Page 23 →2 The Intersection of Literature and Politics during the Cold War

Tony Tanner’s 1971 City of Words is one of the first exhaustive studies of how post–World War II American authors responded to cultural stimuli of their time. Although Tanner examines these developments primarily in terms of their departure from aesthetic and stylistic conventions in American literature, the underlying sociopolitical dimension also merits greater attention. As a growing number of relatively low-cost media radically increased the quantity of messages to which the average American was exposed during the early years of the cold war, the potential influence that language could exert also increased. This point was understood equally by Joseph McCarthy and George Orwell, although it led them to very different conclusions; where McCarthy saw Communist propaganda lurking masked in “genres” ranging from Hollywood scripts, insufficiently vigilant government legislation, and college lectures, Orwell saw a society increasingly willing not only to be told what it thought but also the words in which it was proper to have those thoughts.

As the cold war progressed, the discursive environment of the United States increasingly resembled Times Square with its whirlwind of messages bombarding the individual from every direction. Also like Times Square, though, the superficial diversity of these messages was subtly undercut by their homogeneous role as carefully constructed advertisements for some aspect of American consumer culture and its products. In such an environment, voices of dissent, criticism, and/or reform found it increasingly difficult to be heard as long as they participated in the extant forms of expression, given that such forms are designed, as Marshall McLuhan and others began pointing out volubly in the 1960s, to control or even to become “the message.” Altering, subverting, or even altogether abandoning the conventional modes of expression thus becomes not only an aesthetic choice but also an inherently political one. Pynchon fictionally conveyed his understanding of this concept in The Crying of Lot 49 via the mysterious Tristero organization Page 24 →(and its clandestine W.A.S.T.E. mail system), whose rhetoric contains echoes of nonfictional countercultures ranging from the civil rights movement and second-wave feminism to the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground.

In his introduction Tanner argues that all writers face a complex choice regarding their use of accepted forms of language: “If he wants to write in any communicable form he must traffic in a language which may at every turn be limiting, directing and perhaps controlling his responses and formulations. If he feels that the given structuring of reality of the available language is imprisoning or iniquitous, he may abandon language altogether; or he may seek to use the existing language in such a way that he demonstrates to himself and other people that he does not wholly conform to the structures built into the common tongue, that he has the power to resist and perhaps disturb the particular ‘rubricizing’ tendency of the language he has inherited” (16). While admitting that such authorial behavior “is not in itself a new position for the writer to find himself in,” Tanner also asserts “that many recent American writers are unusually aware of this quite fundamental and inescapable paradox: that to exist, a book, a vision, a system, like a person, has to have an outline—there can be no identity without contour. But contours signify arrest, they involve restraint and the acceptance of limits” (16–17). Although Tanner repeatedly uses physical metaphors in these passages (resist, disturb, arrest, restraint) to describe defiance of linguistic conventions in literary works, he refrains from concretizing this symbolic linkage between stylistic innovation and sociopolitical activism in the remainder of his study. I would suggest that the disturbance and rejection of restraint that he notes among a younger generation of American writers is intended very much as an agitation, not simply of the literary world but potentially of the whole world.

What Tanner metaphorically calls “contours” were very palpable aspects of language choices for Russian writers during the cold war. Although Socialist Realism was (in principle, at least) not so comprehensively prescriptive after 1953 as it had been during Stalin’s time, it still exerted a powerful influence over literature. In Inside the Soviet Writers’ Union (1990), John Garrard and Carol Garrard discuss the objections to sotsrealizm raised at the 1954 Writers’ Congress by Konstantin Simonov, then vice general secretary of the Writers’ Union and editor of Novy mir (New World), one of the most influential official Soviet literary journals:

The Party had its loyal supporters at the same 1954 Congress argue that Socialist Realism was not a straitjacket, but could expand to accommodate almost any theme or approach to reality. Konstantin Simonov charged that some of his comrades viewed Soviet society through rose-tinted glasses due to a “misunderstanding of the essence of Socialist Realism.”. . . As a result, instead of remaining faithful to a true Socialist Page 25 →Realist approach, much Soviet prose had been damaged by the “varnishing of reality” (lakirovka). Simonov perceived a distinct threat to Soviet literature in a “vulgarizing” tendency which he identified with specific critics—the tendency to approach Socialist Realism as a “single, unified style” that must be adopted by all writers, and to condemn anything written outside this style as “wicked and evil.” (168)

The tendency of Socialist Realism to “varnish reality” is, as many dissident writers repeatedly pointed out, an inevitable result of requiring literature to give preference to partiinost’ (roughly, “party spirit” or “party discipline”) over empirical or even more abstract philosophical truths.

Aksyonov uses the notion of lakirovka ironically in a 1964 short story, “Malen’kii Kit, lakirovshchik deistvitel’nosti” (“Little Whale, Varnisher of Reality”). In its pejorative sense, lakirovka carries a meaning similar to “whitewashing” in English. Aksyonov’s story inverts this meaning somewhat, since it is the protagonist’s young son (nicknamed “Little Whale”) whose innocent fantasies provide a welcome release from the tedium and deprivations of daily existence, not only for himself but also for his father. Although no more realistic than the distortions of Socialist Realism, Little Whale’s form of childish lakirovka at least provides some relief from the harsh conditions of Soviet life rather than trying to cover them up. While Simonov stopped short of condemning the Communist Party’s ideological dominance, Garrard and Garrard note that any such openly expressed criticism of Socialist Realism by a party leader was “the literary equivalent of Khrushchev’s later attack on Stalin—the end of infallibility” (169).

Nevertheless the expansion of Socialist Realism that Simonov proposed was far from universally endorsed, even during the most liberal periods of state control over literature. Official means of publication in the Soviet Union remained firmly bound by ideological strictures: “Executives at Goskomizdat [the State Committee for Publishing Houses, Printing Plants, and the Book Trade] in the Brezhnev period naturally believed that their job was not to produce an economically viable product, but rather to market an ideology. Soviet centralized planning had always stressed production rather than consumption. . . . As long as ideological purity meant more than financial profit, they would continue to receive good reports from their superiors” (Garrard and Garrard 173). This system of publication based on ideological purity helped create the cultural zastoi of the 1970s, since it encouraged a lack of creativity in authors hoping to be published through official channels.¹ Few publishers would risk sending a book to Goskomizdat or Glavlit, the official censorship organization, if they were unsure of its ideological worth.

In The Anti-Soviet Soviet Union, Voinovich cites the massive influx of party officials into the ranks of the Writers’ Union after the Thaw as one of the prime absurdities of such a system. Since members of the party hierarchy were Page 26 →presumed to be ideologically correct, ostensibly literary works written by such individuals were relatively safe to publish, regardless of their artistic value:

[Policemen], KGB men, managers of stores and saunas, building managers, and the chairmen of dacha coops have all entered the field of literature.

The corruption of literature has gone so far as to have obliterated all the boundary lines between the professional writer and those who are published because they have pull. A KGB general writes no worse than a professional writer, and the professional writes no better than a store manager. (256)²

Voinovich states that such a self-perpetuating system results in ideologically consistent but artistically moribund literature: “Living literature was the enemy of the new system, and now that enemy has been laid low, trampled, and nearly wiped out” (258).

Voinovich notes that the emphasis on partiinost’ over literary merit extended to the highest echelon of Soviet society, helping to bolster Brezhnev’s image even in the midst of the zastoi: “When Marshal Brezhnev began to publish his three-volume book of mythology, all the leading lights of Soviet literature, the secretaries of the Writers’ Union, the heroes of Socialist labor, and all the other prize winners were unanimous in declaring, both verbally and in print, that these books were inimitable masterpieces, comparable only to the best (not just any) pages of War and Peace” (256). The “book of mythology” Voinovich mentions is a three-part memoir in which Brezhnev—or more likely his unacknowledged ghostwriter—rather artlessly “varnished” the history of the Soviet Union. Despite (or perhaps because of) rumors of his advancing senility, Brezhnev was awarded the Lenin Prize in Literature for this work in 1979. Voinovich does not hide his low opinion of this award: “When experts now calculate how much damage drunkenness and absenteeism do to the Soviet economy, they should also include the damage done to the economy by Brezhnev’s literary indulgences” (322).

Dovlatov also sardonically comments on the sorry state of the Soviet publication system in a chapter of his semiautobiographical Nevidimaia kniga (1978; The Invisible Book) titled “A Nest of Vipers”:

I am convinced that editorial principles are invariable. . . . There are those who know how to write. And there are those whose vocation is to give orders. Those who write earn less. But they smile more, drink more, and pay alimony. Those in command consist for the most part of former proofreaders, typists, Pioneer leaders, and local trade union activists.

Sensing their creative impotence, these people follow the safe administrative path their whole lives. Their perfect loyalty makes up for their lack of professional skills. (108–9)

Page 27 →Elsewhere he describes the ineptitude of a certain V. Kozlov, head of the prose section at the Leningrad journal Avrora (Aurora), as a discrepancy between intellectual and physical potency: “At that time manuscripts were piling up fast and furious on his desk—a whole mountain of them! So he, who is physically a very strong man, picked up the whole pile and took it to the dump. After all, how could one be expected to read through such a mountain?!” (103). Given such a glaring lack of literary sophistication among professional editors, stylistic innovation or linguistic experimentalism was often automatically assumed to be concealing ideological divergences.³ “Avantgardism” supplanted “cosmopolitanism” and “formalism” as a defamatory buzzword meaning “anti-Soviet” in the parlance of the Writers’ Union; most of the Russian satirists included in this study suffered professional (and in some cases physical) castigation for the content and/or form of their works.

