Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America
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If its Polish organizers had hoped to use the meeting as a way of maintaining their traditional contacts with both the West and Russia, they were bitterly disappointed. Their interests, in a pattern that would be frequently repeated in the history of the WPC, proved subordinate to the desires of the Soviet delegation. “They’ve screwed up my congress,” fumed Jerzy Borejsza, a Jewish Polish intellectual whose idea had led to the conference. “They warned me that ‘We have to say difficult things … to not be conciliatory’ … but [Fadeyev’s speech]? No one expected that.” Two years later, Borejsza was charged with being “pro-Western” and was stripped of all political responsibilities.18
Some of the European Communists rolled their eyes at Russian dogmatism. After Fadeyev’s speech, the Polish organizers tried to get new orders from Moscow, and some moderation in tone followed, but it did little to calm those who had hoped for a peace based more on mutual understanding than on the extinction of bourgeois culture. Liberals and socialist colleagues were less forgiving. Bryn Hovde, a U.S. delegate who had been chief of the Division of Cultural Cooperation in the U.S. Department of State from 1944 to 1945, expressed dismay that Fadeyev’s approach seemed to presume the impossibility of peace between the Soviet Union and the United States. If the United States could be faulted for racial and religious prejudice, inequality, and civil rights violations, he argued, then the USSR suffered morally for its attempts to control opinion and expression, placing science and art under one ideology, for the power of its secret police, and for the existence of labor camps for political prisoners. “If made by a responsible member of a government,” Hovde said, “[Fadeyev’s] was the kind of speech that would be made to give propaganda-justification to a premeditated military attack.” Julian Huxley, the director general of UNESCO, the UN organization tasked with fostering peace and mutual understanding through science and culture, was so upset by the Russian’s performance that he called for the abandonment of recriminations. When he requested that Russian artists and scientists be allowed to join international professional societies, another Russian delegate assured him that “all artistic questions were talked out to the mutual satisfaction of Russian artists and the Russian people” so that no other opinion was necessary. “Let it be so in all lands,” the Russian said, “so that national cultures may flourish without the influence of alien ways.” Huxley, deeply disappointed, departed the congress quietly.19
Few Latin American delegates could have attended the Wrocław Congress, but there were contingents from Brazil (including the novelist Jorge Amado and the architect Oscar Niemeyer, both members of Brazil’s Communist Party), as well as a smaller group traveling from Mexico that consisted mostly of Spanish Republicans in exile. Amado’s speech invoked his identity as a symbol of Latin American nations wounded by anti-Communist violence. He showed how the rhetoric of cosmopolitanism would be adapted in the context of the Americas, connecting the defense of Brazil’s cultural sovereignty to an attack on U.S. imperialism. “Along with the liquidation of our economy, of our industry and of our freedom,” he said in his speech, “imperialism aspires to accomplish the liquidation of Brazil’s burgeoning young culture which traditionally is [pacifist]. And this culture is still further threatened by the cosmopolite propaganda of the United States because this cosmopolitism prepares ideologically for war.”20 Like the Western Europeans who used the language of cosmopolitanism to express anxieties about American dominance, Amado situated Brazilian anticosmopolitanism in a cultural anti-imperialism that had deep resonance in the thinking of much of both the Left and the Right: he was practicing Communist cultural criticism as a combination of Latin American nationalism, indigenism, and a kind of proto–Third Worldism. Amado also put the persecution of Communists at the center of the struggle for peace by denouncing the persecution of the “conscience and voice of the Chilean people,” Pablo Neruda, then still in hiding. Pablo Picasso, who had joined the French Communist Party in 1944, flew in an airplane for the first time in his life to attend the Wrocław congress and articulated the same point, helping make the absent Neruda’s case a cause célèbre and the subject of one of the congress’s concluding resolutions.21
