The perils of building Cold War consensus at the 1957 Moscow World Festival of Youth and Students

Abstract

This article examines the Cold War meanings of the Moscow Festival of Youth and Students that attracted thirty thousand attendees in June of 1957. It argues that this festival reflected a pivotal moment in the Cold War where the Soviet leadership embraced the rising importance of culture and youth in their struggle for global consensus. It contends that while the Soviet leadership endeavored to use the festival as a vehicle for the projection of a revised, free, and peaceful Soviet populace, both the western press and the delegates themselves took actions that complicated the meanings of the festival and in turn, complicated the meanings of the cultural Cold War for domestic and international audiences alike.

Notes

Margaret Peacock has been an Assistant Professor of Russian History at the University of Alabama since 2009. She obtained her doctorate at the University of Texas and has a manuscript that is nearing completion entitled, Cold War Kids: The Image of the Child and the Collapse of Cold War Consensus, 1945–1968.

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 [2] Patrick Major and Rana Mitter, Across the Blocs: Cold War Cultural and Social History (London; Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2004), vi; Penny Von Eschen, ‘Jazz, Race, and Empire in the Cold War,’ in Here, There and Everywhere: The Foreign Politics of American Popular Culture, ed. Wagnleitner Reinhold and Elaine Tyler May (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2000); Penny M. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Kenneth Alan Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower's Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 2006); Naima Prevots, Dance for Export: Cultural Diplomacy and the Cold War, Studies in Dance History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998).

 [3] Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932 (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2000), 2. Also see Lynn Mally, Culture of the Future: The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 2. Elizabeth Wood, The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia, Indiana-Michigan Series in Russian and East European Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 13.

 [4] Catriona Kelly, Children's World: Growing up in Russia, 1890–1991 (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2007).

 [5] These terms are borrowed from two seminal works in Cold War history, both of which describe long-held beliefs on both sides of the Iron Curtain that the Soviet Union and the United States were under siege from outside aggression. Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (New York, NY: BasicBooks, 1995), 13; Vojtech Mastny, The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 6.

 [6] Christian Appy, ed. Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945–1966 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000); Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1997); Stephen Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); Shawn J. Parry-Giles, The Rhetorical Presidency, Propaganda, and the Cold War, 1945–1955, Praeger Series in Presidential Studies, (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002).

 [7] Prevots argues that ‘Stalin's Death had also brought about an increase in cultural diplomacy on the part of the Soviet Union; the amount of money spent on sending artists, writers, and performers to other countries escalated considerably’. Prevots, Dance for Export: Cultural Diplomacy and the Cold War, 12.

 [8] Frederick Charles Barghoorn, Soviet Foreign Propaganda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964), 36–38.

 [9] A. A. Fursenko and Timothy J. Naftali, Khrushchev's Cold War: The inside Story of an American Adversary, 1st ed. (New York: Norton, 2006), 23; V. M. Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev, The New Cold War History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 175; Martin Ebon, The Soviet Propaganda Machine (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987), 11; Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower's Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad, 56.

[10] Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev, 175.

[11] Susan Reid, ‘Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev’, Slavic Review 61, no. 2 (2002): 211. The term ‘external language’ is based on Donald Raleigh's work on emerging Soviet rhetoric during the Revolution. Donald Raleigh, ‘Languages of Power: How the Saratov Bolsheviks Imagined Their Enemies’, Slavic Review 57, no. 2 (1998): 320.

[12] Andrei Loskutov and Peter Tempest, The World Shall Not Be Blown Up!: Soviet Youth and the Peace Movement (Moscow: Novosti Press Agency Pub. House, 1983), 16.

[13] Gossudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiskogo Federatsii (GARF) f. 6903, op. 23, d. 171, l. 43.

[14] On 13 June 1950 Moscow Radio sent letters to Earnest Hemingway and Fidel Castro asking them to produce congratulatory broadcasts for a ‘radio event’ that would mark the International Day of Youth a week later. Castro agreed. Hemingway did not. GARF f. 6903, op. 2, d. 272, l. 21–27. On the International Day of Youth in the Struggle against Communism see GARF f. 9540. Op. 1, d. 34, l. 13.

[15] RGASPI f. 3, op. 15, d. 1, l. 24.

[16] RGASPI f. 3, op. 15, d. 1 l. 20.

[17] Direktiv Komsomola, 27 March, 1957, RGASPI f. 3, op. 15, d. 8, l. 46.

[18] ‘Moscow Readies Youths as Hosts’, The New York Times, 28 May 1957, 9.

[19] B. Shikits, ‘Postanovlenie TsK KPSS o xode podgotovki upravedenii VI Vsemirnogo Festivalia Molodezhi i Studentov v gor. Moskve. Proekt.’ 16 April 1957, RGASPI, f. 3, op. 15, d. 1, l. 38.

[20] V. Ivanova, ‘Predsedatelia komiteta molodezhnykh organizatsii SSSR, Sekretno’, 16 August 1957, RGASPI, f. 3, op. 15, d. 8, l. 45

[21] World Federation of Democratic Youth, The Vith World Festival of Youth and Students for Peace and Friendship, Moscow, July 28th–August 11th 1957 (n.p.: World Federation of Democratic Youth, 1957), 29–49.

[22] ‘Poslednoe Zaiavlenie’, 11 August 1957, RGASPI f. 3, op. 15, d. 23, l. 7.

