57

Pauline Fairclough

Chapter Three

Détente to Cold War: Anglo-Soviet musical exchanges in the late Stalin period

During the four years of wartime that Britain and the Soviet Union were allies,

diplomatic and cultural relations between the two powers thawed dramatically. In the

musical field, this resulted in high-profile Soviet music concerts in London, including

several performances of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, and reciprocal British

music concerts in the wartime ‘capital’ city Kuybïshev, Novosibirsk (the evacuation

city of the Leningrad Philharmonic) and Moscow. As diplomatic relations once again

became strained after 1945 – Churchill made his ‘Iron Curtain’ speech in 1946 – almost

all cultural invitations to the USSR from Britain were rejected. Though there was some

interest in pursuing high-profile visits on the Soviet side, in the end, between 1945-1953

(the year of Stalin’s death), there were no musical exchanges at all between the UK and

the USSR. The picture only really comes to life during the Khrushchev era, as Simo

Mikkonen describes so well in his chapter, though there were some very early exchange

visits in 1954, as will be seen.

Research to date in the burgeoning field of Soviet-Western cultural relations

focuses mainly on US-Soviet exchanges after 1953, though there has been some

research on British performances of Soviet music during the war and immediately

afterwards.1 Nevertheless, documentary evidence that has survived in both British and

Archival abbreviations as follows: TNA: The National Archives at Kew; FO: Foreign Office; BBC WAC:

BBC Written Archive at Caversham, RGASPI: Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (Rossikiy

gosudarstvennïy arkhiv sotsialno politicheskoy istorii); GARF: State Archive of the Russian Federation

(Gosudarstvennïy arkhiv rossiskoy federatsii); RGALI: Russian State Archive of Literature and Art

58

Russian state archives from the 1940s and early 50s tells an intriguing story, even if it is

largely one of suspicion and failure. It shows what attempts were made to keep musical

exchanges going, by whom they were initiated, and the extent to which such exchanges

were regarded by both governments as conduits for propaganda. More importantly

perhaps, it shows that, while from the British side it seemed as though the Russians

simply rejected every invitation to send artists abroad out of hand, in fact the three main

Soviet channels through which requests passed – VOKS (Vsesoyuznoe obshestvo

kulturnoy svyazi s granitsey, or the All-Russian Society for Cultural Relations Abroad),

the Committee on Arts Affairs of the Council of Ministers of the USSR (Komitet po

delam iskusstv pri SNK SSSR) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Narodniy

Komissariat Inostranikh Del, or NKID) – were sometimes open to the idea of cultural

exchange with the West, albeit to a limited extent. When invitations were rejected, it

was not necessarily because the Soviets were hostile to the idea of sending artists

abroad. But equally, not every invitation from the British side was an innocent gesture

of post-war friendship: if anything, the British government emerges from Foreign

Office documents as firmly committed to the subtle use of cultural propaganda. The key

player, of course, is Stalin himself, who may have vetoed any proposals that had not

already been rejected by lower-ranking officials, though so far I have not found any

(Rossiskiy gosudarstvennïy arkhiv literaturï i isskustva). Russian archival abbreviations: f. – fond, or

collection; op. – opis, or file; d. – delo, or item; ed. khr. - edinitsa khreneniya, or item; l. – list, or page.

1 See for example Constance Dee, ‘Music and Propaganda: Soviet Music and the BBC During the Second

World War’, PhD diss., University of Manchester, 2007 and Pauline Fairclough, ‘The Old Shostakovich:

Reception in the British Press’, Music and Letters (2007), 88/2, pp. 266-96.

59

concrete evidence of that (such vetoes may, of course, have been issued face-to-face, or

on the phone). However, the speed with which cultural relations resumed after his death

points the finger of suspicion firmly in his direction. What documentary evidence there

is, points to the fact that certain other officials and politicians were relatively open to

such exchanges, and it was only when the final proposal was sent to the upper echelons

of the Central Committee that it would be quashed.

Each of the three Soviet organisations through which invitations were

channelled performed different functions. VOKS had representatives in foreign

embassies all over the world, and its principal role was the facilitation of controlled

visits of approved delegations to and from the Soviet Union and the dissemination of

Soviet journals and propaganda abroad. In the 1930s VOKS worked principally with the

networks of Soviet friendship societies, and in London, the main player was the Society

for Cultural Relations with the USSR (SCR), then based in Bloomsbury and with a very

distinguished membership drawn from some of the leading intellectual and artistic

figures of the day. In the 1940s the SCR lost some of its influence as the British

government made strenuous efforts to marginalize it and take over its ambassadorial

role. As documents show, the British government was profoundly hostile to the various

Anglo-Soviet friendship societies, most of which it believed were run by communists or

‘fellow-travellers’ and the SCR was deemed to be thoroughly ‘infiltrated’, as will be

seen. When considering proposals to bring over Soviet artists, the government had to

balance the risk of stoking of pro-Soviet feeling and thus gratifying British communists

with the propaganda value of pulling off a significant diplomatic coup. During wartime,

pro-Soviet feeling among the British public was sought and nurtured by the

government, but with the onset of the Cold War, officials felt increasingly dubious

60

about appearing too eager to accommodate a major Soviet cultural visit. Nevertheless,

as will be seen, they felt that it was essential that, should such a trip take place, it would

be the British government and not the SCR or any similar organisation that would take

the credit.

Not every proposal to the Soviets followed the same procedure, and this seems

to have been because no one in Britain outside the much-maligned friendship societies

was quite sure what the ‘correct’ procedure was. If a private impresario wished to bring

over artists, he needed the help of both the Foreign Office and the Soviet Embassy, but

he might also use the SCR as a go-between, and they would communicate directly with

VOKS. Invitations might be passed directly to the Soviet Ambassador, but he would

then typically pass it to the VOKS representative responsible for Britain. Next, the

invitation would go to the NKID (whose chief at this time was the Minister of Foreign

Affairs Vyacheslav Molotov), who would in turn send it to the Committee for Arts

Affairs, headed until 1948 by Mikhail Khrapchenko. Khrapchenko had the power of

veto, but he could not sanction a proposal without sending it for approval to the Central

Committee of the Communist Party, where one of its officials would in turn consult his

superiors and feed back the response to Khrapchenko. He would then have the

responsibility of sending the final reply back to the Soviet Embassy in London.

