The Culture of Cold War

Films, books, and other cultural productions also promoted the cold war even when they conveyed an antiwar message. Books like George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) were claimed by both sides in the cold war as supporting their position. Ray Bradbury’s popular Fahrenheit 451 (1953), whose title refers to the temperature at which books would burn, condemned restrictions on intellectual freedom on both sides of the cold war divide. In the USSR, official writers churned out spy stories, and espionage novels topped best-seller lists in the West. Casino Royale (1953), by the British author Ian Fleming, introduced the fictional British intelligence agent James Bond, who tested his wit and physical prowess against Communist and other political villains. So popular were such programs that Soviet pilots would not take off for flights when the work of Yulian Simyonov, the Russian counterpart of Ian Fleming, was playing on radio or television. Reports, fictional and real, of Soviet- and U.S.-bloc characters facing one another down became part of everyday life.

High culture also operated in a cold war climate. Europe’s major cities rebuilt their war-ravaged opera houses and museums, and both sides tried to win the cold war by pouring vast sums of money into high culture. As leadership of the art world passed to the United States, art became part of the cold war. Abstract expressionists such as American artist Jackson Pollock produced nonrepresentational works by dripping and spattering paint; they also spoke of the importance of the artist’s self-discovery in the process of painting. “If I stretch my arms next to the rest of myself and wonder where my fingers are, that is all the space I need as a painter,” commented Dutch-born artist Willem de Kooning on his relationship with his canvas. Said to exemplify Western freedom, such painters were awarded commissions at the secret direction of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The USSR more openly promoted an official Communist culture. When a show of abstract art like Pollock’s opened in the Soviet Union, Khrushchev yelled that it was “dog shit.” Pro-Soviet critics in western Europe saw U.S.-style abstract art as “an infantile sickness” and supported socialist realist art with “human content,” showing the condition of the workers and the oppressed races in the United States. The Italian filmmakers Roberto Rossellini, in Open City (1945), and Vittorio De Sica, in The Bicycle Thief (1948), developed the neorealist technique that challenged lush Hollywood-style sets and costumes by using ordinary characters living in devastated, impoverished cities. By depicting stark conditions, neorealist directors conveyed their distance both from middle-class prosperity and from fascist bombast. “We are in rags? Let’s show everyone our rags,” said one Italian director. Many of these left-leaning directors associated support for the suffering masses with the Communist cause, while on the pro-American side, the film Doctor Zhivago became a hit celebrating individualism and condemning the Communist way of life. Overtly or covertly, the cold war affected virtually all aspects of cultural life.