The Soviet Cultural Offensive

The Role of Cultural Diplomacy in Soviet Foreign Policy

Frederick Charles Barghoorn

• Publisher: Barakaldo Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781839747250
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique russe

IMPORTANT techniques of Soviet foreign policy still remain almost unexamined. One of these is the complex amalgam of propaganda, deception, and sometimes mutually profitable transactions with non-Soviet states that is herein described as Cultural Diplomacy. Soviet Cultural Diplomacy represents what from a non-communist point of view usually seems to be a perversion of cultural exchange and intercultural communication.This is an effort to project to all men an image of the Soviet way of life calculated to facilitate Soviet foreign policy objectives. It is accompanied by an equally massive effort to shield the Kremlin's subjects from harmful "alien" influences. It has almost nothing in common with democratic ideals of free intellectual communion. However, we live in an age when increased freedom of international communication, contacts, and travel is necessary for world welfare. Premier Khrushchev's cancellation of his invitation to President Eisenhower for a visit to Russia underscored Soviet determination to prevent even previously agreed upon contacts if they appeared to threaten, however indirectly, the Kremlin's absolute control over the thinking of the Soviet people. Nevertheless, there is every reason to believe that over the long run communists will make increasing use of the international propaganda procedures described in this study. While guarding against the perils inherent in communist duplicity, we should welcome the opportunities offered by exchanges of persons with Soviet Bloc countries to dissolve prejudices and facilitate whatever limited cooperation is possible between representatives of rival ways of life.

CHAPTER I—CULTURAL DIPLOMACY AND EAST-WEST RELATIONS

WITH the tactical flexibility and unity characteristic of tightly centralized organizations, the communist states have in recent years sought to turn to their own ends instruments of foreign policy which a few years ago even informed opinion in the democracies regarded as incompatible with the functioning of the closed society. Under the astute leadership of Nikita S. Khrushchev, the Kremlin partially succeeded in creating the impression that it had abandoned isolationism and chauvinism in favor of freedom of exchange and East-West contacts as a path toward the relaxation of international tensions and the fostering of peace between the communist and non-communist worlds. Governments and political movements which accept Moscow leadership followed suit, so that even the Mongolian People’s Republic, to mention one amazing example, invited foreign scholars, including Americans, to take part in a philological conference which was held in far-away Ulan-Bator in September 1959.

The Soviet “cultural offensive,” unleashed shortly after Stalin’s death, had assumed such proportions in the free world within a few years that the British and American governments set up new administrative machinery to deal with the problems which it posed. As of the summer of 1959, in several European countries and also in the United States a number of measures taken, both by governments and by private organizations, indicated that the quandary of coping with what in this book we shall call “Soviet cultural diplomacy” was perhaps beginning to be resolved. Two initiatives which seemed significant were the creation, by State Department Circular of June 15, 1959, of a Bureau of Intercultural Relations and the assignment to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow of a Counselor for Cultural Affairs, the first such appointment in a communist state.

Establishment of the abovementioned bureau climaxed a series of steps by which the executive branch of the American government put itself in a better position to fulfill its responsibilities in the international cultural field. Unfortunately, these administrative moves were not accompanied by corresponding Congressional support in terms either of money or encouragement. Some members of Congress, to be sure, did do a great deal to arouse public awareness of the vital significance of the cultural contest, such as Senator Hubert H. Humphrey’s speaking at the Third National Conference on Exchange of Persons at Washington, D.C., in January 1959 and his following with keen interest the background and events of the 1959 Vienna Youth Festival, the seventh of these vast Moscow-staged spectacles. Sometimes, however, even well-informed men like Senator Humphrey and other prominent figures, such as former Senator William Benton or the atomic scientist, Dr. Edward Teller, urged the adoption of ambitious projects for the political exploitation of cultural exchanges which, because they were impracticable in terms of available resources of money and personnel and were certain to impel the Kremlin further to intensify its obstructionism, seemed unlikely to be in the American national interest.

Private citizens interested in East-West exchanges have frequently displayed lack of sophistication about the problems inherent in transactions with totalitarian regimes.

As we had occasion to observe at the abovementioned Third National Conference on Exchange of Persons, Americans sometimes pass public judgments—in this case in the presence of Soviet diplomats, who took copious notes—which may jeopardize the careers of Soviet exchangees or increase the difficulty of obtaining the Soviet cooperation necessary for the success of even a modest exchange program. It is more than naïve to talk at such gatherings about alleged possibilities for “integrating Soviet students into American life” or to complain if Soviet citizens who have been guests in American homes and have told their American hosts how favorably impressed they were with their American experiences subsequently report to Soviet officials, or in the Soviet press, that they were invited only to “rich” homes, carefully selected to prevent their meeting “ordinary people.” Until the Kremlin’s attitude mellows considerably, Soviet exchangees will have to be careful about their public statements.