Such cumbersome bureaucratic trails have the advantage of occasionally

showing individual responses. The workings of Soviet cultural bureaucracy were hidden

from the British, who had to wait, sometimes for many months, just to receive a

negative reply. But if Khrapchenko’s notes sometimes show that he favoured a

proposal, the British documents record the cynicism of the government’s attitude to

cultural relations. It would be naïve to pretend that both governments did not have

61

propaganda aims at heart in their approach to cultural diplomacy. Often, the propaganda

value of a proposal was the key to its success or failure, and records on both sides show

this clearly. What may be more surprising is the extent of the British Government’s

obsession with it: as will be shown, even the initial project to bring over the Bolshoy

Opera and Ballet was fuelled principally not by sincere gestures of friendship but rather

by the wish to display life in Britain to a large group of Soviet artists, thereby injecting

the Soviet cultural elite with a disaffection that they thought might, in due course, bear

fruit.

Diplomatic Background: Britain

During the war, the British Council did not have a formal base in Russia, but had a few

staff within the British Embassy. From there, the Council tried to establish itself as the

main conduit for Anglo-Soviet cultural and educational exchanges. If British music was

performed or broadcast in Moscow, they wanted to demonstrate that musicians had used

‘British Council scores’ (ie. sent over from London via Embassy post at the Council’s

request). Most of all, the Council wished to see the SCR and similar organisations

pushed out of the picture altogether – a goal they shared, of course, with the British

government. In July 1942 the Council representative Mr White2 called on the Soviet

Ambassador Ivan Maisky in order to make their position as the main player in

facilitating relations clear. Asking for higher Foreign Office clearance for this meeting,

the Foreign Office’s K. T. Gurney explained: ‘There are so many unofficial busybodies

rushing about and forming Anglo-Soviet committees for the exchange of this and that,

2 Arthur White later became editor of the weekly Council-run Soviet wartime paper Britansky Soyuznik

(British Ally).

62

that the Council consider it necessary to let Mr Maisky know that they can act as a

centralising agency for the cultural exchanges.’ The response is telling. Reflecting that

such action would be unlikely to prevent such ‘busybodies’ from persisting, especially

since the Soviet Embassy was by now used to dealing with them, the author (name

illegible) goes on to explain that the Soviet Embassy would probably prefer to deal with

amateur agencies because of their ignorance of real conditions in the USSR: ‘It is part

of the technique to put up well-meaning stooges to earn the admiration of the C.P.

[Communist Party] and is secure as vehicles of Soviet propaganda.’3 In part, the

Council’s desire for exclusivity was part of its brief: unlike the SCR, it was supposed to

spread British wartime propaganda in the USSR, and as such was arguably more

concerned with the true exchange of propaganda than were communist-focused

organisations, who had less interest in disseminating knowledge of British culture

abroad than in showcasing Soviet culture in Britain. Together with the Ministry of

Information, the Council published details of the British war effort in whatever Soviet

media they were permitted to show: film clips, documentaries (not shown to the general

public), photographs, exhibitions and newspaper items. However, a later report, written

by the Ministry of Information’s Soviet Relations Division’s Director Mr H. P. Smollett

in 1944 (following his visit to the USSR that year) casts serious doubt on the ability of

the British Council to do the job it claimed was properly theirs:

As regards both personnel and experience, the British Council is utterly

unequipped to deal with Russia and has hitherto done nothing to remedy this very

serious defect. …If therefore the British Council is to play the part it should in our

3 TNA, FO370/674.

63

public relations with the USSR it must acquire suitable personnel both here and in

Moscow.4

While the Ministry of Information and the Soviet Division managed wartime cultural

affairs from Moscow, the British Council would have been the ideal body to continue its

work after the war. In the event, it never secured a permanent base in Moscow until well

after Stalin’s death, closing down in 1947.5 But certainly during the war itself, the

Ministry and the Council co-operated quite closely in managing a vast field of

information and cultural exchanges across the whole spectrum of war reports to parcels

of scores. Smollett’s report recommended that, after the war, a special Foreign Office

cultural attaché should be established in the British Embassy in Moscow to supervise

the Public Relations Division that was active there in wartime, together with one senior

representative each from the Ministry of Information and the British Council, who

would both report directly to him. In this way, specialist knowledge and experience

would be joined together to form an expert Soviet cultural relations team, reporting

directly to the Foreign Office.

As many Cold War historians have noted, in 1944, the Foreign Office still

believed that the Soviet Union was at the cusp of potential change; they sensed a new

mood of openness and hoped that, slowly but surely, co-operation with the West would

4 TNA, FO371/43328.

5 It did not re-open its Moscow base until 1967. See http://www.britishcouncil.org/russia-about-us-press-

room-facts.htm (accessed 26/9/11). It was also ejected from almost the whole Soviet bloc, with the

exception of Poland.

64

become normalized.6 The every day reality of co-operation with the Soviet authorities,

however, continued to be very difficult, as a Ministry of Information report by Mr

Kenneth Grubb dated January 1944 makes clear. He observes that official contact is

very hard to establish, that citizens are still afraid to have dealings with foreigners and

that Soviet authorities habitually mistrust even the most ordinary factual reports from

the British. However, Grubb sounds a note of cautious optimism when he notes that

‘men are eager to throw open long-darkened windows and look out upon a scene which

they now believe not to be wholly hostile.’ He even surmises that the USSR may be

moving towards some kind of practical rapprochement with the capitalist world, and

that both communist and capitalist systems may reach some point of ‘mutual

understanding’.7 But Grubb’s optimism was cautious compared with Smollett’s report

later that year, in which he hopes that ‘A year or two after the war one might well be

inclined to recommend the establishment of a British social centre in Moscow, where

poetry readings, chamber music, explorers’ talks, would be offered to the new Soviet

intelligentsia.’8 Smollett’s practical recommendations about setting up a post-war Public

Relations Councillor in the British Embassy to oversee cultural work was warmly

received in government circles, within the context of broader post-war political aims, as

set out by the Overseas Planning Committee in 1944. Chief among these were: the

continuation of the weekly paper Britanskiy Soyuznik (British Ally) in a longer monthly

edition;9 to maintain an editorial presence in TASS (the Soviet news agency); to

6 See in particular Martin H. Folly, Churchill, Whitehall and the Soviet Union, 1940-45, Basingstoke:

Macmillan Press, 2000.