[23] V. Gavrilov, ‘Zapis becedy s organizatorom molodezhnogo otdela partii Natsional'nyi Kongress Indii Parikkhom’, 16 August 1957, RGASPI, f. 3, op. 15, d. 8, l. 72.

[24] ‘Zapis Becedy’, 11 August 1957, RGASPI, f. 3, op. 15, d. 23, l. 7.

[25] William Jordan, ‘Gala Parade Opens Moscow Youth Fete’, The New York Times, 29 July 1957, 1.

[26] William Jordan, ‘Gala Parade Opens Moscow Youth Fete’, The New York Times, Jul 29 1957, 1

[27] ‘Celebrations at the Sixth World Festival in Moscow,’ The News Chronicle, 7 August 1957, 4.

[28] Cited in Institute for International Youth Affairs., Courtship of Young Minds; a Case Study of the Moscow Youth Festival (New York, 1959), 19.

[29] For more on the revised vision of the ‘new Soviet man’ under Stalin, see Jay Bergman, ‘Valerii Chkalov: Soviet Pilot as New Soviet Man’, Journal of Contemporary History 33, no. 1 (1998); Lilya Kaganovsky, ‘How the Soviet Man Was (Un)Made’, Slavic Review 63, no. 3 (2004).

[30] Arnold Beichman, ‘Soviets Pull “Fourth Lever” in Youth Festival’, The Christian Science Monitor, 8 April 1957, 3.

[31] , ‘Polyglot Youths in Moscow Debate’, The New York Times, 2 August 1957, 4.

[32] , ‘Polyglot Youths in Moscow Debate’, The New York Times, Aug 2 1957, 4

[33] , ‘Polyglot Youths in Moscow Debate’, The New York Times, Aug 2 1957, 4, ‘Voices of America in Moscow’, The New York Times, 11 August 1957, 169.

[34] ‘U.S. Students “Play Hooky” at Moscow’, The Christian Science Monitor, 3 August 1957, 1.

[35] Jean White, ‘Student Tells of Red Festival’, The Washington Post and Times Herald, 17 August 1957, A5.

[36] Mumford died on 23 December 1993. As an academic he would become an expert on Tibetan and Himalayan ethnography.

[37] ‘Soviet Paper Gibes at Student’, The New York Times, 11 August 1957, 2.

[38] ‘Youth Festival Ends; Many Going to China’, The Washington Post and Times Herald, 12 August 1957, A1.

[39] R. Vyshinskii O. Borbabyn, G. Grigorian, I. Efremova, V. Popov, Vi Vsemirnyi Festival' Molodezhi i Studentov: Sbornik Materialov (Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia, 1958); Molodaia Gvardiia, Prazdnik Mira i Druzhby (Moscow: Tsk VKLSM ‘Molodaia Gvardiia’, 1958).

[40] Jack Lotto, ‘Pro-Reds Recruit U.S. Youths to Attend “Festival” in Moscow’, The Washington Post and Times Herald, 19 July 1957, A6. The State Department did ban the delegates from going on to China from the Moscow Festival. Twenty delegates went on to China, nonetheless, despite the risk of losing the passports.

[41] ‘U.S. Youth Groups Spurn Soviet Bid’, The New York Times, 25 May 1957, 10.

[42] Erwin Canham, ‘The Editor and the News’, The Christian Science Monitor, 22 July 1957, 9.

[43] ‘Forbidden Fruit’, The Washington Post and Times Herald, 14 August 1957, A8.

[44] ‘Chink in the Curtain’, The Washington Post and Times Herald, 22 July 1957, A8.

[45] Anthony Quainton, ‘Mosow in Retrospect’, The Washington Post and Times Herald, 4 September 1957, A12.

[46] ‘The Cost of Timidity’, The Washington Post and Times Herald, 17 August 1957, A6.

[47] B. Shikits, ‘Postanovlenie TsK KPSS o xode podgotovki upravedenii VI Vsemirnogo Festivalia Molodezhi i Studentov. Moskve. Proekt’, RGASPI, f. 3, op. 15, d. 1, 39.

[48] ‘Razbiasnitel'naia Rabota sredi naseleniia i molodezhi v cviazi s provedeniem VI Vsemirnogo Festivalia Molodezhi I Studentov: Sekretno’, RGASPI, f. 3, op. 15, d. 8, l. 18.

[49] Dudorov, ‘Plan obespecheniia okhrany obshchestvennogo poriadka: Sekretno’, 22 May 1957, RGASPI, f. 3, op. 15, d. 43, l. 24.

[50] Dudorov, ‘Plan obespecheniia okhrany obshchestvennogo poriadka: Sekretno’, May 22, 1957, RGASPI, f. 3, op. 15, d. 43 l. 25.

[51] N. Bodrodnikov, ‘Analiz festivalia TsK KPSS’, 29 August 1957, RGASPI f. 3, op. 15, d. 2, l. 133

[52] N. Bodrodnikov, ‘Analiz festivalia TsK KPSS’, August 29. 1957, RGASPI f. 3, op. 15, d. 2 l. 132.

[53] ‘Poslednoe Zaiavlenie’, 11 August 1957, RGASPI f. 3, op. 15, d. 23, l. 7.

[54] N. Bodrodnikov, ‘Analiz festivalia TsK KPSS’, 29 August 1957, RGASPI f. 3, op. 15, d. 2, l. 108.