Thus the Soviet “city of words” was an even more exclusive environment than that of the United States in the post–World War II years. The “structuring of reality of the available language [was] imprisoning or iniquitous” in the Soviet Union not only in aesthetic terms but also in literal ones, often requiring physical risk or complete departure (on the part of the text, the author, or both) as a precondition to the dissemination of work that wished to critique the established ideology. Tanner’s claims concerning the paradox of language facing American writers of the post–World War II period are equally if not more applicable to those writers’ Russian counterparts, even though their respective societies are posited as diametrically opposed to one another within the public aspect of cold war rhetoric.

Since Tanner repeatedly couches his discussion of stylistic innovation in terms of freedom and individual identity within a society, extending his ideas to encompass Russian literature naturally requires some examination of how and why the metaphorical confinement of American authors resembles the symbolically and literally confining Russian situation. Tanner states that an identity crisis arose among American authors because of the binary relationship between “utter formlessness” and an “adopted armature [that] is at the same time felt to be an imprisoning deathly constriction” (18–19). He again uses this metaphor of incarceration to formulate one of his principal theses: “The dilemma and quest of the hero are often analogous to those of the author. Can he find a stylistic freedom which is not simply a meaningless incoherence, and can he find a stylistic form which will not trap him inside the existing forms of previous literature?” (19). But if Tanner is unwilling to say that this phenomenon is either unique to the period he is treating or out of keeping with general trends in American literature, why should this development be of particular interest, much less a large portion of his thesis? One answer is that cold war society and language presented such an objectionable “rubric” for some authors that they invited or perhaps demanded not just a Page 28 →Pound-like call for transgressive innovation (“Make it new!”) but a form of genuinely subversive resistance and disturbance.

The same can be said for Russian literature of the cold war that protested the status quo. Andrei Sinyavsky (writing as Abram Tertz) launched the post-Stalin era of satirical subversion in 1956 by sending his essay Chto takoe sotsialisticheskii realizm? (1959; What Is Socialist Realism?) and the accompanying novel Sud idet (1959; The Trial Begins) to France for publication. Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy’s assessment of these two works closely parallels, albeit in a more explicitly political context, Tanner’s claims about a reaction among post–World War II American writers against the “rubricizing tendency” of inherited language: “They . . . mark the beginning of Sinyavsky’s unofficial writing activities in that they constitute an exorcism of sorts, a confrontation with and attempt to overcome the then-prevailing hegemony of Socialist Realism through an exposure of its formal incoherence. The two works thus may be viewed conjointly as the writer’s declaration of independence, his escape from the Soviet canon. In each of them Tertz begins by ostensibly positioning his narrator within the conventions of Socialist Realism in order, ultimately, to subvert those conventions from within by calling into question the existence of a single defining center and thus the authority of authorial voice” (40). Sinyavsky, along with most of the dissident satirists that follow in his wake, engages in “resist[ance] and . . . disturb[ance]” of established Soviet language, using this to denigrate by extension the social and political constructs that are supported by such language. As Nepomnyashchy (echoing Tanner and Weisenburger) notes, the “crime committed [from the viewpoint of the Soviet authorities] by What Is Socialist Realism? and The Trial Begins—and by all of Tertz’s other works—consists in posing a challenge to claims to linguistic authority, to the right to define and therefore judge, including those staked by the literary text” (63). During the cold war, such official claims to linguistic authority are more overt in the Soviet Union than in the United States—that is, there is no American governmental organ that corresponds to the Writers’ Union or Glavlit. Nevertheless the impulse to undermine the existing language was extensive in both countries, thanks to the abuses brought about by the cold war rivalry between them.

As the cold war progressed, a substantial body of both fictional and critical work emerged that strengthened the proposition that American language after World War II had become semantically impoverished and was therefore less useful as the raw material for literary creation. Although such an assertion may be couched in aesthetic and linguistic terms (as was the case with John Barth’s 1967 essay “The Literature of Exhaustion”), the underlying polemical motivation is often more sociopolitical in nature. For example, in the conclusion to Fables of Subversion, Weisenburger discusses what he sees as a prominent misconception of the role of literature in “late capitalist” Page 29 →American culture: “To a number of critics . . . the work of postmodernism consists in an oppositional politics involving the generation and consumption of signs. The problem with [this] argument, however, is that it repeatedly tropes this potential in terms of aesthetic transgression” (258). Weisenburger rejects this strictly transgressive model because it creates a situation in which art voluntarily limits itself to mimicking rather than critiquing the dominant strains of American culture: “Such a reading fails to make a necessary distinction between transgressing and more properly resisting or dissenting practices. There can be no question that transgressing only serves to recuperate the culture of late capitalism. Disrupting all boundaries or conceptions of the subject and its community, art replicates and thus situates us still more comfortably amid the hyperreality of instant pleasures encouraged by Madison Avenue, Hollywood, and the White House” (258).

Weisenburger quotes Charles Altieri in reaffirming the subversive social function of art, in the process echoing the idiom of limits and resistance that Tanner uses in City of Words: “As Altieri puts the case, ‘It is necessary to posit an explicitly oppositional art devoted to resisting dominant social interests. This art would not so much escape limits as make compelling the pain which those limits create and the interests that thrive on such pain, including interests in the myths of taste and sensibility fostered by the ideals of transgression’” (259). Altieri’s (and by extension Weisenburger’s) concept accentuates the sociopolitical ramifications of Tanner’s dilemma of linguistic imprisonment. The subversive satires of the cold war wish not simply to disassociate themselves (that is, to “escape limits”) from the cultural forces that created the cold war world, but actually to undermine their influence or, in the most optimistic cases, to undo the damage they have caused.

In his Dissident Postmodernists (1991), Paul Maltby argues that recognition of a “dissident tendency” is essential to full understanding of the social intentions of a subset of “postmodernist writers, [for whom] the problem of meaning has a contextual dimension insofar as they perceive language as bearing the imprints of the institutions, projects, and conflicts in which it is imbricated” (39). Maltby’s explicitly politicized thesis—that much of postmodern play with narrative form contains overtones of social protest—and his choice of words in his title suggest an intentional connection between the American authors such as Barthelme, Coover, and Pynchon that he discusses and such stylistically avant-garde Russian satirists as Aksyonov, Aleshkovsky, and Sokolov.

Whether discussed in the context of Aesopian language, dialogism, polyphony, textual parody, or sociopolitical satire, the notion that the language of fiction can surreptitiously subvert the Soviet “institutions, projects, and conflicts in which it is imbricated” is hardly an innovative one.⁴ Maltby’s identification of the “dissident” strain in postmodernist American literature, however, is an Page 30 →attempt to answer a question that he claims is unanswerable using the established critical models: “Why should the fictionality of meaning become a major issue at a particular time, in a particular place (i.e., in late-capitalist America)? . . . No coherent model of postmodern culture underpins neoformalist studies of postmodernist fiction. In these studies, the fictionality of meaning is an issue rarely examined beyond its aesthetic and epistemological implications. And yet our very idea of fictionality has been enlarged and enriched by sociological inquiries into the nature of postmodern culture. . . . An explanation of the postmodernist writer’s preoccupation with fictionality requires, inter alia, acknowledgement of his/her situation in a culture pervaded by illusory use-values and simulacra” (21). My argument throughout this study is not only that such an acknowledgment is integral to comparative examination of Russian and American satirical fiction but also that the sources of this “fictionality of meaning” are directly related to the cultural mindset that allowed the cold war to exist in the first place.

Wolfgang Iser’s 1997 essay “The Significance of Fictionalizing” cogently outlines how and why this issue of fictionality is relevant when examining the cultural effects of textual language. Iser’s tripartite definition of a “fiction” includes each of the following “acts” on the part of an author:

1. 1) a selection from a variety of social, historical, cultural and literary systems that exist as referential fields outside the text
2. 2) the organization of specific semantic demarcations within the text [that] give rise to intratextual fields of reference
3. 3) the self-disclosure of its fictionality, . . . [which] places the world organized in the text under the sign of the “as if” [and signals to readers] that they must bracket off their natural attitudes toward what they are reading. (Iser 2–3)

Although Iser does not treat satire specifically, his model for literary fictions in general serves an invaluable function in discussing the nature of cold war satire because of the distinction Iser makes between literary and nonliterary fictions. He suggests that the foundations of a wide variety of nonliterary modes are predicated on fiction: “With epistemological positing, it is a premise; with the hypothesis, it is a test; with world-pictures, it is a dogma whose fictional nature must remain concealed if the foundation is not to be impaired; and with our actions, it is anticipation” (2). For my purposes, the next to last of these is the most important form of nonliterary fiction, since the competing “world-pictures” of the United States and the Soviet Union were the primary factors in the continuation of the cold war.

While contending that literary fictions necessarily disclose their own fictionality, Iser points out that nonliterary fictions are not governed by any such requirement. In fact just the opposite is true; nonliterary fictions are required Page 31 →to “mask” their fictionality for a number of reasons: “The masking, of course, need not necessarily occur with the intention to deceive; it occurs because the fiction [within the nonfiction] is meant to provide an explanation, or even a foundation, and would not do so if its fictive nature were to be exposed. The concealment of fictionality endows an explanation with an appearance of reality, which is vital, because fiction—as explanation—functions as the constitutive basis of this reality” (3). Although Iser rightly allows for potentially innocent motivations behind social fictions, the kind of grand-scale fictionalizing that underpins the cold war invites criticism (and thus satire) both because of the high stakes involved and because of the suspicion that these fictions are not intended as forthright explanations but as elaborately constructed and assiduously maintained distortions of reality.⁵

Given Iser’s claim that “literary genres are the most obvious and durable signs” for the fictionality of literary fictions, it comes as no surprise that the satires of the cold war often include parodies of the nonliterary “genres” through which social and political fictions were sustained: denunciations, loyalty oaths, political speeches, economic reports, court proceedings, official government documents, and so on.⁶ Hutcheon’s assertion that “historiographic metafiction appears to be willing to draw upon any signifying practices it can find operative in a society” (133) becomes especially relevant to understanding how textual parody functions in cold war satire. Parody is an inherently fictive literary form, deriving its efficacy from the reader’s recognition of the extant text being parodied. Satire takes this process one step further by affirming the absurdity of its object, in this case by uncovering the counterfeit “truths” of which cold war world-pictures consist (and by extension the “dominant social interests” [Weisenburger 259] that created them in the first place). Such overt and explicit proclamation of fictionality is absolutely essential to these satires’ effectiveness, since it makes clear the ontological similarities between themselves and the social constructs they deride. The self-evident fictionality of cold war satires thus becomes an integral part of their authors’ “acknowledgement of [their] situation in a culture pervaded by illusory use-values and simulacra” (Maltby 21).