Amado’s remarks might serve as a platform from which to observe the widening gulf between the Cominform’s emphasis on national cultural sovereignty and the proletarian internationalism of Marx and Engels. But the defense of national cultures was hardly a new phenomenon. Left-wing culture had often looked to folk traditions, which it considered the music and the language of the oppressed, for inspiration and revival. It was also the logical extension of long-standing internal Soviet cultural policy to the rest of the world. In the late 1930s the world of Soviet arts and letters had insisted on conformity, but not conformity to Communism so much as to the old non-Communist cultural intelligentsia and the classics of Russian artistic achievement. Soviet cultural policies served nationalist needs before those of internationalism. It was the “low” culture of the United States—“bourgeois barbarism”—that, in seeking new markets, was more likely to embrace its international character in this period. But the “two cultural camps” message of the Wrocław congress had defined the struggle for peace as anti-imperialist and anti-American, not as conciliation. The artists affiliated with the WPC would wield defense of national culture as a political weapon and would criticize U.S. “cultural imperialism” long before that phrase gained widespread currency.22
After the Wrocław congress, organizing continued. In the United States, progressive groups who rejected the bipartisan politics of anti-Communism convened the Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace, which met on 25–27 March 1949 at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. The U.S. State Department worried about the propaganda effect of letting the Waldorf conference take place as planned, but it also worried that denying visas to foreign delegates would be perceived as opposition to freedom and peace and settled on a compromise that pleased no one. It denied visas to nearly all the foreign delegations except those from the Soviet bloc (the Latin American delegates, for example, were rejected). This decision made composer Dmitri Shostakovich one of the most prominent foreign figures allowed to attend, and his case serves to illustrate the ugly position of those drafted unwillingly into the Cultural Cold War.23
In the 1930s Shostakovich had been subjected to withering official criticism of his “formalism” and had seen his compositions prohibited. For a time he wrote simpler, folkloric and heroic themes compatible with socialist realism, which found acceptance during the war. But in February 1948, as Zhdanov once again gathered power in the state’s cultural apparatus, Shostakovich was rebranded a formalist and a cosmopolitan, and many of his works were again banned. In Western Europe and the United States, Shostakovich remained a well-known and well-regarded figure. Out of favor in the Soviet Union, he was nonetheless called on by Stalin himself to go to New York to defend the very policies of which he was a victim. His speech was a dreary exercise in official conformity, written for him by handlers and delivered in a nervous voice, finished only by his translator. He spoke of “formalism” as antidemocratic, pessimistic, degenerate, cosmopolitan, and lacking a national and popular base. He cited Igor Stravinsky (then living in the United States) as a once-promising but now “reactionary” musician who discounted the masses. He insincerely credited party criticism for helping him avoid “los[ing] contact with the people” and helping his music embody “human progressive life-giving ideas.”24
The Waldorf conference also saw the beginning of an organized counterattack against Soviet cultural policy. Sidney Hook, the New York University philosopher who had arranged for Trotsky’s hearings in Mexico and had formed the Committee for Cultural Freedom in 1939, set about arranging a counterconference to the Waldorf gathering. In touch with as many figures from his long-defunct committee as he could reach, Hook formed the Ad Hoc Committee for Intellectual Freedom, holding counterdemonstrations, sending members to challenge the speakers at the Waldorf conference, issuing press rel
eases objecting to the false premises under which the Waldorf conference was being convened, and trying to get non-Communists who had pledged to attend to either back out or pressure the sponsors to include views critical of the Soviet Union.
