This list seems endless, but it covers only the highlights of the performing arts segment of this exchange. Tschaikovsky and ballet dancers are perhaps the most vibrant symbols of this phenomenon, but it goes far beyond that.
Although revolutionary committees ordered the confiscation of huge collections of privately owned Rembrandts and French Impressionists during the chaos that followed the overthrow of Czar Nicholas II (which ultimately turned the czars` immense Winter Palace fronting Leningrad`s Neva River into the renowned Hermitage Museum), contemporary Western painting was for a long time condemned as meaningless, decadent and counter-revolutionary.
This year saw the exhibition in Leningrad and Moscow of ”An American Vision: Three Generations of Wyeth Art,” featuring the bold heroes and grim pirate villains of illustrator N.C. Wyeth; the gentler works of son Andrew Wyeth, so famous recently for his mysterious ”Helga” nudes; and the pleasingly bizarre creations of grandson Jamie Wyeth, famous for portraits of both the late President John F. Kennedy and some rather memorable pigs.
Earlier, Washington`s National Gallery of Art had sent over some Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces, and Russophile Armand Hammer contributed five centuries` of famous works to Russian view. In return came an extraordinary Soviet collection of pieces ranging from the Impressionist period to early modern.
There followed a traveling exhibition called ”Russia, the Land, the People: Russian Painting 1850-1910.” The U.S. gladly reciprocated with ”New Horizons: American Painting 1840-1910,” featuring historic American pictures for which Chicago`s Daniel Terra, U.S. ambassador at large for the arts, and others have long sought international recognition.
Next year will see a mass exchange of paintings between Chicago`s Art Institute and New York`s Metropolitan Museum and the USSR`s Pushkin and Hermitage museums, which will send Russian-owned Dutch and Flemish paintings, including 25 Rembrandts and 41 Rubenses, and a vast haul of Impressionists ranging from Delacroix to Matisse, collected by Chicago`s Bertha Palmer, among others.
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stanley Kunitz, a longtime advocate of Soviet-American friendship and poet laureate of New York, has organized a joint book project that next year will amalgamate into a single collection some of the best works of poetry and prose by American and Soviet authors. It will be dedicated to the spirit of ”Glasnost.”
”One of the discoveries that I`ve made in the course of my life is that there is a deep and touching solidarity and friendship among all writers and artists on this planet,” he said at a recent poetry reading sponsored by the Quaker U.S./USSR Committee in Washington.
Symposia have been held in the Soviet Union on American author William Faulkner and contemporaneous Russian writers, and the Soviets sent a delegation to last year`s 13th Annual Faulkner Conference at the University of Mississippi. American and Soviet book publishers held meetings at the 1986 Frankfurt Book Fair. The Soviets sent authors to the International Program of Writers at the University of Iowa last fall, and the world`s first symposium on classical Ukrainian literature was held last winter at Harvard College.
This year, American literary scholars attended a symposium on Leo Tolstoy in Moscow. Poets Andrey Voznesensky and Yevgeny Yevtushenko gave readings of their works in appearances across the United States.
A picture book to be entitled ”A Day in the Life of the Soviet Union,”
a Russian version of the best-selling American production featuring still photographs of Americans from every walk of life caught on a single day, will be published shortly.
This year`s Moscow Film Festival, well attended by Americans, was notable for ”The Commissar,” a long-suppressed, 20-year-old film depicting the brutality of the Red Army in the Ukraine during the Russian Revolution. There were also non-party-line documentaries on the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and punk rock.
”A Soviet and American committee was formed last March to find ways not to make `Rambo` films any more,” Ambassador Rhinesmith said. ”The idea is for both countries to produce realistic films that go beyond propagandizing.” Rhinesmith, who served from 1971 to 1980 as president of the American Field Service International Scholarship Program and more recently with the World Bank in international exchange efforts, is just as pleased with some of the less publicized results of Glasnost.