The subversive satirical model also helps resolve a philosophical issue that Tanner raises in City of Words, since fictions that satirize other fictions for claiming to be truths cannot then turn around and claim such a status for themselves. Weisenburger provides one possible solution for this problem when he states that subversive satire “functions to subvert hierarchies of value and to reflect suspiciously on all ways of making meaning, including its own” (3). His framework neither implies that subversive satirists are seeking a more perfect language of expression to replace the ones they are undermining, nor limits itself to textual transgressions of the extratextual realm. Weisenburger’s concept allows one to read subversive satires as categorical Page 32 →denials of the validity of cold war social fictions as the “constitutive basis of [a] reality” that includes both the threat of total nuclear destruction and a pair of relatively small power elites who are the principal beneficiaries of the status quo.

Matthew S. Hirshberg’s Perpetuating Patriotic Perceptions: The Cognitive Function of the Cold War (1993) provides a compelling summary of both how that status quo came into being and how it maintains itself. Hirshberg extensively scrutinizes American attitudes (in public opinion, official governmental policy, and academe) about the cold war in the context of cognitive science. In doing so he argues that “patriotic cold war preconceptions affect perceptions of the ‘reality’ of world affairs” and that these often inaccurate perceptions were in turn used “in perpetuating patriotic support in the face of the many twists, turns, tumbles, and triumphs of U.S. foreign policy” (4). Moreover, Hirshberg’s book persuasively outlines the ways in which systematic linguistic associations with certain values formed the basis of a series of complex cognitive schemata that allowed the cold war to continue, often despite evidence that invalidated the dichotomies intrinsic to a binary moral conflict. In doing so Hirshberg creates an invaluable frame of reference for discussing how and why the (de)formation of various forms of public discourse, and subsequent exposures of those discursive processes, are potentially political acts.

Hirshberg begins by outlining what he calls the “American patriotic schema” (39). He remarks that this self-image is “the most important, most salient, and most stable political schema in American culture, and it forms the core of international relations schemata such as the cold war schema” (38). This schema “consists of five concepts (the United States, the self, good, democracy, and freedom) and ten positive relationships among those concepts” (38). In essence it represents a concise summation of the national ideals articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The importance of this schema for Hirshberg lies in its consistent application in shaping policy: “The same American patriotic schema structures mainstream American thinking about both domestic and international politics, providing a stable cognitive basis for patriotic perceptions in both arenas” (39). Thus the logical/rhetorical cycle is established—the schema guides the policy, which reinforces the schema (either in reality or by manipulation of the perception of the policy), which guides the policy, and so on, potentially ad infinitum. As Hirshberg notes, the “American patriotic schema is self-perpetuating: its use reinforces its cultural dominance, which increases its use” (41).

American historians and politicians alike were able to use repeated military triumphs to bolster the patriotic schema and all its constituent associations: Page 33 →“As we move this patriotic schema into the world of international conflict, we see that at various times in history, the United States, freedom, and democracy have had to do battle with opposing forces. . . . Images of these enemies served to bolster and perpetuate the patriotic national self-image by providing the evils against which the nation could favorably compare itself and the threats in terms of which it could justify questionable policies and actions” (39). Hirshberg argues that the three most important such conflicts in terms of their fortifying potency toward the American patriotic schema are the American Revolution, the American Civil War, and World War II.⁷ These three conflicts provide a simplified conception of American history as a process of repeated military vindication of the core values that allegedly define the society. From the conflict that originally liberated the United States from British domination, through an internal challenge by a segment of the population that explicitly opposed individual freedom, right up to an external challenge by an enemy who threatened to force the world to submit to its will, the basic American values always triumph over their opposition. This worldview creates the cold war schema, in which international Communism, embodied by the Soviet Union, becomes the new enemy.

Hirshberg does not subject the premises behind these historical perceptions to extensive criticism, but their ideological and logical simplicity hints at the ample covert influence that a binary point of view on politics and history can contain. The American Revolution, the American Civil War, and World War II are obviously all more complex historical events than can be explained by the “we are good, they are bad” formula to which Hirshberg’s schemata reduce. Nevertheless demonstrations of the efficacy of such unsophisticated “psychic guides for systematic, selective perceptual omissions and additions” abound (27). For example the degree to which China persisted as a close ally and even a puppet of the Soviet Union in the American popular imagination from the 1960s through the 1980s (when Sino-American relations were in many ways considerably better than Sino-Soviet relations) suggests the degree to which such a concept resists change.

Hirshberg notes that American policy toward the Soviet Union since the end of World War II was always more complex than such a tidy framework logically explains. This intricacy arose not only from the memory of the uneasy impromptu alliance brought on by the threat of fascism during the war but also by a postwar containment strategy that “consisted of two tracks, one aggressive, the other accommodative” (46). By the mid-1970s, despite nearly three decades of nuclear stockpiling, regional conflicts, and antagonistic rhetoric, the Soviet Union had become a major trade partner of the United States, meaning that policy needed to strike a balance between economic and ideological concerns that were often seemingly at odds. Extant scholarship on the sociopolitical functions of cognitive schemata suggests how and why such a balance might be achieved through careful message control.

Page 34 →Andrew Rojecki’s Silencing the Opposition: Antinuclear Movements and the Media in the Cold War (1999) contains an insightful, succinct summary of the sociopolitical effects of cognitive schemata. Rojecki divides the function of cognitive schemata into four interrelated parts that help explain how such concepts “structure memory and associate cognition with affective valences [that are] stored in long term memory after repeated mental connections”:

1. People appear less variable when categorized as outsiders—for example, as deviants or minorities—and thus cue less complex conceptualizations. . . .
2. People’s perceptions are polarized on members of these out-groups: the best are seen in some ways as better than the best in the in-group, but the worst are seen as worse than comparable insiders. . . .
3. When schemas are first developing, we notice complicating inconsistencies provided we are continually presented with this information. That is, we can develop suitably complex representations of the world—we are capable of getting beyond stereotypes—provided there is some basis for it. Such information is critical in early stages.
4. People consistently presented with credible, persuasive schema-inconsistent information abandon the schema in favor of the incoming information. . . . This is a corollary to the finding in the previous point. A continuous stream of news coverage that shows variety and complexity among movement participants is thus less likely to produce stereotyped thinking in the public mind. (20–21)

All four of these points are important facets of the formation, maintenance, and application of the ideologies that helped divide the world into two antagonistic armed camps during the cold war. Whereas Rojecki focuses mainly on the role of the professional media in performing propagandistic tasks on behalf of the government, his framework can be expanded to include any form of rhetoric that participates in the geopolitics of the cold war.

Rojecki’s first two points are easily assimilated into existing perceptions of the cold war. The myriad two-sided divisions that permeate cold war rhetoric—East versus West, Soviet Union versus United States, Communism versus capitalism, good versus evil, right versus wrong, freedom versus enslavement, democracy versus totalitarianism—correspond readily with the spatial metaphor of preferred “insiders” and banished “outsiders.” The near-sanctification of dissidents (actual or perceived) by the rival society, furthermore, is a common feature of the cold war, although not exclusive to it. Figures such as Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavsky, Brodsky, and Sakharov, who opposed the Soviet system in some visible way, were almost uniformly hailed in the United States not only as victims of Soviet repression (which each, to differing degrees, clearly was) but also as ideologically sympathetic individuals who yearned to live in a Western-style democracy (which many Page 35 →of them, Solzhenitsyn perhaps most strikingly, were not). Likewise Soviet propaganda of the 1960s and 1970s often used images of American policemen squelching strikes, student demonstrations, or civil rights marches as evidence that capitalist societies brutally repressed their nonelite classes. Additionally, outspoken Marxist sympathizers such as Paul Robeson, Howard Fast, W. E. B. DuBois, and Angela Davis were awarded the International Stalin (later Lenin) Peace Prize, in no small measure because of the extent to which each was marginalized and/or persecuted in the United States.

Rojecki’s latter two points concern what Hirshberg terms “counter-schematic information” (45) and the need for vigilant and unswerving corroboration of the values that make up a particular schema. Hirshberg’s discussion converges with Rojecki’s when the former describes the functioning of the “cold war schema” during the Vietnam War: “American politicians and policymakers justified the Vietnam War by framing it in terms of the cold war schema. Mainstream public discourse and news coverage did not tend to stray from this interpretation, even to criticize policy. Most Americans accepted and used the cold war schema, and this made them susceptible to cold war appeals. It also made them resistant both to criticism of U.S. policy in Vietnam and to evidence that the United States was not supporting freedom, democracy, or good. In the end, the war was rejected, but not because it was not generally seen as a noble cause” (45). Hirshberg’s analysis points out the complex and dynamic process required to maintain what is essentially a static construct. According to the patriotic schema, U.S. virtues and enemy evils are not meant to change, even if the specific enemy identity is subject to change. The purpose of propaganda, whether directly issued by members of the government or indirectly disseminated by an accommodating media, is thus to preserve the status quo, in terms of both the power structure (“U.S. policy in Vietnam”) and the ideology behind that power structure (“the United States . . . support[s] freedom, democracy, [and] good”).

Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow collapses the reality of such tidy moral categorizations. It does so by satirically envisioning a nebulous and sinister network of interests—referred to simply as “Them”—that surreptitiously seeks to control the immediate post–World War II world. He depicts a bewildering multitude of British, American, German, and Russian governmental and financial interests alternately in conflict or in concert with one another, often in total disregard of the overarching military/political situation. Near the end of the third section of the novel, Major Marvy (an American military officer of questionable sanity), Clayton “Bloody” Chiclitz (“one of the American industrialists out here with the T-Force, scouting German engineering, secret weaponry in particular” [558]), and Vaslav Tchitcherine (a Soviet intelligence officer with past connections to the mammoth German IG Farben cartel) discuss their respective progress in locating a secret German rocket prototype before Oberst Enzian’s Schwarzkommando, a renegade group outside “Their” Page 36 →influence. Their exchange lays bare not only the economic forces behind the ostensibly military business at hand but also the long-standing connections between companies based in countries on opposite sides of the war:

[Marvy to Tchitcherine] “You ain’t got General Electric breathin’ over your shoulder, fella. Dillon, Reed . . . Standard Awl . . . shit . . .”

“But that’s just what you folks need,” Bloody Chiclitz interjects. “Get some business people in there to run it right, instead of having the government run everything. Your left hand doesn’t know what your right hand’s doing! You know that?” . . .

“A-and what about Herbert Hoover?” Chiclitz is screaming. “He came over here and fed you people, when you were starving! They love Hoover over here—”

“Yes—” Tchitcherine breaks in: “what is General Electric doing out here, by the way?”

A friendly wink from Major Marvy. “Mister Swope was ace buddies with old FDR, you see. Electric Charlie’s in there now, but Swope, he was one-thim Brain Trusters. Jews, most of’m. But Swope’s O.K. Now G.E. has connections with Siemens over here, they worked on the V-2 guidance, remember—” (565)

Throughout Gravity’s Rainbow Pynchon insinuates that the clandestine network of connections among national governments (represented by politicians, statesmen, military leaders, and so on) and corporations such as General Electric, Standard Oil, Siemens, and IG Farben supersedes the supposedly dominant ideological division between the Axis and the Allies. The novel describes and decries these companies’ mutually beneficial profiteering before, during, and in the immediate aftermath of the war and brands as contemptible those governmental officials who suborned and supported it.

One of the major subplots of the novel, in fact—Slothrop’s quest to discover why he gets erections that appear to foretell German rocket strikes—proves to be wholly intertwined with corporate scheming that ran contrary to the stated policies of the U.S. government. In The Style of Connectedness (1987), Thomas Moore traces the intricate design behind Slothrop’s conditioning both through historically authentic players as IG Farben, General Electric and its president Gerard Swope, Reichsbank director Hjalmar Schacht, and German tycoon Hugo Stinnes and through fictional characters such as Lyle Bland, Laszlo Jamf, and the Slothrop family.⁸ According to Thomas Moore, the interests and influences of this network supercede those of the geopolitical entities at war with one another: “[Tyrone] Slothrop is enabled to discover that he has been ‘sold to IG Farben like a side of beef,’ and has been under surveillance since the original Jamf experiment. His facility for predicting rocket strikes is somehow bound as a strand in a web Page 37 →of international corporate plotting to which World War II itself may be only incidental” (73).

Such interconnections become commonplace in the second half of the novel, serving to reinforce what Theodore Kharpertian identifies as one of its dominant themes, namely, how “history becomes propaganda so that ‘They’ can maintain control”: “In short, the They-System is seen by Gravity’s Rainbow’s characters and narrator as an unceasing and universal venture for which the war serves as subterfuge and camouflage. . . . [A] complex overlay of perspectives is used to create a version of World War II that attacks the customary historical explanation as a delusion and affirms a countertheory of ‘the real movements of the war’ as commercial” (120–21).

While I agree with Kharpertian’s assertion, I would add that Pynchon’s satire goes beyond stating that the existing historical perspective on the war is simply a “delusion” by criticizing it for its fictionalized and self-serving nature. Not only was the “customary historical explanation” used to distract from the commercial motives that Pynchon sees as driving World War II, but, as Hirshberg’s schemata show, it was employed in formulating the ideological premise for the cold war, a conflict in whose continuance “They” had vested financial and political interests. The war, as Pynchon writes, “provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world” (Gravity’s Rainbow 105). This preparation essentially consists of being acculturated into the patriotic schema and having it reinforced by “sequences of violence” that have been recast as righteous moral struggles.

The strength of the cold war schema allowed it not only to survive despite counterschematic information but also to be immediately recoverable in time of political expediency:

Long-term support for this dual approach to dealing with the Soviet threat depended on the ability of Americans both to rally behind their leaders against the evil empire, and to celebrate superpower summits and improved U.S.-Soviet relations.

. . . If the Soviet Union was always viewed as a hated enemy, then accommodation would have appeared as immoral and unwise as making deals with the devil. Had anti-Soviet sentiments entirely dissolved, however, then U.S. leaders would have been unable to justify aggressive acts as necessary responses to the evil empire. The Soviet Union, communism, and the oppression associated with them served again and again to justify questionable American behavior, and to provide an unsavory image against which a flawed America could be favorably compared in times of doubt and discontent. (Hirshberg 46)

Page 38 →It proved to be a continual political tightrope for both American and Soviet leaders to walk, but from the mid-1960s onward, cold war international relations were based on a bifurcated logic combining both “peaceful coexistence” and dire antagonism.

The cold war schema, thus, was an important tool for the American political, military, and economic elite, as it provided a flexible framework in which to achieve several goals that ideological absolutism would not have allowed: “Positive perceptions of the United States were the immobile anchor of the cold war schema. Perceptions of the Soviet Union varied as the tides of aggression and accommodation changed. Through this mix of rigidity and flexibility, the cold war schema functioned to perpetuate patriotism and public support for U.S. foreign policy throughout the cold war era” (46). Almost the same statement can be used to explain a cold war schema from the Soviet Union’s perspective.⁹ Important deviations from the American schema include the replacement of the “self” with “the working class” or “the proletariat” as the positive social unit, replacement of “democracy” with “capitalism” as the dominant societal impulse in the United States, and recasting the humanistic dichotomy of “Freedom vs. Oppression” in terms of socioeconomic class struggle (that is, “Power vs. Oppression”). Like the American cold war schema, the Soviet version did not originate during the cold war—class conflict on a global scale was, after all, the driving philosophical force behind the Bolshevik Revolution—but adapted existing sentiments to fit the two-sided balance of power that arose after World War II.

The Soviet model is both as oversimplified and as potentially persuasive as its American counterpart. Both sides, as Hirshberg notes, used an inherently fictitious (or at least knowingly exaggerated) ideological division as the basis for their international and domestic policies: “On both the American and Soviet sides ideologically grounded conceptions of international relations defined and structured cold war antagonisms and made them relevant to domestic politics. . . . The result . . . was that cold war policy and rhetoric served a political legitimation function. In fact, the ‘normative frameworks’ that served to define the cold war emerged from legitimation processes in both superpowers” (55). Subversive satirists of the cold war on both sides found fertile ground for subject matter thanks to the “normative frameworks” engendered by the respective cold war schemata of the two societies. These satirists subvert these frameworks both by pointing out the wide variety of intentional linguistic and logical distortions required to maintain the cold war and by remarking that such continuation is desirable only to the select economic and/or political elite that benefits from it.

Such distortions occur in wide range of situations: in defense of the sociological, philosophical, and/or political premises (“Americans value individual freedom” or “Communism empowers the working class”) on which the cold war schemata are based; as palliative explanations for “counterschematic Page 39 →information” (the Watergate break-in or the spectacular failures of Soviet economic policy during the 1970s); as rhetorical flourishes used to further political ambitions (Ronald Reagan’s fervent anti-Communism during the 1980 presidential campaign or Gorbachev’s glasnost); as cover for activity that violates the putative principles of the nation (Oliver North’s defense of American sales of arms to Iran on the pretext of using the money to support anti-Communist rebels in Nicaragua or the Soviet persecution of political dissidents as “enemies of the state”); and so on.

Both the American and Soviet cold war schemata are, to use Iser’s terminology, essentially “dogma whose fictional nature must remain concealed if [their] foundation is not to be impaired” (3). If any of the positive associations (such as “the United States is an advocate of freedom”) that comprise these schemata were to be compellingly disproved, the entire structure would become vulnerable. These associations can be invalidated either by presenting counterexamples or by revealing the fictive nature behind them. Because the cognitive schemata of the cold war are reinforced (either by repeated practical vindication or by tight control over information) to withstand contrary evidence, the potential for subversion contained within the former option is limited. Revelation of the fictions behind the dogma, however, offers a more promising alternative, just as exposure of the “man behind the curtain” undermined the fictive image of the “great and powerful Oz.”

Numerous scholars of cold war culture have attempted to isolate some of the specific individuals and entities responsible for the persistence of constructs like the cold war schema. Maltby, for example, refers to language as “a medium of social integration” and claims that such a status “calls for attention not only to the ideological inflection of everyday and socially privileged forms of language, but also to other components of the ‘discursive field’ like the ensemble of institutions and apparatuses that regulate the use of language” (30). Among the components he mentions are “the erosion of the public sphere; the enlargement of the state’s propaganda agencies; the impact of technical rationality on language; and the spread of conceptually impoverished discourses that impede critical reflection on society” (30). Maltby explicitly states that these four factors “have all been explained in the context of the restructuring and growth of capitalist economies in their postwar phase” (30), but all of these factors are equally and sometimes more prevalent in Soviet society in its postwar phase.