7 TNA, FO371/43326.

8 TNA, FO371/43328.

9 This short (8-page) weekly periodical was begun in August 1942.

65

establish a British Film Theatre; to make contact with Soviet newspaper editors and

insert British press material into Soviet papers, and to broadcast in Russian from

London (this last became the BBC’s Russian Service, which began in 1946).10 A 1944

document from the Overseas Planning Committee entitled ‘Plan of Propaganda to

USSR’ states that ‘The revolutionaries who destroyed Tsarism have turned into (or been

replaced) by constructors, administrators and adepts in the art of the possible.’11 It listed

three main objectives for British propaganda strategies in the post-war period: to

convince Russia of Britain’s desire for friendly relations; to impress upon them the

success of the Commonwealth; and to demonstrate that the Commonwealth would be a

major post-war world power through its ‘material and moral resources.’12 The British

wished to convince the Soviets of their respect for the USSR as a world power, but at

the same time to impress upon them the extent of British influence worldwide,

reckoning that if a culture of mutual respect and acceptance could be forged, then post-

war co-operation could have a strong foundation.13

Such hopes were swiftly dashed in the first few years of the Cold War, as will be

seen. The freeze in cultural relations was confirmed by a hostile speech given by the

director of VOKS, Vladimir Kemenov, in July 1947 entitled ‘The Decline of

Contemporary Bourgeois Art’, in which he crudely attacked modern Western sculpture

and painting.14 Later that year, D. N. Pritt, Chair of the SCR, wrote to the post-war

10 TNA, FO371/43326.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid.

13 For a clear account of the British government’s hopeful attitude to post-war Soviet co-operation, see

Folly, Churchill, Whitehall and the Soviet Union.

14 The speech can be found in TNA, FO371/66413.

66

Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin informing him of their plans to expand their work and

asking for a message of goodwill from the Prime Minister. Pritt’s reasons for sending

such a strange request are unclear, but his letter may have been testing the official

waters to see how the SCR stood with the British government. Foreign office memos

refer to Kemenov’s speech as a good reason to turn down Pritt’s request; but Bevin’s

reply is worth quoting at length:

It is quite true, as you say in your letter, that I am anxious to see a real and lasting

friendship established between this country and the USSR. I also believe that this

end would be served by complete freedom of cultural contacts. When I saw Stalin

in March [1947] I raised the question of cultural exchanges and told him, in

particular, that an exchange of students and student teachers would be a great

benefit to mutual understanding. Stalin said that he saw no special obstacles to my

suggestion, and since then Sir Maurice Peterson [British Ambassador after Cripps

and Archibald Clark-Kerr] has done his best to follow up this suggestion and

arrange for an exchange on the lines I had indicated. He has had no success. You

are no doubt aware that a number of other invitations sent through His Majesty’s

Ambassador have yielded meagre results.

In view of this disappointing attitude on the part of the Soviet Government, I am

reluctant to make any further overtures, or to give the public the impression that

goodwill on our side is all that is required to establish a real basis of

understanding… I should prefer to postpone any personal message until such time

67

as the attitude of the Soviet Government offers a more encouraging prospect of

free two-way cultural exchanges between our countries.15

When the British government realized the extent of Stalin’s plans for the creation of a

powerful Soviet bloc and influence in the Middle East – effectively spreading

Communism well beyond current Soviet borders – they became alerted to the very real

dangers posed by their former ally. In response, the Russia Committee was created in

April 1946 for the purpose of assessing Soviet policy and agreeing on appropriate

British responses. Led by the Foreign Office’s Northern Section’s Christopher Warner,

the Committee recommended a campaign of ‘offensive propaganda’ against the Soviet

Union, in which the BBC’s Russian Service, World Service and European Service

would play important roles. The Foreign Office Department that led this propaganda

offensive was the Information Research Department, formed in 1948, whose remit soon

extended far beyond Soviet affairs, but which was founded specifically to counter the

Soviet political threat.16 The years of co-operation were well and truly over.

Diplomatic Background: Russia

As the historians Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov have shown, the British

Foreign Office was not totally misguided in its belief that the Soviet Union would co-

15 Ibid.

16 See W. Scott-Lucas and C. J. Morris, ‘A Very British Crusade: the Information Research Department

and the Beginning of the Cold War’, in Richard J. Aldrich, ed., British Intelligence, Strategy and the Cold

War, 1945-51. London and New York: Routledge, 1992, pp. 85-110.

68

operate with the Western powers after the war.17 In 1944, the Soviet Union did indeed

envisage post-war co-operation with the West, albeit one couched in mutual espionage,

mistrust and self-interest. The Soviet Ambassador in London, Ivan Maisky, formally

advised Stalin that such a policy would be in the Soviet Union’s best interests and

Maxim Litvinov, Soviet Ambassador to the US (1941-43) also strongly argued for

continuing Allied relationships after the war.18 Their advice was not unheeded;

questions of US aid for post-war reconstruction and the carving up of Europe at the

Yalta and Potsdam conferences meant that, for the time being at least, the Soviet Union

needed the Western powers to remain friendly. But this period of co-operation was very

short-lived. It seems that a number of key events triggered Stalin’s deepening hostility

to the US and Britain: the death of Roosevelt (April 1945), Attlee’s election victory

(July 1945) and America’s unleashing of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki

(August 1945). Stalin, having enjoyed his status as popular and respected world

statesman and who had forged functional – even cordial - relationships with Roosevelt

and Churchill, did not like either Truman or Attlee (who, though a Labour Prime

Minister, had a record of antagonising British communists). More important, perhaps,

was his realisation that America had a weapon that could annihilate the Soviet Union, a

fact that changed the balance of power in a way that left the USSR without a negotiating

strategy. The only way Stalin could counter this massive military force was by Soviet

17 Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War. From Stalin to

Khrushchev, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1996, especially pp. 39-44.

18 Ibid., pp. 29-30.

69

expansion and re-armament. He also moved quickly to develop a Soviet atomic bomb,

under the supervision of Lavrenty Beria and his Soviet nuclear programme.19

The continuation of cultural exchanges with Britain is, of course, dwarfed by

this turbulent diplomatic context, but it must be remembered that in Britain, at least,

such exchanges were seen as the last vestiges of hope of maintaining any connections

beyond the Iron Curtain. Their very harmlessness made them more likely to succeed

where more ambitious diplomatic strategies were failing, and, as we have seen, the

British government regarded them as a useful part of their propaganda efforts. Into this

already complicated mixture of espionage, empire-building and nuclear armament came

Stalin’s retrenchment at home in the form of further repressions. Cultural figures and

arts unions were attacked and punished for excessive ‘cosmopolitanism’ and decadence

in a vicious purge known today as the ‘Zhdanovshchina’ after the minister who fronted

it, Andrey Zhdanov.20 Its effects on the musical community have been widely

disseminated, but what is less well known is that VOKS and Khrapchenko’s Committee

for Arts Affairs were also attacked in the summer of 1948. The VOKS chairman,

Vladimir Kemenov, was personally disgraced and sacked for alleged financial

misconduct. Georgy Shneyerson, head of its Music Section, was also reprimanded and

blamed for over-payment to composers.21 Even Mikhail Khrapchenko did not retain his

post in this poisonous atmosphere. He, too, was sacked in the wake of the furore over

Vano Muradeli’s opera The Great Friendship and replaced (briefly) by Polikarp

Lebedev. His Committee was subsumed by the Department of Agitation and

19 The nuclear programme started in 1946, and the first Soviet plutonium bomb was successfully tested in

August 1949. See ibid., p. 151.

