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The CIA Battled the Kremlin with Books and Movies
- rdtsc 12y agoAnd KGB battled back with disinformation -- fake news stories such as "USA created AIDS": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_INFEKTION http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_INFEKTION I remember hearing it from relatives and friends growing up.
- paganel 12y agoThis article about how CIA supported (with money) modern American artists just after WW2 was posted on HN before, but here it is: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-w... > 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 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 http://www.allworldwars.com/image/008/SovietPictures065.jpg ("The last letter") just gave me instant, huge goose-bumps.
- blumkvist 12y agoSoviets tried to keep to common people away from culture. Culture is for smart people (it makes you think). Smart people don't like communism. The few exceptions were, of course, artists whose creations were commissioned by the CPSU to support their agenda.
- jacquesm 12y agoSee: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_realism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_realism
- kiiski 12y agoAccording to wikipedia there seem to have been times when artists had more freedom too. And it doesn't seem accurate to say that "the few exceptions ... were commissioned by the CPSU", as the artist - who were not few - seem to have had freedom to do their own thing within the limits of socialist realism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_art 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.
- wtbob 12y agoAnd the KGB was funding the counterculture movement in order to destabilise the West.