As Diana Trilling observed in the New Leader for February 2, 1959, Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Americans only too often entertain “the wishful hope that culture has the same autonomy...in the Communist countries as it does in the free world.” They refuse to see that the Soviet Union has “declared cultural war on us,” says Mrs. Trilling, and forget that in the field of intercultural relations “one must proceed with caution and acuteness, with the knowledge, indeed, that our lives are at stake.” One need not fully share Mrs. Trilling’s pessimism, but her warning that one cannot expect reciprocity and mutuality in cultural relations with Moscow deserves to be pondered.

Before seeking to identify, in the bulk of this chapter, the motives of Soviet cultural diplomacy, it will be useful, by way of background, to describe briefly the policies of major Western nations in the field of international cultural exchange.

France was the first great nation to embark on an extensive program of officially organized cultural relations. Beginning on a large scale in the second half of the nineteenth century with extensive religious, educational, and philanthropic works in the Near and Far East, this program was directed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Official efforts were supplemented by the activity of private agencies, still active in our day, such as the Alliance Française, which since 1883 has organized courses, schools, lectures, and gifts of books to encourage the teaching of the French language and to disseminate French culture beyond the frontiers of France.{1}

The flavor of the French effort—relatively modest in aims and yet at times ethnocentric and chauvinistic in tone—is suggested by an article on the Alliance Française which was published in 1886 in the Grande Encyclopedie. The article stated that the best way of “conquering” the natives of French colonies was by inculcating in them a love for the French language. It urged efforts to keep the language alive among Frenchmen living in foreign countries, as an offset to the excessively slow rate of increase of the French population at home. One is reminded of the significance attributed by patriotic Frenchmen to their country’s foreign cultural program by the satisfaction with its results which have been expressed, for example, in General Charles de Gaulle’s War Memoirs.

After World War I, the French effort was intensified to cope with formidable German competition. Some Germans, especially during the Hitler period, regarded French cultural policy as a highly sinister weapon. A Nazi study of French academic exchange with Denmark, for example, referred to the “universalist and at the same time imperialist” character of French cultural pressure abroad.{2} Both before and after World War I, Germany carried on a vigorous program of exchange of students and professors and also, particularly under the Nazis, attempted to utilize persons of German background resident abroad as instruments of German foreign policy.

The United Kingdom entered the field of cultural diplomacy in 1934 with the creation of the British Council, which was incorporated by royal charter in 1940. As “an officially created and subsidized body,” it began its activity with a grant from the Treasury of £5,000 in 1935; this had been increased to more than £100,000 by 1938. The official purpose of the Council was to “make British life and thought more widely known abroad, to encourage the study of the English language, and to render available abroad current British contributions to literature, science, or the fine arts.”{3} As of 1939, it was estimated that the Germans, in seeking to counter the financially modest but extremely astute British effort, were spending some £4,000,000 to £6,000,000 annually on propaganda, while France was spending about £1,200,000 and Italy nearly £1,000,000.{4}

By 1957 the British Council had at its disposal for the conduct of cultural propaganda an annual budget of over £3,000,000—a small sum by Soviet standards, but one which reflected the growing significance attributed to this instrument of international politics even by governments which had traditionally looked with disdain on such unconventional instruments of foreign policy as international broadcasting and large-scale cultural exchange.{5}

According to American officials interviewed, the Council apparently has at its disposal much larger funds than do the corresponding American governmental units, among which the International Educational Exchange Service of the Department of State and the same department’s East-West Contacts Staff are the most important. The Council is able to enter vigorously into actual operations, particularly in the private and semiprivate fields, while the official United States cultural agencies have usually been forced to keep their functions largely advisory and facilitative, except for the official Soviet-American exchanges in which they are directly involved.

The British Council operates on a wide front, as indicated by its table of organization, which includes committees on books, drama, fine arts, movies, law, and many other fields. Its chairman in 1957 was Sir David Kelly, a former British ambassador to Russia. On behalf of the Colonial Office, it is responsible for the non-academic welfare of colonial students in Britain. It sponsors and arranges visits from overseas of individuals and groups in various fields of cultural exchange. To it, rather than to the British foreign service, is entrusted the task of conducting British cultural diplomacy in all countries except Russia, where in 1959 a cultural attaché was appointed within the Moscow embassy, since the Council could not operate in the Soviet Union as it could in most parts of the world.

While it is outside the scope of this book to appraise the success of the British effort, it is not irrelevant to suggest that, particularly in India, but also in some other Commonwealth or colonial countries, not to mention the United States, the British have probably been the most successful practitioners of cultural diplomacy and have accomplished, considering the odds against them, more than the Russians. Certainly the prestige of the British in India—some ten years after that country’s achievement of independence from Britain—not to mention the dominant role of the English language and English political ideas, has been little short of astonishing.