20 See principally Alexander Werth, Musical Uproar in Moscow, London: Turnstile Press, 1949.

21 See RGASPI f. 82 (Molotov) op. 2, d.1013, ll. 25-64.

70

Propaganda (headed by Mikhail Suslov). If Khrapchenko and his Committee had

seemed opaque to the British, then Suslov and Agitprop were not even on their radar.

Between around 1947-53, the British government made no further overtures to the

Soviets regarding musical exchanges.22

The Bolshoy Theatre of Opera and Ballet

A tour to London by the ‘Russian Ballet’ was first mooted as early as December 1941.

During the war, the ballet enthusiast Bruce Otteley worked at the Foreign Office. He

was a former banker and backer of Colonel de Basil’s Russian Ballet23, and this was

why he was approached by officials from the Russian Departments of the Ministry of

Information and Ministry of Economic Warfare with a view to bringing over the

‘Moscow State Ballet’ to Covent Garden in the summer of 1942. Otteley wrote to the

Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden on 7 December 1941, explaining that he had been

asked to help organize the visit, and asking him to ‘sound Stalin on it’ during his

forthcoming visit to the USSR. No reply from Eden survives in the Foreign Office file,

but Christopher Warner, head of the Northern Department, did discuss the plan with Sir

Stafford Cripps (then British Ambassador) in Moscow during Eden’s visit. Ivan Maisky,

the Soviet Ambassador in London, was supportive (though of course, he had no say in

the final decision). Otteley had recommended that the Council would provide a

22 For the best available account of Khrapchenko’s fall from grace, see V. V. Perkhin, Deyateli russkogo

iskusstva i M. B. Khrapchenko, predsedatel Vsesoiuznogo komiteta po delam iskusstv, aprel 1939-yanvar

1948 [Russian arts affairs and the president of the All-Union committee on arts affairs, M. B.

Khrapchenko, April 1939-January 1948], Moscow: Nauka, 2007, pp. 7-125.

23 Vassily de Basil was a Lithuanian impresario who tried to revive the Ballets Russes tradition after

Diaghilev’s death in 1929, first in Monte Carlo, then (1938) in Covent Garden.

71

guarantee of £10,000 and be responsible for ‘theatre, orchestra and running expenses’,

with the Soviet government paying all other personnel costs.24 He estimated that the

tour would ultimately make a profit. Warner, who corresponded with Otteley’s

superiors at the Foreign Office, stated in a letter (1 April 1942) that Eden and the

Cabinet supported the proposed tour. However, by 21 April the British Council were

warning the Foreign Office that they could not justify the expense of meeting the

considerable costs of bringing over more than 100 Russian personnel on a homeward-

bound supply ship, with full equipment – an astonishing feat during wartime. The

Foreign Office’s K. T. Gurney’s letter to Mr Bridge-Adams of the British Council of 21

April suggested that Otteley wait to see if official permission would come from the

USSR before proceeding further, but in passing revealed the real motivation behind the

initial idea:

We doubt whether it would be possible to justify the expenditure by the British

Council of public funds… in respect of activities not undertaken for the specific

purpose of spreading the knowledge of British culture among foreigners. The

most that could be argued would be that such knowledge would be spread

indirectly, in so far as a certain number of Soviet citizens would be brought out of

their ring-fence to see this country, which would be certainly to the good,

provided they were shown the right things in the right way.’25

It was no accident that it had been the Ministries of Information and Economic Warfare

who had mooted the idea: its chief purpose was to have been propaganda, not cultural

co-operation. Although the selling-point to British citizens would be to showcase

24 TNA, FO371/443327.

25 TNA, FO370/674.

72

Russian culture, the political motive was, rather, to show Russians what life in Britain

was like. There was still potentially something to be gained from the Soviet perspective;

they could at least be sure that they were showcasing their best talent in London. But it

was not clear from these proposals what the Soviet Union was expected to contribute to

the trip: the British Council and Foreign Office were proposing to keep all box-office

takings and, though they would undertake to pay for actual running costs, nowhere in

these proposals is there any indication that the visitors would have their accommodation

and living costs in London covered. There is no further record of how this proposal

advanced, but the Soviet government clearly did not favour it. I have not been able to

verify whether that was expressed in a direct response or simply through such a

prolonged delay that the British gave up. But in any case, it is clear that there was

hesitation on both sides, which is hardly surprising given the logistical difficulties

involved.

The idea of bringing over the Bolshoy appealed to more people than

Government officials bent on propaganda, however. Failure on the first attempt did not

deter the British from trying again in 1944. This time, the impetus of the whole visit

was different; it was not broached by the government but instead by a new, non-profit

organisation, headed by Lord (John Maynard) Keynes, who took over the running of the

Covent Garden Royal Opera House in early 1945. Since its stated purpose was to

establish a national home for opera and ballet in Britain, Keynes’s committee saw the

Russian State Ballet as a potential model, and wished to offer the USSR the very first

international invitation of their new company. Nor would the visit be entirely London-

centred: their plan was to tour industrial cities such as Manchester and Glasgow (then in

a sorry state from bombing raids and not calculated to impress any Russian visitor),

73

proposing a seven-week tour between March-August 1945. The ‘Moscow Ballet’ (by

which they meant the Bolshoy) would have been invited to bring its own staging and

orchestra, and – though the question of living expenses is not specifically raised in the

proposal document – Keynes’s committee offered to take upon itself the duties of

accommodation, entertainment and ‘reception’ of the company.26 Any profits from the

visit would go to charitable wartime causes.