For last year`s Chautauqua Conference, 250 Americans traveled to the Soviet Union for debate on the Soviet-American relationship. Although the U.S. delegation included superhawk defense guru Richard Perle and the session was marked by a few oratorical sparks and fireworks, the Kremlin decided to reciprocate the visit this year and sent more than 200 Soviets to Chautauqua in upstate New York.
”Our biggest problem with the Soviets has been getting Soviet citizens to this country, be they high school kids or college kids or ordinary citizens or whatever . . . ,” Rhinesmith said. ”But one of the great things that has happened with Glasnost-and I`ve seen it-is that Soviet government officials are beginning to believe in their own people for the first time.
”I`ve seen the glimmer. Toward the end of `86 I was told: `We can tell them anything. The Soviet people can handle it. Afghanistan, whatever.` They said it with such force and conviction you knew it was a newly acquired belief.”
The exchanges have not been entirely without friction. Moscow correspondent Thom Shanker reports that, on their recent tour of the USSR, members of the Baltimore Symphony found only 18 of 70 promised private hotel rooms waiting for them in Moscow-and they were not allowed into the recital hall for practice until a few hours before performance time.
A mixup in ticket distribution for a rock concert by America and Russian groups resulted in only 15,000 Soviets showing up in a 40,000-capacity soccer stadium.
But the Baltimore Symphony concert was well received, and Horowitz`s performance had many in the Russian audience weeping, according to Shanker.
Although American jazz was once officially reviled in the USSR as
”revolting rubbish” and ”ideological poison,” the Brubek and Metheny concerts won the acclaim of mere citizens and high government bureaucrats alike.
Although the Moiseyev troupe`s visit provoked protests and bomb threats in New York, among other places, it was widely and wildly cheered wherever it went, and the Bolshoi performances were treated as epochal events.
”The public has been dying to see this company,” said Jane Hermann, director of presentations for New York`s Metropolitan Opera. ”Russia is the spiritual home of ballet . . . . We`re moving toward tremendous normalcy, as long as politics doesn`t get in the way.”
The usually secretive and circumspect Soviet Embassy in Washington has been churning out news releases on every aspect of the ”glasnost” exchanges- from Gorbachev`s meeting with American schoolteachers to the arrival of a Jewish theater company from the U.S.S.R.
When asked some months ago about Raisa Gorbachev`s impact on world fashion, Soviet Embassy spokesman Boris Malakhov rather irritably replied,
”Do you really expect me to answer such a question?” When asked more recently about cultural exchange, his response was ecstatic.
”We have been very pleased,” he said. ”There has been great progress. Exchanges of the theater, cinema, musicians-it`s very positive. We firmly believe these exchanges promote better relations.”
When told that former CIA chief Richard Helms was among those standing to cheer the Moiseyev when it performed at the Kennedy Center, Malakhov was unfazed.
”Our art is a superb quality,” he said.
U.S. Sen. Paul Simon (D., Ill.), who has been working to ease the plight of dissidents within the Soviet Union as well as to promote expanded exchanges, has also been pleased. As he said on the floor of the Senate in arguing for increased exchange:
”The U.S.-Soviet relationship is our No. 1 foreign-policy concern. Yet in the 27 years of exchanges, we have managed to average only 600 Americans and 250 Soviet scholars exchanged each year. Contrast these numbers with an average of 14,000 per year with Japan; 5,500 with Britain; 3,600 with West Germany, 3,000 with France; and 14,000 with the People`s Republic of China.
”Had a young Eureka College student named Ronald Reagan spent his junior year in Moscow, and had a young law student named Mikhail Gorbachev spent a year at an American college, relations today between our two countries surely would be better. Given the gulf between our two governments and peoples, bridging it becomes that much more important-particularly in difficult times when leaders must act quickly.”
