Ballet in the Cold War: A Soviet-American Exchange, by Anne Searcy

Abstract

Over the past two decades, one of the most vibrant subfields in the history of US foreign relations, as well as international history more broadly, has been the study of ‘cultural diplomacy’—that is, efforts by nation states to deploy cultural artefacts to serve diplomatic ends. We now have excellent studies of the way that various nations (though particularly the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War) used art, music, dance and film to advance their geopolitical objectives. Anne Searcy builds on much of this literature to offer a new history of the role that ballet played in Soviet–American relations during the critical Cold War window of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In four chapters, plus an introduction and epilogue, Searcy tells the story of four ballet tours—two Russian and two American—that took place against the backdrop of the extraordinary tensions of the late Eisenhower and Kennedy years. Prominent Cold War crises during this period included the Sputnik launch of 1957, the communist revolution in Cuba in 1958, the American U-2 plane shot down in Soviet airspace in 1960, the Bay of Pigs and the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, and, of course, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962—the most dangerous moment in the roughly 45-year history of the Soviet–American stare-down. Amazingly, there were Russian dancers touring the United States and American dancers touring the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. The book includes a chapter on each of these tours, as well as a chapter on the earlier tour of the United States by the Bolshoi Ballet in 1959 and the little-known tour of the Soviet Union by the American Ballet Theater in 1960, the first such visit by an American ballet company to the USSR.