This time, the British Council was not expected to shoulder the financial burden

and, crucially, the tour was not regarded as a commercial event, because Keynes’s

organisation was non-profit-making. A Foreign Office document from September 1944

suggests that Churchill should discuss the matter personally with Stalin as ‘an excellent

way of expressing Anglo-Soviet friendship in the immediate post-war era’.27 It seems

the original invitation was delivered on 9 November 1944, yet by 11 April 1945 there

had still been no response, prompting anguished memos to and from the relevant

agencies in London, under pressure from Covent Garden, who needed to plan their

season. It seems that, though the Ambassador (now Fyodor Gusev) had been given the

invitation in late September, it took a further intervention from the British Embassy in

Moscow directly to the Minister for Foreign Affairs Vyacheslav Molotov (18

November) before it abruptly landed on the desk of Mikhail Khrapchenko, via the

Ministry of Foreign Affairs (NKID) on 20 November 1944. In this instance, VOKS

seems to have been bypassed, since the NKID’s note to Khrapchenko refers directly to

Gusev’s account of the invitation. Khrapchenko seems to have liked the idea, replying

to the NKID on 27 November:

26 TNA, FO371/47953.

27 Ibid.

74

The Committee for Arts Affairs of the USSR considers it possible and valuable to

send for exhibition in London artists of the Bolshoy ballet of the USSR. The best

popularisation abroad of Soviet theatrical art would be valuable to show in

London a few ballet spectacles – Swan Lake, Don Quixote, Romeo and Juliet and

Gayane… Our best artists may take part in the trip to London – Ulanova,

Lepeshinskaya, Dudinskaya, Sergeyev, Chabukiani, Messerer and the conductor

Feyer, the balletmaster Lavrovsky and the set designer Pyotr Vilyams.28

An estimated 110 people would have been sent to London on this visit, which

Khrapchenko suggested could take place in May 1945. Prior to this trip, he observed,

the last exhibition of the Russian Ballet in London had been organized by Diaghilev:

Khrapchenko seems to have felt it was time to refresh British impressions. There are no

further papers in Khrapchenko’s file concerning the proposed 1945 trip, but the Foreign

Office records show that the Soviet Ambassador was duly approached by Anthony Eden

in late March 1945, and his reply came a week later – in the negative, on grounds of

transport difficulties and wartime conditions.29 But Khrapchenko’s reply to the British

government left open a window of hope: the Ambassador’s note to Eden ended with

expressing the Arts Committee’s hope that they might, at some point in the future, be

able to take advantage of the invitation.30

In the end, as will be seen, it was not Stalin, Molotov or any politician who

refused to allow the Bolshoy to travel to London, but the Bolshoy itself who may

28 RGALI f. 962 op. 10 ed. khr. 64, l. 17.

29 TNA, FO371/47953.

30 Ibid.

75

effectively vetoed the trip by making excessive demands. The next attempt to bring

them over began just months later, in September 1945, when the private impresario firm

Hyde Productions (represented by Major Leith-Hay-Clark) asked Ernest Bevin to

approach the Soviet Ambassador with a commercial venture, financed entirely by Hyde

Productions. This alone indicates that a commercial company could feel very confident

of financial gain, even when set against the phenomenal cost of accommodating such a

large number of people. Leith-Hay-Clark’s letter to the Under Secretary of State, John

Galsworthy, in September 1945 declares that such a trip would provide a ‘golden

opportunity of “enforcing” some sort of understanding between our respective nations

along artistic lines.”31 If any underlying purpose other than commercial gain and a flair

for ambitious artistic planning can be discerned through that claim, it is surely only that

cultural exchanges may be the best way of keeping the channels of communication

open: there is no hint of propaganda here. But the British government refused to

intervene on Leith-Hay-Clark’s behalf because Hyde Productions was a commercial

organisation; a similar refusal had already been sent to another impresario firm, Drury

Lane, on the same grounds.32 The Northern Department strenuously opposed what they

saw as a pointless embargo on supporting commercial ventures, stressing that without

official support the visit could not be arranged, but apparently to no avail.33

At this point the Foreign Office paper trail peters out; but the fate of Leith-Hay-

Clark’s proposal can be followed in Khrapchenko’s Arts Committee file and in those of

the Central Committee of the Communist Party. It seems that Khrapchenko approached

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid.

76

the Director of the Bolshoy, A. Bondarenko, in February 1946 to ask his opinion about

the invitation. Bondarenko responded with a catalogue of demands guaranteed to deter

even the most determined impresario. The tour, he requested, would involve bringing

over no fewer than 256 people to perform the following repertoire: Swan Lake, Giselle,

Prokofiev’s Cinderella and Romeo and Juliet, and Glazunov’s Raymonda. It should be

stressed that this large number did not include an orchestra – the Bolshoy orchestra

were apparently too heavily committed to come. Bondarenko insisted that their own set

designers (probably including Vilyams) would also come with them to London. There

was nothing inappropriate or unusual in this request, nor in asking the British to provide

an orchestra; but the final blow was financial: all material costs and salaries would be

met by the inviting organisation. It is doubtful if Hyde Productions expected to pay for

256 people: the original 1941 figure had been estimated at less than half that number.

Khrapchenko’s response was pragmatic: he wrote to the NKID to explain that the

logistical problems were insurmountable. As a gesture of goodwill, he offered to send

instead the Ensemble of Folk Dance of the USSR under the direction of Igor Moiseyev,

who had just toured in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Romania.34

Khrapchenko’s decision was confirmed at a higher level. A letter from Andrey

Vïshinsky (Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs until 1949, when he took over from

Molotov) to Georgiy Malenkov on 18 April 1946 requesting final authorisation for the

Red Army Ensemble and Moiseyev’s tour reveals a number of things. First, that

somewhere along the line, Lord Keynes’s and Major Leith-Hay-Clark’s invitations had

become confused and merged into the same proposal; second, that the Soviets by now

regarded the British Council (not an Anglo-Soviet friendship society) as the main

34 RGALI f. 962 op. 10, ed. khr. 86, ll. 49-52.

77

organising body for such trips; and third, that there is no obvious political strategy in the

Soviets’ response. The Bolshoy could not be sent because of practical hurdles, but they

saw no reason to refuse a trip by another ensemble on the grounds that contact with a

foreign country might adversely affect Soviet citizens. The question of who would fund

the trip was only raised by Bondarenko: Khrapchenko and his superiors in the NKID

seem occupied only with the principle of whether it was possible or not:

The director of the opera theatre in Covent Garden has invited the Bolshoy

Theatre troupe of the USSR to tour England in the summer of 1946. … Apart

from that, the British Council, the state organisation for the control of cultural

connections between England and abroad, passed via VOKS an invitation to

organize in England an exhibition of the Red Army Ensemble of Song and Dance.

The Committee for Arts Affairs considers that to send the Bolshoy Theatre to

London in impossible in the face of the technical difficulties of organising such a

tour. The Committee recommends sending to England the Ensemble of Folk

Dances of the USSR conducted by I. Moiseyev. Comrade Molotov considers it

possible. With the approval of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, we

will send for two months on tour to England in the summer of 1946 the Red Army

Ensemble of Song and Dance conducted by Alexandrov and the Ensemble

conducted by Moiseyev. I ask the Central Committee of the Communist Party

(Bolsheviks) to decide this question.35

35 Vïshinsky to Malenkov, 18 April 1946. RGASPI f. 17 op. 125, ed. khr. 466, p. 74.

78

According to British Council records, the Red Army visit never took place and their

invitation was declined.36 If the request had got so high in the chain of command as

Vïshinsky, and was approved by Molotov, then it seems only Stalin could have vetoed

it.