The composer Nicholas Nabokov, a member of Hook’s group, confronted Shostakovich at the end of his speech, asking whether he agreed with Pravda’s attacks on Stravinsky and other “formalist” composers. Shostakovich had to lie, stating his full agreement with Pravda. Nabokov had what he wanted: an affirmation of Shostakovich’s lack of freedom and an indictment of the character of Communism’s approach to art and ideology. That it came at the expense of Shostakovich’s difficult position was of little consequence. Only one of the two men was in any danger for what he said, and that, perhaps, was the point. Years later, at a press conference in Edinburgh in 1962, a journalist asked Shostakovich whether the Communist Party’s criticisms had always helped him, and he again answered in the affirmative. He then turned to a companion and said: “Son of a bitch! Doesn’t he know he shouldn’t ask me such questions—what can I possibly say?” Shostakovich did what he had to do to exist within the system in which he lived, and that meant cooperating with many more peace activities. He held in contempt those artists who volunteered their time and prestige on behalf of peace campaigns in the West. He called Pablo Picasso a “viper.” In a private conversation Shostakovich said, “You understand that I’m in a prison and that I fear for my children and myself, but [Picasso]—he’s free, he doesn’t have to lie!”25
Several branches of the U.S. government, including the CIA, judged Hook’s efforts a successful form of “citizen” action against Communism. Since the World Congress of Partisans for Peace was gathering the next month in Paris, the CIA sponsored a counterdemonstration on Hook’s model organized by the French socialist David Rousset. (That November, Rousset called for an investigation into Soviet slave labor camps; when the Communist Pierre Daix accused him of falsifying documents, he sued for libel, creating a trial that roiled the French intellectual scene and put the honesty of French Communists on trial. Rousset was awarded damages in 1951.) Hook himself was flown in for the occasion but found the anti-American exhortations of many of the delegates to the counterdemonstration excessive. Frank Wisner, the head of the covert-action arm of the CIA, subsequently worried that a permanent organization to counterbalance the peace movement would degenerate “into a nuts folly of miscellaneous goats and monkeys whose antics would completely discredit the work and statements of the serious and responsible liberals.” But CIA sponsorship made possible the convocation of a rival gathering, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, in West Berlin in 1950, and its subsequent transformation into the U.S.’s own instrument in the Cultural Cold War, an antitotalitarian rival to the WPC.26
The Paris meeting of the Partisans of Peace elected a permanent committee consisting principally of French Communists, who met regularly with representatives from Moscow, which provided the bulk of the financing for the organization. Fadeyev himself was responsible for communication between the committee and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and he kept Stalin informed and listened to his suggestions for new directions for the organization. In November 1949 the Cominform declared the struggle for peace and against imperialist aggression the most important task of the Communist movement worldwide. Stalin himself decided to name the newspaper of the Cominform For a Lasting Peace, for a People’s Democracy, hoping to make the Western press use that phrase every time it cited the paper. The atomic scientist and Communist Frédéric Joliot-Curie became the head of the World Peace Council, the body created in 1950 as the lasting institutional embodiment of the peace movement. In 1949 Joliot-Curie had traveled to the Soviet Union to coordinate new plans for the WPC, leading to its most famous effort, the mass-signature campaign known as the Stockholm Appeal.27
The Stockholm Appeal called for placing atomic weapons under international control, declared the first use of nuclear weapons a “crime against humanity,” and called on “all men and women of good will [throughout] the world to sign.” (It also called for the recognition of the Soviet Union’s right to Eastern Europe as its legitimate sphere of influence.) Signatures were collected around the world, although campaigns to expose the appeal as a “Communist trick” limited its numbers largely to those living in Communist countries (the number of signatures submitted from Bulgaria was said to have exceeded the country’s population) and members of Communist organizations in the West. Although the Stockholm Appeal called for placing atomic weapons under international control at the moment when the United States held a significant nuclear advantage, the WPC’s campaigns were not for “peace” understood as the absence of conflict. The name “Partisans of Peace,” a phrase that was used frequently to describe sympathizers and members of the WPC, evoked the Communist-led resistance movements—many of them irregular, guerrilla forces—to Nazi occupation of Europe. The WPC explicitly rejected “bourgeois” or “passive pacifism,” which it saw as the failed legacy of earlier antiwar movements that had been unable to stop two world conflagrations. The French Resistance could hardly be faulted for opposing the Nazis with violence; and so too, struggles for national liberation against imperialism and colonialism would be celebrated by the WPC as progressive actions to—in its oft-repeated words—“impose peace” on behalf of the people.28
