of the cultural exchange process won the Cold War, long after the spies who implemented them were forgotten.
Sources
Caute, David. The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy During the Cold War. Oxford University Press, 2003.
Hixson, Walter J. Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945-1961. St. Martin's Press, 1997.
Prevots, Naima. Dance for Export: Cultural Diplomacy and the Cold War. Wesleyan University Press, 1998.
Saunders, Frances Stonor. The Cultural Cold War. The New Press, 1999.
Tim Scholl is Professor of Russian, Oberlin College and Docent and the Department of Theatre Research at Helsinki University