The last of these abortive attempts to bring over the Bolshoy Ballet may have

begun in January 1953, just months before Stalin’s death. Galina Ulanova was reported

in the Manchester Guardian as planning to visit London to dance at Covent Garden.

Various Foreign Office memos in response to the article make it clear that the paper’s

source had been unreliable, since nothing was known of the proposal at either

embassy.37 But immediately after Stalin’s death, the idea of bringing over the whole

company was once again broached by a private company, directed by the ballet

impresario Peter Daubney. Daubney’s proposal was to bring over the company for three

to four weeks in July-August 1953 as an appended visit from their main destination of

Paris, where another impresario was trying to arrange a tour.38 The response from the

British Government was cautious, in view of past failure, but supportive. In the end, the

trip to Paris never happened, and consequently Daubney dropped his plan, but the

government correspondence around the proposed trip is revealing. Memos were still

circulating about it after Daubney’s plan had fallen through, with various officials

toying with the idea of picking up Daubney’s idea and taking it forward themselves

under government auspices. It is plain that the British government were concerned that,

if such a trip should go ahead, it must have nothing to do with any of the Anglo-Soviet

36 See TNA, BW151/7, Report of the British Council 1945-46. The report also states that an invitation to

Oistrakh had been declined. I am grateful to Peter Bloor for sending me this document.

37 The Manchester Guardian, 23 March 1953. See TNA, FO371/106591.

38 Ibid.

79

friendship societies, all of whom were perceived as far too close to the Communist

Party of Great Britain, and hence to Moscow. Any political advantage to the British

government in facilitating such a high-profile tour would have been wiped out if it had

been arranged by the SCR or any other similar organisation. When Daubney’s idea

changed into bringing over a Soviet song-and-dance ensemble with the help of the SCR,

the Northern Department issued a scathing document in which the SCR is described as

being ‘under Communist control from the start’ with audiences of ‘hand-picked…

suburban communists’ ready to attend whatever event they organized.39 But Daubney’s

own alleged account of why he had gone through the SCR made commercial sense to

the Foreign Office: ‘The Society was able to guarantee full houses by bringing up

charabanc loads of the faithful from every part of the country.’40 In the end, the formal

Foreign Office submission on the matter of any future Bolshoy tour proposed the

following: that the government would not initiate such a tour (which would make them

look as though they were chasing after the Soviets), but would approve any visit

arranged by a commercial organisation; if the visit was set to be arranged through the

SCR or any other cultural friendship society, the government would endeavour to

replace them with the Arts Council; and finally, that the visit should be reciprocal, with

a British company visiting the Soviet Union in return. It was to be another eight years

before they had their wish granted: in 1961, the Kirov came to London and the Sadlers

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid.

80

Wells Ballet visited the USSR under the terms of the Anglo-Soviet Cultural

Agreement.41

Shostakovich and Prokofiev

Various invitations were sent to Soviet composers and musicians during the post-war

era. Shostakovich’s international fame was at a peak, and performers such as David

Oistrakh, Lev Oborin and Yevgeny Mravinsky were already world famous. Prokofiev

was an international figure, highly respected by the many who knew him as a

cosmopolitan young European before his return to the Soviet Union in 1937. In general,

performers were allowed far better travel privileges than composers: their success at

international competitions was a key element in the Soviet Union’s cultural propaganda,

and had been since the mid-1930s. Prokofiev was not granted permission to travel at all

in the post-war period and would not set foot outside the Soviet Union again, while

Shostakovich went to New York in 1949 as an unwilling member of the Soviet peace

delegation: a painful and humiliating chapter in his biography. He would visit Soviet-

bloc countries in subsequent years (notably the German Democratic Republic), but

would not visit the West again until after Stalin’s death.

Prokofiev’s treatment was especially harsh. The Royal Philharmonic Society

awarded him their gold medal in the summer of 1946 and wanted him to come to

receive his award in London at a concert of Russian music at the Albert Hall on 26

41 The first Anglo-Soviet Cultural Agreement was signed in London on December 1 1959 (for details of

the first US-Soviet Agreement in 1958, see Mikkonen’s chapter in this volume, n.1). A new agreement

was reached in January 1961 on relations in the cultural, scientific, technical and educational fields and

extended up to early 1963. Part of the agreement was to hold Soviet and British Music Festivals in the

UK and USSR respectively, both of which took place.

81

May. The NKID were suspicious of the British motives for wishing to honour Prokofiev

in this way. Vïshinsky, writing to Khrapchenko on 9 June 1944, queried the purpose of

the award, yet wondered if sending the Soviet Ambassador to the Albert Hall to receive

it on Prokofiev’s behalf (which was evidently the original plan) would not look odd ‘in

view of his [Prokofiev’s] international status.’42 The decision to give Prokofiev the

award in person, but in Moscow, was therefore a compromise designed to save face on

the part of the Soviet government. The award ceremony was arranged by the VOKS

Music Section in Moscow, and Prokofiev was handed his medal in the presence of the

British Ambassador. His speech referred poignantly to his memories of past London

visits:

The fact is that I have been in England quite often, and came to love the life of

London, its magnificent orchestras and its hospitable and really musical public.

With London I associate many pleasant and fond recollections, and gratifying

creative friendship binds me with London musicians. I regard my being decorated

with the Gold Medal as an expression of the mutual sympathy and cordial feelings

which our victorious peoples have for each other. Allow me, Mr Ambassador, to

convey through you my sincere and hearty thanks and my warmest greetings to

the Royal Philharmonic Society which has so highly honoured me and also my

best wishes to my friends – English musicians and composers.43

Prokofiev was invited to London again only months after receiving his award: Lady

Wood, Henry Wood’s widow, wrote to VOKS in September, inviting Shostakovich and

42 RGALI f. 962 op. 10, ed. khr. 64, l. 52.

43 GARF f. 5283 op. 15 ed. khr. 235, l. 23.

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Prokofiev to visit under the auspices of the Henry Wood Concert Society, either in late

1946 or early 1947. L. Kislova, the VOKS official who corresponded with Lady Wood,

promised to pass on the invitation, but there is no response in the file. Needless to say,

they never went. Though it would seem as though sending them could only have been to

the Soviet Union’s advantage – showcasing musical talent abroad at a time when the