One may apply these claims about American language to Russian language in the cold war era if one accounts for the idiosyncrasies of Soviet culture, and satirists from both countries directly address each of the developments he notes in their works.¹⁰ Taking his cues from Jürgen Habermas, Maltby defines the public sphere as “a domain in which established forms of power Page 40 →and authority (ecclesiastical, aristocratic, and so on) could be subjected to the critical scrutiny and judgment of the public” (30–31). He proceeds to note the mass media’s deleterious effects: “Today, the mass media are the main source of public information. This in itself need not damage the health of the public sphere if media provision included critical inquiry and commentary from a standpoint outside the spectrum of the consensus. However, under the prevailing structure of monopolistic ownership and control, the presentation of events from genuinely alternative perspectives is a rare and marginal practice. Mass-media conglomerates are generally united on viewpoint and news values, with proprietors often exercising their prerogative of ‘private censorship’ to affirm or exclude views as suits their own political prejudices (which are normally biased toward support of the established order). . . . There is, simply, no public sphere” (31). Soviet control of the media was legendary in its restrictiveness, whether in the form of the state-controlled news agency (TASS) or leading newspapers like Pravda (Truth) and Izvestiia (News). As Thomas F. Remington writes in his The Truth of Authority: Ideology and Communication in the Soviet Union (1988), “The view that the job of gathering and reporting information must be justified by service to the collective good rather than a diffuse civil right to know is integral to Soviet doctrine” (134). When this principle was contravened, the results were usually problematic for the regime. Many historians, for example, have identified the outraged public reaction to the revelation of deliberate misinformation surrounding the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in April 1986 as the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union, since it suggested that Gorbachev’s glasnost reforms were essentially hollow when it came to important matters.¹¹ Suffice it to say, if “private censorship” of the kind that Maltby describes can result in “erosion of the public sphere,” then systematic and far-reaching Soviet control over information produced even more pronounced effects.

The mass media’s abdication of its power to critique the “established order” is a theme that shows up prominently in Fazil Iskander’s Sozvezdiye kozlotura (1966; The Goatibex Constellation), Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1977), Vassily Aksyonov’s Ostrov Krym (1981; The Island of Crimea), and Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1984), among others. It is Dovlatov, however, who most directly covers this ground. His The Invisible Book and Kompromiss (1981; The Compromise) are based on his experiences as a professional writer in the Soviet Union. Both of these works demonstrate the range of absurdities present in Soviet mass media. In The Compromise Dovlatov exposes the falsity of Soviet journalism by quoting verbatim articles he wrote for an Estonian newspaper, each followed by a somewhat fictionalized explanatory anecdote that uncovers the omnipresent ideological filter. In the chapter “The Fifth Compromise,” Dovlatov reproduces an article that heralds the birth of the four hundred thousandth inhabitant of the city of Tallinn:

Page 41 →In Tallinn Hospital No. 4, a baby has been born to Maya and Grigori Kuzin—their long-awaited first-born. It’s this little boy who is fated to be the four-hundred-thousandth inhabitant of the city. . . .

The happy father awkwardly tries to hide his callused hands. “We’ll call our son Lembit,” he says. “Let him grow like the folk-hero of that name!” . . .

I do not know what you will grow up to be, Lembit! A lathe operator or a miner, an officer or a scientist. Only one thing is clear: a man has been born! A man condemned to happiness! (25)

In the story that follows, Dovlatov lays bare the series of inaccuracies and outright fabrications that pervade the entire article. To begin with his editor assigns him the specific task of finding a baby appropriate¹² for use in a propaganda piece that celebrates the anniversary of the liberation of Tallinn from the occupying Nazis during World War II. Dovlatov first suggests the infant son of an Estonian woman and an Ethiopian student at the Soviet Merchant Marine Academy and is angrily rebuffed by his editor, who tells him to find a “normal human baby” (35), implying that the child’s national and racial characteristics make him abnormal and/or inhuman.

Dovlatov’s next attempt is equally unsuccessful, as the child he chooses is the son of Jewish—and thus tacitly unacceptable—parents. Even the father’s status as a renowned official poet is not enough to merit the baby’s selection, although the father’s poem to his newborn son is recast in ideologically correct language for use in the eventual article. The only seeming positive characteristic of the father whose child is eventually chosen is his Russian last name. Other than that he is an obnoxious and politically unenlightened drunkard, characteristics that are, of course, excluded from the eventual article. The parents want to name the child Volodya and agree to the editor’s suggestion of Lembit—a name taken from Estonian folklore—only after a paltry bribe of twenty-five rubles. The editor also contributes the awkward and clearly inappropriate catch phrase that concludes the article. By the time Dovlatov is finished telling his tale about the article’s production, practically every word of it has been discredited. Dovlatov repeats this process eleven times within The Compromise, in the process explaining why he “said farewell to journalism” (147). On the final page Dovlatov recounts a conversation that drives home with grotesquely dark irony his point about the debasement of Soviet journalism:

My first cousin, who has been convicted twice (once for unpremeditated manslaughter), often says to me:

“Take up some useful kind of work. Aren’t you ashamed of what you do?”

“You’re a fine one to lecture me!”

Page 42 →“All I did was kill a man,” my cousin says, “and try to burn his body. But you!” (148)

Throughout The Compromise Dovlatov demonstrates that the credibility of Soviet journalism has been, as his book’s title suggests, fundamentally compromised by the absurd distortions and fabrications required to produce ideologically palatable articles. Nevertheless, Dovlatov also insists that recovery is possible, even though “it’s a hard road from the reported facts to the truth”: “You can never step into the same river twice. But looking down through the thickness of the water you can make out the river bottom covered with tin cans. And behind magnificent theatrical decorations you can learn to see the brick wall, the ropes, the fire extinguisher, and the drunken stagehands. All this is well-known to anyone who has been behind the scenes, even if only once” (4). The metaphors that Dovlatov uses in this passage reverberate with the necessity of exposing polluted and illusory fictions masquerading as objective truths.

Maltby’s second point concerns the expanding organs of state propaganda, which are deeply implicated in the erosion of the public sphere. Propaganda is inextricably associated with totalitarian states in the American popular imagination, perhaps because of the word’s undemocratic and dishonest associations, both of which run counter to the American patriotic schema.¹³ Nevertheless Maltby argues that “U.S. administrations . . . justified the excessive cost, risks, and secrecy of its armament program by deploying its primary propaganda strategy—the Cold War” (33). And this strategy worked because “deliberately raising the level of confrontation with the U.S.S.R.” was the means by which “successive U.S. administrations have mobilized public support for their high level of military expenditure” (33).

Chris Hables Gray goes one step further in Postmodern War: The New Politics of Conflict (1997), implicitly linking the propaganda of the nuclear arms race with the concomitant desire for political power and economic gain: “Using systems analysis, Albert Wohlstetter claimed he had proven that the Soviets could ‘Pearl Harbor’ the U.S. nuclear bombers. This threat and a parade of others usually labeled ‘gaps,’ as in the bomber gap and the missile gap, have all been shown to be nonexistent—after the election was won or the new weapons were built. But before being proven fallacious, they helped create and elaborate the nuclear arsenal of the United States” (152). For both Maltby and Gray, the logic of American cold war propaganda is a cycle of self-fulfilling and self-enriching prophecy that creates a seemingly public justification through deliberate obfuscation or even outright fabrication of the threat posed by the Soviet enemy. Maltby characterizes the strategy of such propaganda as “a kind of ideological/rhetorical process one might call ‘dichotomization,’ whereby political issues are simplified into emotionally charged pairs of opposing terms; superpower rivalry translated into a conflict Page 43 →between Good and Evil, Light and Darkness, God and Godlessness, Freedom and Slavery” (101).

Coover personifies and satirizes these particular pairs in The Public Burning, imagining Richard Nixon as a buffoon caught out of his depth in the midst of an epic battle between the “Sons of Darkness” and the “Sons of Light.” Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy, Percy’s Love in the Ruins, and DeLillo’s End Zone perform similar satirical functions, albeit by dislocating the propagandistic dichotomies of the cold war into new contexts. Barth does so by recasting the cold war as a rivalry between two colleges, Nikolayan and New Tammany, and their respective supercomputers, EASCAC and WESCAC, for supremacy in a larger university. Percy’s novel involves a psychologist who has diagnosed a pervasive schism within Americans’ individual and collective psyche resulting in large measure from a proxy war in Ecuador that strongly resembles the Vietnam War. DeLillo parallels the quasi-martial language of American football with the national political discourse of the early 1970s, making clear the satirical intention of the fact that coach Emmett Creed’s constant enjoinders—“Hit somebody, Hit somebody. Hit somebody” (10)—result in players whose “thoughts are wholesomely commonplace, [whose] actions uncomplicated by history, enigma, holocaust or dream” (4). In each case a pervasive and calculated us-versus-them mentality cultivates ignorance and propagates violent conflict.

The Soviet Union under Brezhnev’s rule presented a similar situation. The government sought to create public support for military spending through massive anti-American propaganda campaigns even as the populace suffered from endemic shortages of food and other necessities. The massive political education system in the Soviet Union that had existed since the 1920s had always sought not only to shape public opinion but to assure its conformity with Marxist-Leninist philosophy. As Remington observes, it was “not understanding or belief that the propaganda system aspire[d] to achieve in its audience but the standardization of public discourse” (86). However, Sinyavsky points out in Soviet Civilization that a new set of potential cognitive dissonances demanded a refinement of this goal during the early years of the cold war: “Everything pointed toward chauvinism: the Soviet Union’s aggressive policy, the cold war with the West, the abrupt increase in anti-Western sentiment. Propaganda’s job was to present yesterday’s allies—the British and the Americans—as accomplices of fascism. . . . It was necessary to compensate ideologically and psychologically for the terrible losses incurred during the war and camouflage with extravagant phraseology the low standard of living. . . . Thus the patriotic hysteria began, the limitless self-glorification” (251–52). As relations with China worsened during the 1960s, the economy sputtered in the 1970s, and the Red Army became bogged down in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the need for such rhetorical smokescreens only intensified.