To deal with the Soviet cultural offensive the British Council in May 1955 created a Soviet Relations Committee, headed by Christopher Mayhew, a labor member of Parliament.{6} The council, although autonomous, works closely with British governmental departments and agencies, such as the Foreign Office, the Colonial Office, the Commonwealth Relations Office, the British Information Service, and the Educational Interchange Council.

If one were to survey the overall British organization for cultural diplomacy, one would, of course, have to take into account a host of effective and closely coordinated semi-official and private activities, such as the Rhodes scholarship program, and to keep in mind the British tradition of close cooperation between Foreign Office, press, radio, universities, and business, which makes many an Englishman abroad a kind of volunteer ambassador.

The United States was laggard in entering the international cultural competition, in so far as governmental action is concerned. In 1938 a Division of Cultural Relations was established in the Department of State. Until 1943 its work was limited by Congressional appropriations to the Western Hemisphere. With the passage of the Fulbright Act in 1946, public funds became available to supplement the large sums which had traditionally been provided by foundations and other private sources to such organizations as the Institute of International Education to enable American students, both graduate and undergraduate, to study abroad. Money provided by private sources and, under the terms of the Fulbright Act and the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, from public funds has enabled the United States since World War II to maintain a program of exchange of students, professors, and experts, especially with the German Federal Republic and other European countries, which is far larger numerically than the comparable Soviet effort.

And, of course, if one compares the total American overseas involvement, public and private, with that of Russia, the latter seems almost negligible by comparison, at least in numbers. As the editorial in Life magazine for December 23, 1957, noted, “Outside the lands fully controlled by Communism, less than 5,000 Soviet citizens are at work.” In contrast, there were at the same period 580,000 United States civilians resident abroad—many of them, incidentally, at a standard of life which elicited some local envy—and hundreds of thousands of members of the armed forces stationed overseas.{7} On the other hand, the Soviet Union had at its disposal the apparatus of foreign communist parties. Hence, it could focus and channel its efforts in ways not available to the democracies. Increasingly, many Americans, and Europeans too, were coming to feel that the information programs of non-communist nations were not an adequate counter to the ideological pressures emanating from Moscow and Peking. There was a growing conviction that, while democratic societies could not and would not wish to tailor the truth to political ends, they should make a more vigorous effort to refute Soviet propaganda distortions and to achieve more effective communication with the people of communist-ruled lands.

In 1957 the East-West Contacts Staff was set up in the Department of State to develop and coordinate policies of the department applicable to exchanges between the United States and the countries of the Soviet bloc and to carry out arrangements for such exchanges.{8} In the same year the Soviet Union created, by setting up its State Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, an agency with status and functions roughly corresponding to the new American unit. The East-West Staff, headed by Ambassador William B. Lacey, negotiated, under date of January 27, 1958, a Soviet-American Exchange Agreement. The agreement, as we shall see, paved the way for a significant expansion of the exchanges which had been under way since 1954 and 1955.

The summer of 1959 witnessed some interesting additions to American organizational equipment for the conduct of East-West exchanges, especially in the private sector. With the 1958 Lacey-Zarubin agreement under renegotiation, and with tourist travel to Russia on the way to becoming big business—according to various reports from 10,000 to 15,000 Americans visited the U.S.S.R. in 1959 as against some 5,000 to 7,000 in 1958—the Governmental Affairs Institute of Washington, D.C., established an Information Center for American Travelers to Russia, “in response,” as the Institute’s announcement stated, “to a need expressed by many such visitors for essential background information on Soviet affairs and on the opportunities and limitations of tourist travel in Russia.” One also heard of such enterprises as publication by the Freedom Fund of a Russian-language guidebook to New York, for the benefit, reported the New York Times of July 17, 1959, of Russians in the city for the Soviet exhibition, or of literature for American travelers published by the East European Student and Youth Service of New York.

At the same time, the State Department and other interested government and private agencies, although still somewhat hampered by lack of adequate funds, improved their facilities and expanded their personnel to provide hospitality for the increasing flow of Soviet visitors to America by, for instance, appointing competent persons to serve as tour directors.

By mid-1959 it was clear that, while mistakes had been made and effort wasted by both sides, East-West exchanges had been mutually beneficial in a variety of ways. Certainly they had contributed greatly to Western, particularly American, knowledge of conditions behind an Iron Curtain which, though it still existed, was no longer an impassable barrier. Very likely the opportunities to establish or renew contact with reality which was afforded by the reopening of Russia had, as one of my colleagues said, saved Russian studies in America from sterility.

Both France and the United States, among the Western nations, had already, despite all obstacles, derived enormous benefit from a carefully conducted program of graduate-student exchange with the U.S.S.R. This program, in the case of France, began in 1954-1955 and, in that of the United States, by the summer of 1959 had run its first full year, within the framework of the Soviet-American Exchange Agreement of Ja...