The recent revelation by the that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency published and distributed Boris Pasternak’s epic novel to undermine the Soviets made headlines.
But to Cold War historians and those who lived on the other side of the Iron Curtain, it was yesterday’s news.
As it turns out, the CIA decided long ago that a good way to topple the Soviet Union was not with bombs, but canvases, symphonies and prose.
During the heyday of the Cold War in the late 1940s, that the Russian revolution’s promises of social equality had won over many Western European artists, writers, scientists.
In 1950, the CIA set up the with a goal of undermining the Soviet government and winning over the hearts and minds of Europe’s left-leaning intellectuals.
“The idea was to try and contradict notions that America was this sort of capitalist, commercial, philistine society that lacked a high cultural tradition, because the U.S. government was concerned that European intellectuals, especially, who were inclined to neutralism in the Cold War had that kind of anti-American cultural prejudice,” said , an author of several books on covert CIA operations during the Cold War era.
Books were one weapon and was just one of many that were clandestinely subsidized.
“I think that was even bigger than , as an example of, from the American point of view, successful propaganda,” said , son of former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Senior Fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.
He refers to the landmark novel by former Soviet labor camp detainee and Nobel Laureate, which detailed hardships and abuses in Soviet prisons.
“And I would also say that about the Svetlana Alliluyeva’s [Joseph Stalin's daughterwhich was most painful to the Bresnev era,” he said, adding that Svetlana was paid nearly a million dollars for her novel.
came as a devastating blow to Soviets, Khruschev said, as it exposed the flaws of Josef Stalin, the architect of Communism.
“I think it was very effective because Russians are different from the Americans,” he said. “Americans, when they watch something on TV or listen to the news, they usually believe the news.
“But in Russia, all the time there was censorship,” he said. “They never believed what they heard on the official news, so they tried to find out what was the truth and why they were lying in the Soviet Union. So all the Soviet people listened to the so-called ‘enemy voices.’”
Getting these books into the Soviet Union turned out to be relatively easy, Khruschev said.
“The people from the U.S. embassy and journalists, they liked to meet with artists, and of course they told them about the so-called “unofficial arts” in the Soviet Union, when you are talking about sculpture, about painting, music, writing, and they would usually distribute books and pamphlets around the Soviet people,” Khruschev said.
“It was illegal at that time, but in reality, everybody knew that they were doing this,” he said.
The Congress funded a host of literary and cultural magazines, including Britains’ magazine and, wittingly or not, the .
It was the shadow behind sponsored concerts, such as a ’s April 1952 performance at a Paris music festival.
The choice of music for the performance was surely no accident: by , one of the most famous composers of his day and an .
The CIA even funded the animated film version of author .
To fund these activities, the CIA, secretly through a variety of cultural organizations in America and Europe.
In the Soviet Union, modern art was considered to reflect the “decadence” of the West, i.e., democracy, and modern artists were viewed as subversives--including Pablo Picasso, who ironically was communist himself.
Many artists fled the Soviet Union, among them Wassily Kandinsky and Mark Rothko.
The CIA dumped millions of dollars in subsidize the 1950s New York art movement known as , an unrestrained and expressive style of painting as practiced by Rothko and Jackson Pollack—artists who were not particularly appreciated by Americans of the era.
The intelligence agency supported them, organizing showings of these and other painters across Europe and helping to spread abstract art as a global trend.
“In making sure that abstract expressionism, which was incontrovertedly highbrow art—it was so difficult to understand—that if it got out there, that might contradict those European notions and help get European intellectuals on our side in the Cold War,” said historian Wilford, a professor of history at California State University.
Today, it is difficult to imagine America’s spymasters as patrons of the art.