Page 44 →Given its ubiquity in Soviet culture, it is not surprising to see propaganda crop up frequently as a theme in subversive satire, including almost all of the Russian works mentioned in this study. For example, the satire of official Soviet language in Alexander Zinoviev’s work is encyclopedic and blunt. Ziiaiushchie vysoty (1976; The Yawning Heights), whose title puns on a stock phrase of Soviet propaganda,¹⁴ is a mock sociology of Ibansk (“Fucktown”), a society governed largely through constant repetition of the utterly irrational tenets of “soc-ism.” In Svetloe budushchee (1978; The Radiant Future), Zinoviev makes an elaborate physical grotesque out of another stock phrase of Soviet propaganda by depicting the decay of a metallic monument that spells out the words “Long Live Communism—The Radiant Future of All Mankind!” (7). Aleshkovsky’s novels focus more on the producers than the products of propaganda. In Ruka (1980; The Hand) he creates a protagonist whose cleverness allows him to turn the duplicitous power of official language against the same Soviet system that killed his father and destroyed his childhood village, while Kengeru (1981; Kangaroo) tells the absurd story of a two-bit criminal and the elaborately managed, hyperpropagandistic show trial in which he is charged with raping and murdering a kangaroo.

Iskander’s Kroliki i udavy (1982; Rabbits and Boa Constrictors) is a complex animal fable that examines how propaganda enables the kind of chauvinism that Sinyavsky describes. The novel concerns a society of rabbits beginning to realize that the hypnotic power exerted upon them by preying boa constrictors is a myth. Finally Voinovich’s Moskva 2042 (1987; Moscow 2042) satirically envisions what the Soviet Union’s “radiant future” might look like, in the process illustrating Sinyavsky’s claim about propaganda serving to “camouflage” Soviet society’s flaws. Voinovich depicts a Potemkin village of a state in which propaganda is so far-reaching that individuals have ceased to discriminate between food and excrement. Taken together these works form a comprehensive satirical critique of both the Soviet propaganda organs and their products.

Maltby identifies a third source of negative influence on cold war American language in what he calls the “technologist-rationalist ideology [that] is understood to acclaim the benefits of systematization, ‘cybernetization,’ . . . and global planning, the goal being the technical-bureaucratic organization of production and consumption” (34). Essential to this ideology is “the tendency to think of all social practices in systemic terms—wholes to which all parts (‘subsystems’) must be adapted or adjusted in order to optimize the system’s ‘performance’” (34). Systemic thinking was the organizing principle of the state-controlled Soviet economy, especially the intricate five-year plans that guided most aspects of production until the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In fact Maltby’s notion of “parts” being “adapted or adjusted in order to optimize the system’s ‘performance’” recalls the “from each according to his ability” portion of the familiar Marxist-Leninist dictum. Mikhail Epstein Page 45 →discusses what he calls the “hyperreality” of Soviet economic reports, stating that “no one knows . . . whether the harvests reported in Stalin’s or Brezhnev’s Russia were actually reaped, but the fact that the number of tilled hectares or tons of milled grain was always reported down to the tenth of a percent gave these simulacra the character of hyperreality” (“Postmodernism, Communism and Sots-Art” 5). This hyperreality is created in part because the government needs harvest reports for the abstract purpose of validating the systemic thinking behind Soviet economic policy than for the “real” purpose of feeding the populace. In this way even the most mundane economic statistic became a possible source of linguistic distortion in the service of ideology.

In Zhizn’ i neobychainye prikliucheniia soldata Ivana Chonkina (1977; The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin), Voinovich uses forged harvest figures in his satire on the insubstantiality of Soviet life. From the first Voinovich shows how the bureaucratic state system has tacitly agreed to cooperate in obscuring the dismal failure of agricultural collectivization. Ivan Golubev, chairman of the kolkhoz (collective farm) in the town of Krasnoye,¹⁵ is introduced in a drunken stupor, as a result of “questioning Granny Dunya on the subject of her home brew” (9). The narrator, who frequently intrudes into the narrative frame to add folksy asides or tangential anecdotes, immediately begins the process of confusing reality by pointing out that “things at the kolkhoz were going poorly. Not what you would call very poorly, you could even say things were going well, except that they were getting worse and worse every year” (10). The narrator states that Golubev, as would be expected in a system that putatively abhors corruption and slackness, “lived in constant expectation of the arrival of some committee of inspection—then he’d pay for everything, and in full” (10). In fact, although Golubev still fears that “someday a Maximum Responsibility Committee of Inspection would suddenly appear and have final say in the matter,” his experience with the “various district inspectors, and examiners” who have inquired after the affairs of the kolkhoz invariably involve nothing more than “drink[ing] vodka with him while munching on lard and eggs, [after which] they’d sign the documents of certification and drive off, everything still in one piece” (10–11).

Later in the novel, Voinovich presents Golubev in the act of composing one of his falsely rosy crop reports; the narrator adds a commentary that again discloses the complicity of the entire hierarchy of power in maintaining this illusory productivity and prosperity:

Ivan Timofeyevich Golubev was sitting in his office, toiling over the composition of a report concerning haymaking in the last ten-day period. Needless to say, the report was a fraud, since there had been practically no haymaking at all during the last ten-day period. The men were leaving for the front, the women were getting them ready, some harvest that was! The District Committee, however, did not consider such reasons Page 46 →valid. Borisov cursed him out on the telephone and demanded that the plan be fulfilled. Naturally, he knew that, in times like these, he was demanding the impossible, but the paper signifying work completed was more important to him than the work itself—Borisov was also being cursed out by those over him. And so Borisov collected papers from all the kolkhozes, compiled the figures, and sent them off to the province, where further reports were compiled on the basis of the district reports, and so it went, all the way to the top. (218)

In a development that recalls Gogol’s play Revizor (1836; The Government Inspector), Golubev originally mistakes Private Ivan Chonkin, a rather inept and simple-minded Red Army soldier sent to Krasnoye to guard a malfunctioning plane, for the authority figure who will finally call him to task for failing in his duties as chairman. Golubev even goes so far as to confess to Chonkin and consequently prepares himself to be shipped off to prison.

Golubev’s fate turns out differently, though. He is arrested much later (in the sequel, Pretendent na prestol [1979; Pretender to the Throne]) on totally unrelated charges, when all of Krasnoye is accused of aiding and abetting Chonkin, himself suspected of being both a Nazi collaborator and the illegitimate son of a prerevolutionary prince. Even on this occasion, though, Golubev mistakenly believes his detention to be related to his bogus reports:

The phone rang every now and again, and representatives of various organizations requested information about the delivery of milk and meat, about the requisitioning of supplementary horses for the army, the preparation of the seed fund; they asked about the livestock, farrows, the number of laying hens and the fodder supply.

“Everything’s going according to plan,” Golubev would answer and hang up.

They’d call back. “What do you mean according to plan, when this isn’t being done and there’s none of that and that’s not happening?”

“All according to plan,” Golubev would repeat and hang up. (283)

The vindication of the plan ultimately is more important (and feasible) in this system than the inconvenient but necessary business of actually procuring and distributing food. Although the two Chonkin books are set before the cold war, the food shortages of the 1970s provide contemporary relevance for Voinovich’s satire on the inept system of Soviet agriculture.

The incongruity between the physical truth and the ideological fiction of collective farming was just one aspect of Soviet systemic thinking that satirists exposed, though. Tertz/Sinyavsky’s Liubimov (1963; The Makepeace Experiment) and Aksyonov’s Zolotaia nasha zhelezka (1980; Our Golden Ironburg) likewise address the topic along somewhat different vectors. The Makepeace Experiment details the rise and fall of Lenya Tikhomirov (“Lenny Makepeace” Page 47 →in the English translation), a would-be enlightened despot who rules a nondescript village through a combination of pseudoscience, marvelous gadgetry, and dynamic personality (literalized in the novel as a form of psychic power). Tikhomirov calamitously transforms the entire town of Liubimov (“Love-town”) into a proving ground for his oxymoronically rational-yet-mystical political philosophy, ostensibly an improvement on Soviet Communism. His “experiment” fails despite the superficial appearance of having created a utopia. Like Brezhnev, Tikhomirov cannot provide enough food for his subjects, a problem that Sinyavsky satirically implies will plague any social system that conceals rather than addresses its inherent contradictions. On the surface Our Golden Ironburg parodies the form of the relentlessly positivist Soviet “industrial novel” in telling the story of a group of scientists searching for a new subatomic particle. Through metafictional destabilization of a narrative form whose sole purpose is to glorify Soviet industry and science, Aksyonov exposes the vapidity of both the literary subgenre and the politicized (and often dubious) scientific knowledge described therein.

Systematization in American cold war culture takes on a variety of forms as well, but none was more prominent than the development of the military-industrial complex against which Eisenhower warned in his farewell address. As early as 1952, Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano questioned the ways in which the postwar industrial economy was routinizing and degrading life. The novel depicts a thoroughly mechanized United States that has arisen after a war won by technology: “It was the miracle that won the war—production with almost no manpower” (1). The outwardly tranquil society of the novel’s early pages was achieved only after “the men and women had come home, after the riots had been put down [and] after thousands had been jailed under the anti-sabotage laws,” a wholesale abandonment of the individualist and humanist values upon which the country was founded (1). The novel’s hero, Paul Proteus, manages a giant mechanized factory, the Ilium Works. As the novel progresses, he gradually rejects the values that have made him “the most important, the most brilliant man in Ilium” (1). The best apparent alternative to the vast controlling technocracy is the Ghost Shirt Movement, a group of neo-Luddite saboteurs whose goal is the destruction of the machines that produce and run everything.¹⁶ Proteus is ordered by his superiors to infiltrate and inform on this group, but instead joins them and is eventually proclaimed to be (and sacrificed as) their messiah. They begin a rebellion, which collapses after a few minor successes; by the novel’s end, Proteus is disillusioned by the complete undesirability of either system.

