The CIA Battled the Kremlin with Books and Movies
medium.com
medium.com
> The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.
For the life of me I still cannot understand how come some of these post-WW2 Soviet paintings (http://www.allworldwars.com/Soviet%20War%20Paintings.html) have not achieved the same cultural high-status (if not the same insane high prices) as the works of Pollock or Rothko. For example this painting: http://www.allworldwars.com/image/008/SovietPictures065.jpg ("The last letter") just gave me instant, huge goose-bumps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_art
> However, art exhibitions of 1935–1960 disprove the claims that artistic life of the period was suppressed by the ideology and artists submitted entirely to what was then called ‘social order’. A great number of landscapes, portraits, genre paintings and studies exhibited at the time pursued purely technical purposes and were thus free from any ideology. Thematic painting was also approached in a similar way
> ...
> The death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, and Nikita Khrushchev's Thaw, paved the way for a wave of liberalization in the arts throughout the Soviet Union. Although no official change in policy took place, artists began to feel free to experiment in their work, with considerably less fear of repercussions than during the Stalinist period.
> ...
> The most infamous incident regarding nonconformist artists in the former Soviet Union was the 1974 Bulldozer Exhibition, which took place in a park just outside of Moscow, and included work by such artists as Oscar Rabin, Komar and Melamid, Alexandr Zhdanov, Nikolai Smoliakov and Leonid Sokov. The artists involved had written to the authorities for permission to hold the exhibition but received no answer to their request. They decided to go ahead with the exhibition anyway, which consisted solely of unofficial works of art that did not fit into the rubric of Socialist Realism. The KGB put an end to the exhibition just hours after it opened by bringing in bulldozers to completely destroy all of the artworks present. Fortunately for the artists, the foreign press had been there to witness the event. The world-wide coverage of it forced the authorities to permit an exhibition of Nonconformist Art two weeks later in Izmailovsky Park in Moscow.
> ...
> By the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev's policies of Perestroika and Glasnost made it virtually impossible for the authorities to place restrictions on artists or their freedom of expression. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the new market economy enabled the development of a gallery system, which meant that artists no longer had to be employed by the state, and could create work according to their own tastes, as well as the tastes of their private patrons. Consequently, after around 1986 the phenomenon of Nonconformist Art in the Soviet Union ceased to exist.
>The death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, and Nikita Khrushchev's Thaw, paved the way for a wave of liberalization in the arts throughout the Soviet Union. Although no official change in policy took place, artists began to feel free to experiment in their work, with considerably less fear of repercussions than during the Stalinist period.
Artists felt considerably less fear of being prosecuted? Prosecuted because they painted something? Paintings are dangerous? I thought guns were dangerous. Who fears paintings? Such a silly thing to fear.
Gorbachov's goal was to end the USSR, so no surprise his first reforms were in the cultural realm.
Things were bad enough with visual arts, but very few people care about visual arts or literature. If you deny those people completely, you would get more trouble than if you just let them do their thing in solitude and simply spy on them and take care of the most dangerous ones. Let the hippies have just a little bit of freedom, just keep the commoners away. That's the equilibrium you want to keep, if you desire a long utilitarian rule.
The really atrocious deeds were done in performance arts like cinematography and music. Everything had to go through a censor. Almost every movie had to support the class struggle or put the party in a good light. Commons people don't stare at paintings. They watch films. They listen to music. In my country, artists were repressed because they refused to sing praises to the communist party. Their relatives thrown in jail. Their kids were refused higher education. Obedient artists were promoted (and put on a piedestal), even though they were of a lesser talent.
This depends on your definition of culture.
I was born in 80th and grew up throug 90th in Russia. I grew mostly on american films and western games. They showed me how to kill, cheat and hate. Recently I've watched some of USSR movies and I was shocked. There is realy not too much of them. But there is very little politics, but so much humanity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_INFEKTION
I remember hearing it from relatives and friends growing up.