USSR itself was feting its best composers with awards and prizes – Soviet officials did

not favour trips either to or from the Soviet Union by just one or two individual citizens,

preferring official delegations managed by VOKS. Fear of defection was not the sole

reason, since foreigners could not normally travel alone to the USSR either. A major

part of the reason must have been the desire to control visitors’ movements: just as

Western visitors to Russia were not allowed to move freely around unsupervized, the

Soviet government did not want Soviet visitors to the West to be unrestricted either. It

would have been politically risky to have allowed Shostakovich and Prokofiev to travel

to London for concerts, protected and chaperoned by the London musical elite. This is

borne out by the fact that, towards the end of the war, the secretary of the London

Philharmonia had invited Shostakovich and Oistrakh to London for a short tour in

January-February 1944. Khrapchenko turned down the invitation on the grounds that

‘the Committee… does not consider it valuable to organize a tour for any individual

Soviet artist abroad at the invitation of a private organisation. The Committee…

considers that for the propaganda of Soviet art abroad we should send not one [artist],

but a group of leading musicians and performers.’44

44 RGALI f. 962 op. 10, ed. khr. 64, l. 65. Letter from Khrapchenko to Kemenov (chair of VOKS), 3

February 1944.

83

In fact, the BBC tried to do just that, yet got no further than the London

Philharmonia had done. They hoped to bring over Shostakovich, Prokofiev and a select

group of performers as part of a Russian Music Festival, provisionally planned for the

winter season of 1946-7. BBC representatives had heard Oistrakh play at the first

Prague Spring Festival in 1946 and were keen to invite him, together with Mravinsky,

Oborin and the two composers, to London as part of a goodwill effort ‘in view of the

present strained diplomatic relations between this country and the USSR’.45 The BBC’s

Director General wrote straight to Khrapchenko, believing that invitations sent via the

Soviet Embassy risked going unanswered. But Soviet bureaucracy could not be so

easily circumvented. His letter almost certainly went first to the NKID, where it may

well have remained; I found no trace of the invitation in Khrapchenko’s files.

Unbeknown to the BBC, of course, even if the letter had reached Khrapchenko first, it

would not have made the slightest difference to the outcome. Khrapchenko was then

already beginning to be publicly and privately attacked in a sequence of attempts to

undermine his authority that concluded with the termination of his post in 1948, and he

was in no position to open talks with the BBC on such a politically sensitive issue.46

When no response came from his office, the BBC turned to the SCR and its then-

chairman, the lawyer and Independent Labour MP D. N. Pritt. A BBC memo from

Edward Lockspeiser to Etienne Amyot on 1 May 1947 indicates Pritt’s naïve optimism

45 BBC WAC, R27/450, ‘Russian Musicians June 1946-Feb 1947’. Letter to Mr G. R. Barnes from Mr

Etienne Amyot on meeting with Tony Lewis, 6 June, 1946.

46 See Perkin, Deyateli russkogo iskusstv, pp. 110-25.

84

about a good outcome, but here the trail again comes to a stop.47 Neither the BBC, nor

the SCR, nor the British Government itself, could make the slightest different to the

Soviet Government’s determination not to let its best musicians travel to the West.

Musical exchanges

During the period of allied détente, the British Ministry of Information managed a vast

field of news reportage, public relations and cultural exchanges in Moscow. Where

required, it worked with the British Council, who had a limited presence there, but

which was expected to remain in Moscow after the war to continue the Ministry’s work.

Both worked in close collaboration with the Foreign Office to bring as much British

culture as possible into Russia. During wartime, their strategies were enormously

effective. British films were screened – George Formby was an especially big hit – the

British paper Britansky Soiuznik was published weekly (it was so popular that copies

were sold on the black market), and records and scores were sent to the Composers’

Union in Moscow. The problem of hire and copyright restrictions on contemporary

British scores was solved by a new music hire agreement offered in July 1942, which

enabled scores to be loaned to the Soviet Union until the end of the war without

incurring any copyright or hire fee,48 and Soviet orchestral records show that English

orchestral music was played and broadcast in major public concerts.49 In 1942 the

47 Ibid. Edward Lockspeiser was a music writer who wrote the Dent Master Musicians volume on

Debussy (London: 1963) and sometimes wrote music articles for the New York Herald Tribune. Etienne

Amyot was the very first programme planner of the BBC’s Third Programme.

48 TNA, FO370/674, FO370/675.

49 In October 1942, Vaughan Williams’ London Symphony, Delius’s Village Romeo and Juliet, Ireland’s

Symphonic Rhapsody and Elgar’s Military March were played in Kuybïshev. See TNA, FO370/675.

85

British Ambassador (Cripps) wrote to William Walton to raise the issue of availability

of English music in the USSR: though the British Council had already sent a large

quantity over the previous year, further scores and recordings were sent regularly via

diplomatic bags to Moscow. A senior British Council official in Moscow, Mr G.

Reavey, also reported a conversation with the Secretary of the Moscow Composers’

Union, in which he (possibly Khachaturian) expressed the wish to obtain a lot more

material.50 The response to this particular request almost went disastrously wrong, when

a package of thirteen orchestral scores51 arrived in Moscow after the Moscow

Philharmonia had been evacuated to Kuybïshev, leaving no one left to play the music.

Following reports in the British press that the parcels would be returned to England, the

Foreign Office instructed that they instead be presented to the Moscow Conservatoire

Library or to VOKS. Oistrakh was known to have been keen to perform the Elgar

Violin Concerto and the Walton Viola Concerto: he eventually played the Walton

concerto in the winter season of 1946-7, with scores and parts sent via the diplomatic

post from London.52 However, his request for the score of the Elgar Concerto in 1944

must have caused embarrassment to the British Council. Owing to copyright

50 TNA, FO370/675. The ‘secretary’ is not identified; Vissarion Shebalin was the Moscow Composers’

Union president until the autumn of 1942 (when he took over the directorship of the Moscow

Conservatoire), so this representative may have been Kabalevsky or Khachaturian, both of whom were

Moscow-based senior composers.

51 The scores were: ‘Theme of Reconstruction’ from Bliss’s Things to Come, Purcell ‘Trumpet

Voluntary’, Vaughan Williams Greensleeves, Delius ‘Walk to the Paradise Garden’ and ‘Serenade’ from

Hassan, Ireland ‘Mai Dun’, and Forgotten Rite, Warlock Capriol Suite, Stanford (?) Irish Rhapsody,

Gilbert and Sullivan Iolanthe, and Mackenzie (?) Britannia Overture. FO 6166.