Not only does the dream of individuality prove to be impossible in this world, but the competition between equally undesirable modes of living also leads to violence without improvement; to paraphrase Walter Duranty’s famous apologia for Stalin’s methods, the eggs are broken, but no omelet results. Vonnegut’s vision in Player Piano is more bleak even than conventional Page 48 →dystopia, in which the power of the state is so durable and far-reaching that all efforts at revolution are doomed to fail. Vonnegut suggests that the failed revolution depicted in Player Piano would change only the outward appearance of the status quo, not the dystopian system behind it. Such criticism of the uselessness and destructiveness of counterforces that do not fundamentally subvert the established power structure is a central theme of later a new, distinct mode of cold war anti-utopianism that I call serial or systemic dystopianism.¹⁷

Whereas Player Piano focuses on the industrial element of the military-industrial complex, a host of other works satirize the military component thereof, including Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler’s Fail-Safe (1962), Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1963), Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle (1963), and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Whereas Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove both satirically refute the underlying rationales for nuclear deterrence policies, Catch-22, Cat’s Cradle, and Gravity’s Rainbow decry the logical, ethical and rhetorical deformations created and sustained by the constant militarism of the cold war. In different ways each of these novels point out that military, political, and economic interests were intertwined out of necessity during World War II, while also warning that this process has continued unabated, often clandestinely, with deleterious implications not only for democracy but potentially for the entire planet.

Finally, “conceptually impoverished discourses that impede critical reflection on society” are perhaps the overarching subject matter for subversive cold war satire and appear in some form or another in every work of fiction mentioned in this study. Maltby bases his discussion on the ideas of Herbert Marcuse and thus creates a model applicable to both sides of the cold war ideological divide: “[Marcuse] identifies a public discourse notable for its use of ‘syntactical abridgement,’ as in the propensity for acronyms and catch-phrases. It is a syntax which erodes the critical space between the parts of a sentence by condensing subject and predicate. . . . This results in propositions such as ‘the Free World’ or ‘the clean bomb’ which come across as ‘self-validating, hypnotic formulas.’ It is . . . an ‘irreconcilably anti-critical and anti-dialectical language,’ which ‘absorbs . . . the negative oppositional elements of Reason.’ Evidently, for Marcuse, this (perceived) deadening of the critical impulse in language facilitates the integration of the subject into the social order” (35–36). Whether articulated as Tanner’s “imprisoning or iniquitous” languages, as Hirshberg’s cognitive schemata, or as Iser’s “masked” fictions, intentionally debased modes of expression become a potent tool for maintaining the cold war status quo, both within the respective superpowers and from a geopolitical standpoint. As Sinyavsky notes above, such intentional limitation of critical reflection (that is, “deadening of the critical impulse in language”) is an intrinsic element of official Soviet language from Stalin onward.

Page 49 →While Maltby blames the “phenomenal profit-motivated expansion of mass-media broadcasting and publishing” in the United States for spawning modes of expression that “inhibit reflection and lack the perspectives necessary for critical analysis of the social order” (36), governmental control of the media and cultural production in general led to a similar situation in the Soviet Union. Arguably such “syntactical abridgements” form the core of all cold war satires given that both parties involved in the ideological conflict relied on a cultural mindset that did not waver, much less collapse, in the face of glaring absurdities and other cognitively untenable positions. Among the Russian works that explore such themes most fully are Aksyonov’s Say Cheese!, Iskander’s The Goatibex Constellation, Zinoviev’s The Yawning Heights and Gomo Sovietikus (1980; Homo Sovieticus), and many of the shorter pieces collected in Voinovich’s Putiom vzaimnoi perepiski (1979; In Plain Russian) and The Anti-Soviet Soviet Union. Thematically similar American works include Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle and Galápagos (1985), Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy, Ishmael Reed’s The Free-lance Pallbearers (1966), DeLillo’s White Noise, and Tim O’Brien’s The Nuclear Age (1985).

The narrator of Zinoviev’s Homo Sovieticus examines the issue of “deadened” language metanarratively by musing at length about the nature of the book he is writing. Unable to settle on a single representative genre, he decides to classify the work as a “novel-denunciation-Report-tract” and discusses how each of these constituent parts is a sham under the Soviet system. He notes that “Soviet people are trained to write Reports about everything [as] . . . an indispensable element of the Communist organization of work” (14). This work proves to be as empty an exercise as Golubev’s agricultural reports, since these reports are guided not by the desire to “do a summing-up or extract lessons, but by virtue of certain higher, mystical considerations” (15). These satirically exaggerated considerations turn out to be simply the length of the report, wholly exclusive of the ludicrous content of the subject matter:

In my Quarterly Report I once wrote that I had discovered ten new elementary particles. I did this with the purely cognitive intention of checking my theory of Reports. The director of the section sent for me. I was on the point of thinking that my theory was mistaken, but I needn’t have worried. My Report, Director said, was too short. Would I add a couple of pages? I made a demagogic declaration: the value, I said, of a Report lay not in the number of pages but in what, according to the Report, had been done. “Read what I have done,” I said, “and compare it with what the others did.” “Don’t try and fool me,” said Director calmly. “Do you think the others have done less than you?” And so I added a couple of pages to the Report in which I communicated that I had discovered a method of converting the contents of Moscow’s rubbish-bins into first-class foodstuffs. “Well done!” said Director, Page 50 →filing my Report in a bundle of other unread Reports by my colleagues. “The man who can write a good Report is a good worker” (15–16)

The narrator provides the same sort of deflating explanation for the other “genres” in his formula, ultimately making his own work a paragon of meaninglessness since it is representative of four distinct yet ultimately “impoverished discourses.”

Zinoviev savagely mocks the emptiness of Soviet Russian thought and language from the beginning of Homo Sovieticus. In the second of the hundred-plus chapters that make up the book, the narrator states, “I have a wish to get something done; but I rarely have the wish actually to do what I want to get done.” He cautions the reader not to mistake this for “a piece of dead sophistry,” claiming instead that it is “living dialectics” (9). He simplifies his problem: “I want to do something, but I don’t want to make the effort to accomplish what I want” (9). This predicament frames the discussion of the absurdity of Soviet life—and its supposedly dialectical and inevitable advancement toward Communism—that takes up the remainder of the book. The narrator claims that the paradox within his malaise points out the inability of this mode of thinking to deal with “the deepest and most complex” philosophical problems: “For instance, take the eternal Problem Number One: ‘to be or not to be?’ For the Russian it comes out in the form: ‘to b[ooz]e or not to b[ooz]e?’ And there can’t be two opinions about that: of course, b[ooz]e. And seriously, by God! Then start boozing again. Then some more. And then begin all over again. In the Russian language one can also formulate this Problem Number One in another way: ‘to be[at] or not to be[at]?’ And again there are no two ways about that: be[at]. Of course one must beat. And above all, in the face! In the West, of course, they don’t understand this, because you can’t translate Russian problems into Western languages. If you try to do that, all the romantic nuances disappear, and all the psychological profundity” (9–10; brackets in original).¹⁸ This section closes with the narrator’s disclosure that the “wish to do nothing arises in me even more often,” causing him to “make titanic efforts to accomplish my wish” (10). The propagandistic hyperbole of this passage provides the satirical contrast to the narrator’s claim that “Western thinkers see in this ‘typical Russian laziness.’ And they are wrong, as always” (10). He is right; this is not “typical Russian laziness” but the “titanic” uselessness that Zinoviev sees as endemic to Soviet society and its modes of thinking.

A gloomier satire of such cultural hollowness can be found in Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, which repeatedly invokes a mysterious holy man named Bokonon as an antithetical voice to balance out the passionate positivism expressed by other characters including scientists working for the defense industry, businessmen, and banana republic dictators. Bokonon freely admits that his philosophy is a necessarily limited construct—in Iser’s terms, he Page 51 →“discloses the fictionality” of his words—in the opening line of his quasi gospel, The Books of Bokonon: “All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies” (5). He also asserts that even though the quest for understanding is noble and proper, it is also folly to believe that such understanding is perfectible: “Nowhere does Bokonon warn against a person’s trying to discover the limits of his karass and the nature of the work God Almighty has had it do. Bokonon simply observes that such investigations are bound to be incomplete” (4). The invented notion of the karass—a “free-form” grouping of humans “that [does] God’s Will without ever discovering what they are doing” (2)—is central to the novel, both because of the term’s ultimate incomprehensibility and because of Bokonon’s claim that humans invariably and consciously order themselves into other groups (granfalloons) that are “meaningless in terms of the way God gets things done” (91). Among the granfalloons that Bokonon singles out are “the Communist Party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows—and any nation, anytime, anywhere” (91–92).