Nor was the WPC antiwar: it opposed “wars of oppression,” defined as wars against Communist interests. It celebrated the victory of Communist forces in China and the struggle of Greek Communists in that country’s civil war. It proved not to be antinuclear either; it feted the Soviet bomb as beneficial to mankind, as opposed to the warlike bombs of the United States. (In the United States, anti-Communist thinkers like James Burnham made the same argument, but with the countries reversed.) Although not all the members of the WPC were Communists, to deny that the Soviet Union was playing a “progressive” role in world politics was the single step that it took to be labeled a warmonger; when Marshall Tito of Yugoslavia split with the Soviet Union, Soviet predominance assured that Yugoslavia was quickly labeled an “enemy of peace” and expelled. In countries with Communist governments, the theme of “fighting to defend peace” became central to daily life and the subject of campaigns aimed at workers and children. In 1950 Hungary, for instance, began to require workers to commit part of their yearly salary to the purchase of state-issued “peace bonds,” revenue from which was substantially used for rearmament in preparation for war with imperialism and Yugoslavia.29
That same year the WPC blamed the outbreak of the Korean War on the United States, and during the war the international apparatus and press of the WPC were instrumental in spreading the allegation that the United States had engaged in bacteriological warfare in North Korea. In 1956, when the Soviet army crushed the Hungarian revolution, national peace councils were divided and could not issue a clear statement of this as a violation of peaceful principles, a situation that led to some defections but an institutional victory for the Soviet position. This failure to confront the events of the Hungarian revolution eventually discredited the WPC in the minds of many of its Western European supporters, particularly those associated with Christian peace groups.30
The partiality of the rhetoric of the Partisans of Peace helped convince Western governments that the WPC could not be trusted as a legitimate participant in public debate. If it is true that the Soviet-aligned peace movement marked the start of the official Cultural Cold War, its campaigns provoked repression in two distinct ways. Within the Soviet bloc, the campaign for peace justified repression in the name of anti-imperialism and anticosmopolitanism. In the West, efforts to suppress peace propaganda were justified in the name of anti-Communism. In both settings the WPC and its connection to the Soviet Union helped consolidate new limits on permissible opinion; its decreasing appeal as the 1950s went on made it clear that nothing like a popular front among intellectuals would be created in the atmosphere of the Cold War.
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nbsp; In Latin America, as in the rest of the world, the Partisans of Peace campaigns were limited in scope to the sympathies of the Communist parties and those who objected to the consequences of those parties’ demonization and marginalization: the anti-anti-Communists. For artists who aligned themselves with the WPC, like Neruda, Amado, and Diego Rivera, producing works of art that accorded with the needs of pro-Soviet and anticosmopolitan campaigns became imperative. Although it is tempting to see these artists as ceding power over their craft to party officials and commissars, the moral calculus they faced was different from that of those who lived in the Soviet Union. In the Americas there was no threat that Communists would monopolize government power, and the great issue was the strength of “reaction” in their countries, which would use potential self-criticism from “progressive” intellectuals as justification for further repression of the Communist movement. If, for Shostakovich in the Soviet Union, artistic restrictions really did metaphorically resemble a straitjacket, then the sartorial reference for those who accepted such rules voluntarily was, instead, a uniform. A uniform serves both to identify its wearer’s role and to fix for the wearer a set of responsibilities to authority and the institution he or she represents. The uniform of the Partisans of Peace conferred a beguiling sense of righteousness and responsibility. A commitment to social change made the idea of intellectual independence a luxury. Men and women aligned themselves with the WPC as an expression of dissatisfaction with the results of capitalism and imperialism. The Soviet Union, even when they had traveled to it and had knowledge of it, remained more important as a symbol than as a concrete reality, which meant that they would have to deny knowledge of its crimes.