The time is at hand for all parties involved in ”glasnost” to ask-not where this will all end-but where it is leading. Criticism has been raised concerning Ronald Reagan`s arms control efforts to the effect that he may be seeking any kind of treaty more than he seeks a useful and workable agreement, a criticism that was raised with former President Jimmy Carter and his SALT II pursuits.
The same critical view must soon be taken of cultural ”glasnost.” The admixture surely is to be valued, not simply because it is an admixture but because of what it contains and contributes. Horowitz and Moiseyev are national treasures for both countries to embrace. The same cannot necessarily be said for Joel`s trash-the-instruments concerts and 60-year-old dance paeans to Stalin-think.
And many have sounded some very cautionary notes, including Gorbachev himself. In a recent speech to artists and writers at a gathering of the Soviet Creative Workers` Associations, he warned that his policy of glasnost was intended to strengthen Soviet socialism, not replace it.
”If someone begins to look for and suggest to us values and discoveries beyond the interests of the people and beyond socialism,” he said, ”then the Central Committee will publicly criticize this, give its assessment and, within the framework of democracy and openness, also outline its position.”
U.S. Undersecretary of State Edward Derwinski, who as a longtime Illinois congressman was a spokesman for the ”captive nations” of Eastern Europe and who has a cousin in Poland`s Solidarity movement, views cultural glasnost with skepticism.
”It`s still at this point very tentative,” he said. ”What`s going on to date shows no sign of anything but a very contrived effort to dazzle the West. We ought to follow our usual precautions and be very careful about who`s coming-especially scientists. I have to view this with some skepticism. No Marxist state has ever given its people a role. It`s certainly too early for negative comment, but also too early for positive.”
Ambassador Rhinesmith saw difficulties even if one grants the Soviet leadership the very best intentions.
”When you`re talking about 282 million people in 100 nationalities spread out over 11 time zones,” he said, ”and then you talk about transforming this society with radical change, you have a situation that not only will take decades but a situation that is almost unimaginable. It`s an incredible undertaking.”
He noted that, despite the explosion in cultural exchange, the Soviet system is not really configured to accommodate it. The government
bureaucracies there are too insular, too resistant to change and too lacking in resources.
”We`re trying to get a rodeo over there,” he said, to illustrate his point. ”We`ve been having an awful time. Part of what we have with the Soviets is the `you can`t get there from here` syndrome. We are every day confronted with differences between the two systems. It`s not only political philosophy.
”Let`s say both the Soviets and the Americans want to do something. They`re happy to have a rodeo. We`re happy to send it to them. In fact, they think it would be neat because they`ve got a Cossack division on horses they`d like to send to us.”
He sighed, shaking his head as though he`d just come from the Kremlin`s Ministry of Ministries.
”Well, try to find what organization in the Soviet Union would receive a rodeo,” he said. ”You go to the sports committee. The sports committee looks at it and says: `We have looked at it and looked at your videotapes. We think a rodeo is really interesting, but we are a sports organization. This is not really a sport. This is entertainment.`
”So, we go to the performing arts council. We say: `Here is a rodeo. A rodeo is entertainment as defined by the sports people.` They say: `That`s really very interesting, but we don`t have any arenas like that. We have concert halls. We can`t have horses traipsing around in our concert halls. We`re interested in symphony orchestras. This is not really entertainment in our sense. Go to the circus, because they have those kinds of arenas. Maybe they can do it.` ”
At this point, Rhinesmith sounds like he spent the entire day at the Ministry of Ministries.
”So we go to the circus,” he continued. ”We`re still waiting to see if the state circus will take it. The state circus says: `We`re interested in an exchange of circuses. We`ll send you the Moscow circus and you send us the Big Apple circus from New York. But we don`t know anything about this horse stuff. You go to the equestrian academy.` ”
The fate of the rodeo to date remains as unclear as Soviet-American arms control, but not for lack of trying.
”We have turned on lights in the dark corridors of the Soviet bureaucracy,” Rhinesmith said in summation.
”We have seen bright faces light up with the possibilities.”
