The Foreign Service Journal, December 2011

44 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 1 items and engaged in spirited con- versations with Soviet visitors. For most Russians, it was their first and only opportunity to speak with an American. Cinema Verité Vladimir Lenin described cin- ema as the most important art, but he could not have foreseen the in- fluence that foreign films would have on the Soviet public. The cultural agreement provided for exchange of mo- tion pictures through commercial channels, and over the life of the agreement four or five American films were purchased by the Soviets each year from the major Hol- lywood studios. Most were comedies, adventures and musicals that met the interests of Soviet audiences. Among the more popular were “Some Like it Hot,” “The Apartment,” “The Chase” and “Tootsie.” But they were much more than entertainment. Au- diences carefully watched the characters in the films and their homes, stores, streets, clothes and cars. When re- frigerators were opened in American films, they were full of food. Such details were very revealing for Soviet audiences. Films screened by the Soviet authorities but not deemed fit for purchase still reached key audiences: high officials and their spouses and other privileged Soviets — scientists, journalists, writers — who saw the films at “members only” clubs. Rocking the Boat Rock ’n’ roll and jazz also helped open up the Soviet Union. But did they, as many Russians claim, play a role in ending Soviet ideology? To answer that question, we need to go back to the Sixth World Youth Festival, held in Moscow in 1957. When the Soviet Union made plans to host the festi- val, its intent was to demonstrate the changes that had taken place since Stalin’s death four years earlier. Pre- vious festivals had been held in other countries where they were well-managed by local communists and pro- duced propaganda successes. The results of the Moscow festival, however, were quite different, with unintended consequences. The tens of thousands of Soviet youth who attended quickly adopted the styles of their West- ern peers, and the Soviet Union would never again be the same. For two weeks in July and Au- gust 1957, 34,000 foreign and 60,000 Soviet delegates came to Moscow for what Max Frankel of the New York Times described in an Aug. 12, 1957, report as “...a dizzying round of games, confer- ences, parties and carnivals.” Some five million Moscow residents and thousands of other Soviet citizens witnessed these events. Also attending was a British delegation of more than 1,600, and some 160 Americans of various political per- suasions who had come against the misguided advice of the State Department. “There is no doubt,” reported Frankel, “that the total effect of the festival pleased the Soviet government. It has been armed with months’ worth of propaganda about the friendship and fellowship demonstrated in Moscow by the visitors.” But seeds of protest were planted that would plague the Soviets in future years. As Frankel wrote, “There is erratic debate, polyglot conversation and heated argument everywhere as Soviet youth surrounded foreign visitors and peppered them with questions about their home countries and lifestyles.” Along with jazz groups from Eastern and Western Eu- rope, there were also a few of the early rock ’n’ roll groups from Britain with their electric guitars. Such music was unknown in the Soviet Union, and Russians were sur- prised when it took the festival by storm and withstood later efforts to stem the tide, with devastating conse- quences for Soviet ideologists. During the 1960s and 1970s, the music of the Beatles swept the Soviet Union. As Pavel Palazchenko, Gor- bachev’s aide, put it: “We knew their songs by heart. In the dusky years of the Brezhnev regime they were not only a source of musical relief. They helped us create a world of our own, a world different from the dull and senseless ideological liturgy that increasingly reminded one of Stalinism. ... The Beatles were our quiet way of re- jecting ‘the system’ while conforming to most of its de- mands.” Rock, moreover, taught Russians to speak more freely, to express their innermost thoughts, as singers Vladimir Vysotsky and Bulat Okudzhava, and poets Andrei Vozne- sensky and Yevgeny Yevtushenko, had done a generation F OCUS The cost of those exchanges was minuscule in comparison with U.S. expenditures for defense and intelligence over the same period.