52 TNA, FO924/279.

86

restrictions, the British Council was allowed to send only miniature scores and a violin

and piano reduction. Their apologetic telegram states that ‘the publishers will only

release the full score and parts for definite performance… When the date of

performance is known we will then send full material.’53 This sounds like angling for a

fee; but in 1944 the agreement with publishers for no-strings-attached score hire should

still have been in force.

When the Director of the Soviet Public Relations Division of the Ministry of

Information, Mr H. P. Smollett, visited Moscow in May 1944, he and Mr Reavey met

with Dmitry Kabalevsky, the music critic and VOKS official Georgy Shneerson and the

VOKS official L. Kislova. They requested more scores and recordings of English

music, and Smollett duly obliged with a selection based on their conversation:

recordings of English Renaissance composers (Dunstable, Arne, Byrd, Purcell), folk

songs (English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh), modern music, light music (operetta), Bliss’s

Piano Concerto and several sets of Percy Scholes’s ‘History of Music’ gramophone

records and booklets, jazz (especially anything by Jack Hylton), war and popular songs.

All these requests came directly from the Russians; Smollett and Reavey recommended

in addition Arne’s The Beggar’s Opera, some Gilbert and Sullivan, the score of

Vaughan Williams’s Violin Concerto and some Gracie Fields records. They also

promised to present VOKS with a set of the Purcell Society Complete Edition (which

they duly did). When Smollett interviewed Puzin, Chair of the All-Union Radio

Committee, he was told that an ‘unlimited’ amount of English music could be

broadcast, of all kinds but excepting jazz, which was ‘frowned upon’.54 The possibility

53 TNA, FO924/41.

54 TNA, FO371/43328.

87

of future collaboration with the BBC was discussed at this meeting, though in the end

nothing came of it.

In his capacity of Head of the Music Section at the Radio Committee,

Kabalevsky was in an influential position. The Press Department of the British Embassy

in Moscow informed the Foreign Office that English music was broadcast fairly often

on Soviet radio, with Elgar’s Violin Concerto, Walton’s Façade Suite and Bliss’s Piano

Concerto especial favourites.55 Whatever music was sent to VOKS made its way to the

Radio Committee, presumably via Kabalevsky; and when the Soviet popular music

composer Isaak Dunayevsky received a parcel of folk songs and sea shanties, these too

apparently attracted widespread interest. A further Press Department report that year

mentions a Moscow Conservatoire concert (February 1944) at which Purcell’s Trumpet

Voluntary and Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro for Strings, were performed (it should

be recalled that the Purcell was included in that 1942 parcel that the Foreign Office

requested should be passed to VOKS or to the Moscow Conservatoire library).56 The

same month, the Radio Committee celebrated Henry Wood’s 75th birthday by

broadcasting his performances of Greensleeves and Bach’s ‘Sixth Concerto’.57 It seems

that musicians shared this wartime musical fruit freely with one another and seized the

chance to improve their meagre stock of English music scores and recordings. It was as

well they did so; for that friendly diplomatic channel would not remain open for much

longer.

55 Ibid.

56 TNA, FO371/43327.

57 Ibid.

88

Little evidence remains of a proposed visit to the USSR by Walton and Malcolm

Sargent except a letter dated February 1946 from the Press Department in Moscow to

the Soviet Public Relations Division on London, in which the writer (H. W.) reports a

conversation with a VOKS official about the proposed trip. Questioned about the visit,

the official had claimed that he knew nothing further about the proposal, but explained

that such visits were at present ‘difficult’.58 Thereafter, governmental trails run cold and

no further invitations to the Soviets seem to have been made.

The Beginnings of a musical ‘thaw’

Cultural exchanges between Russia and Britain resumed swiftly after Stalin’s death in

March 1953, with some very prominent musical visits and events. The ‘Thaw’ in Soviet

attitudes to contemporary Western music was indicated by a concert in May 1955, at

which Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue was played alongside Britten’s Four Sea Interludes

and Nielsen’s Second Symphony, a concert that prompted a series of intrigued memos

from the Foreign Office’s Northern and Information Research Departments. In May of

the same year, Cecil Parrott of the British Embassy in Moscow invited (with VOKS’s

co-operation) the composers Shostakovich, Khachaturian, Yury Shaporin, Kabalevsky,

Tikhon Khrennikov and the critics Georgy Khubov, Igor Belza and Yury Keldïsh to an

evening of British music, played on the gramophone.59 Parrott concluded his report by

advising the Northern Department that the time was now ripe for an English musician to

visit the USSR; that Soviet composers had expressed sadness at the cessation of

58 TNA, FO924/478.

59 Works played included Britten Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings and Lennox Berkeley Horn Trio,

Bliss Music for Strings, Purcell Dido and Aneas Act I, Walton Violin Concerto and Vaughan Williams

Fifth Symphony.

89

relations for so many years, and that Khachaturian, in particular, was keen to re-visit

London.60 Parrott met Khachaturian informally soon after, and wrote to the Northern

Department again, requesting more records to be sent over, this time of more

contemporary British music (he mentions Lutyens, Rubbra, Maconchy, Tippett, Searle

and others). A large number of records were dispatched in November 1955 in response,

and plans were set in motion for a major visit by Arthur Bliss, who would eventually

lead a delegation to the USSR in 1956.61 The progression of Anglo-Soviet musical

exchanges from this date goes beyond the scope of this chapter; but it is clear from

these Foreign Office reports that the initial thaw in cultural relations was, though of

course dependent on political changes after Stalin’s death, initiated by the well-judged

efforts on the part of Embassy staff like Parrott to re-open friendly musical channels. No

part of the Foreign Office correspondence around this re-opening of relations addresses

propaganda value: though such concerns had hardly receded, the preceding freeze had

been so severe that the British government was glad of any opportunity to reach out a

welcoming hand. In return, it seemed, the Soviets had simply been waiting for such

opportunities to be available once more, and were only too glad to reciprocate gestures

of friendship. The decade of relative openness under Khrushchev changed Soviet

60 TNA, FO371/116811.

61 Britten was mentioned as a possible visitor, but his music was judged too advanced for Soviet tastes at

the time. Parrott reports that Walton and Oistrakh met at the home of Rafael Kubelik at the Prague Spring

Festival (no date given), at which Oistrakh, to Walton’s delight, played through his Concerto. His advice

was to send Bliss, since though Walton was the ‘greater composer’ his manner could be rather ‘aloof’,

whereas Bliss’s personal warmth was calculated to draw friendly responses from Soviet composers. See

ibid.

90

cultural life permanently, even after he was displaced in 1964. Windows to the West

had been flung wide open; they would never be wholly closed again.