Vonnegut’s satire places blame for the novel’s concluding apocalypse on those characters guided by inflexible adherence to one or more such constructs, but especially on those who follow “the secular Antichrist figure that relentlessly hounds humanity toward species destruction: a two headed-beast, government and science” (Dewey 55). Bokonon does not intend his philosophy to serve as a simple solution to the world’s problems, since positing it as such would inherently make it just another granfalloon. As in many of Vonnegut’s other works (such as God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and Slaughterhouse-Five), the advice offered to the reader is an exhortation not only to be more discerning about one’s surroundings but also to make love for humanity as a whole the core principle of one’s personal philosophy.¹⁹

Although both the causes for and the nature of social, political, and economic problems found in the United States and the Soviet Union during the cold war differ greatly, the essential approach of subversive satirists is remarkably similar in terms of their uses of language. Parodying official modes of discourse devalues these modes by asserting meaninglessness in ideas where meanings important enough to risk nuclear destruction supposedly reside: militarism, scientific rationalism, technology, utopianism, and grossly simplified ethical binaries such as “good” versus “evil” or “us” versus “them.” Satirical subversion is achieved by first making the language itself seem absurd, then by rejecting as false the ideology that creates the system from which such instances of meaningless language spring. Various examples of this twofold technique occupy the remainder of this study.

Before setting out on a broad thematic survey of cold war satire, I wish briefly to trace the gradual infusion of satire into one of the first sustained topoi of Page 52 →the cold war: civil defense. Emergent artistic responses to official civil defense rhetoric in Great Britain and the United States served as a microcosm of cold war literature in general. In particular the chain of increasingly satirical commentaries on the effectiveness of civil defense eventually culminates in one of the iconic exemplars of cold war satire, Dr. Strangelove, thus retrospectively making it a sort of countercultural Manhattan Project for the development of a satirical approach to the cold war. A short summary of the subversion of civil defense rhetoric serves both as a model for the remainder of this study and a point of entry into the more detailed discussion of primary texts.

The civil defense movement in the United States from the late 1940s through the early 1960s powerfully exemplified how old “modes of thinking” that Einstein referred to in 1946 were both inadequate and intentionally misinformed. Predicated first on mass evacuation, “duck and cover” techniques (such as those taught to schoolchildren via “Bert the Turtle” movies), and then fallout shelters, these tactics were essential to large-scale government propaganda efforts to quell fears about atomic warfare. Even as officials privately acknowledged that civil defense was increasingly irrelevant in light of technological innovations such as the hydrogen bomb and the neutron bomb, they publicly conducted vigorous campaigns encouraging citizens to believe that American society and values could survive even a full-scale nuclear war. Along with local governments, the Federal Civil Defense Administration, established in 1950, supplied willing print and television media with plentiful information reinforcing the notion that nuclear war was not so different from conventional bombing and eminently survivable, provided one prepared for it properly. Historian Allan Winkler notes that civil defense produced few substantive results in terms of physical national security, but it did do “a good deal of cajoling of the American public” (quoted in Boyer, Bomb’s Early Light 322).²⁰

Published testimony by knowledgeable scientists largely discredited civil defense, but fictionalized works also contributed by offering less idealistic speculations about the potential behavior of the survivors of a nuclear exchange. The epitome of such works is The War Game, a film produced in 1965 by Peter Watkins for BBC television, which refused to air it on the grounds that it was overly dismal.²¹ Using a documentary style, the film simulated the hypothetical (and by many estimates understated) effects of an atomic blast on Kent, effectively functioning as a noncomic satire that shattered the rose-colored glasses through which civil defense encouraged citizens to view nuclear warfare. The War Game dramatized the effects of a nuclear explosion and, more shockingly, the resulting firestorm, fallout, radiation sickness, and deprivations, topics that official civil defense documents of the 1950s tended to downplay.²² It also suggested the vaunted spirit of cooperation, regularly invoked in optimistic British civil defense pamphlets as the reason for the country’s survival during the Blitz, would prove an untenable fantasy in the Page 53 →harsh reality of a nuclear war. For example, even before the bomb explodes, some white citizens are shown refusing to admit “colored” evacuees from the city into their homes. The inherent chaos of a plausible postnuclear scenario repeatedly thwarts the civil defense policies designed to maintain order. The film unambiguously insisted that the familiar nuclear adage about the living envying the dead would become true in the aftermath of even a relatively minor nuclear war.

But even before The War Game, British and American popular culture had already begun to point out the inherent fallacies of the civil defense campaign. Both the 1957 novel and the 1959 movie version of On the Beach question of the effectiveness of civil defense. Its plot revolves around the lives of several characters awaiting the inevitable arrival of a deadly radioactive cloud in Australia after a nuclear war confined entirely to the Northern Hemisphere. Some characters, mainly the women and the somewhat emasculated British scientist Julian (played by Fred Astaire in the film version), express mild horror at the situation. The remainder of the country goes on living life as normally as possible²³ until “the time” (of the cloud’s arrival) comes, and then they commit mass suicide rather than wait to die of radiation sickness. Despite the legitimate criticism that it “made world extinction a romantic condition” (Weart 219),²⁴ On the Beach is not simply a conventionally lachrymose tale of tragically doomed love. Admittedly the extensive development of the romantic relationships served to obscure the real message for much of the reading and viewing audience: “Nearly everyone [in On the Beach] was already accepting the gradual approach of what the film called ‘the time,’ the nuclear midnight. In ignoring this peril, was not the world public like the fictional Australians who refused to acknowledge imminent death?” (Weart 219). Nevertheless both the movie and the book implicitly ask how survival of a nuclear war could be possible in a warring nation, if no one can survive in a country where bombs and missiles do not even fall.

The Eisenhower administration was sufficiently apprehensive of public reaction in the wake of the film’s release that it declared in a special State Department report that On the Beach “grossly misconstrues the basic nature of man” and that it “is inconceivable that even in the event of a nuclear war, mankind would not have the strength and ingenuity to take all possible steps toward self-preservation” (quoted in Boyer, Fallout 110). On the other hand, chroniclers such as John Hersey, whose Hiroshima was published barely a year after the use of the atomic bomb against Japan, and psychologists such as Robert Jay Lifton argued that strength and ingenuity become irrelevant when one feels there is no reason to survive. On the Beach, like The War Game, clearly follows this latter line of reasoning—albeit with a markedly different cinematic aesthetic—in denying the substance of civil defense rhetoric.

In a somewhat different vein, Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone television series aired an episode titled “The Shelter” on September 29, 1961. In this episode Page 54 →all cooperation between a previously congenial group of neighbors erodes in the wake of a CONELRAD warning.²⁵ A family retreats into its shelter and refuses admittance to neighbors who have not prepared shelters of their own; they refuse on the perfectly reasonable grounds that the shelter is stocked with food, water, and air for only three people. The neighbors grovel pitifully for admittance then attempt to break into the shelter; a scene of panicked violence threatens just as the all-clear sounds. As Boyer writes in By the Bomb’s Early Light, the “shaken neighbors recognize that they have been destroyed as a community almost as surely as if the bomb had actually fallen” (354). Civil defense materials and novels like Pat Frank’s 1959 postapocalyptic best seller Alas, Babylon suggested that Americans’ willingness to help each other out in times of adversity would get the country through even the toughest postnuclear times.²⁶ Serling’s fiction speculated that the actual response would be considerably less hopeful.

Released less than two years after “The Shelter” aired, Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove also contained a critique of civil defense, thereby setting an example of wholesale satirical subversion of one of the central policies of the American government during the cold war. First a poster featuring the slogan “Civil Defense is Your Business!” and a drawing of a smiling family in a shelter, saying “Gee Dad! Thanks for thinking of us!” is visible in a pivotal scene three-quarters of the way through the film. The poster continues the film’s satirical use of conspicuously self-contradictory language. The ubiquitous billboards around Burpelson Air Force Base proclaiming “Peace Is Our Profession” establish this pattern, and President Merkin Muffley picks up this theme later when he tells the Russian ambassador and General Buck Turgidson that they are not allowed to fight in the “War Room.” The poster also provides a satirical commentary on the ineffectuality of civil defense, since Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (behind whom the poster appears) is thwarted at every turn in his efforts to perform the ultimate act of civil defense, namely, providing the president with a code required to call back a bomb wing that has been sent to attack Russia by an insane American general. The satire is especially poignant since Mandrake is temporarily prevented from fulfilling his mission by a putative ally, an American colonel named “Bat” Guano. Instead of assisting Mandrake in making his important phone call to Washington, Colonel Guano semiliterately accuses him of being a “prevert” (largely because he fails to recognize Mandrake’s RAF uniform as that of an ally) and seems more worried about the sanctity of the Coca-Cola company’s property (a soft-drink machine containing change that Mandrake needs to place a phone call to the White House) than the imminent threat of a nuclear war. As with Milo Minderbinder’s decidedly unfriendly “friendly fire” in Catch-22, the greatest danger in this situation comes from the sheer irrationality of one’s own putative allies.

Page 55 →The film satirizes civil defense again in its final scene, as the activation of the Soviet “doomsday machine” has become inevitable. Doctor Strangelove, a former Nazi scientist now in charge of the American nuclear weapons program, outlines his plan for the “future of the human race,” much of which resembles, albeit in grotesquely deformed ways, American civil defense strategy of the early 1960s. Strangelove urges the president not to “rule out the chance to preserve a nucleus of human specimens . . . at the bottom of some of our deeper mine shafts.” As he continues his speech, he struggles with his left arm, hitherto paralyzed but now dangerously animated and independent. It tries alternately to strangle him and to extend itself in a Nazi salute, thereby implying a connection between Strangelove’s survival scheme and the eugenics of the Third Reich. Strangelove’s explanation of how American society could persist in mine shafts combines civil defense rhetoric with a scathing parody of the kind of jingoistic “Golden Age” language used by R. W. Langer and other advocates of nuclear power in the 1940s and 1950s:²⁷

Strangelove: It would not be difficult, Mein Führer! Nuclear reactors could . . . I’m sorry, Mr. President. . . . Nuclear reactors could provide power almost indefinitely. Greenhouses could maintain plant life, animals could be bred and slaughtered! A quick survey would have to be made of all the available mine sites in the country, but I would guess that dwelling space for several hundred thousands of our people could easily be provided.

Muffley: Well I would hate to have to decide who stays up and who goes down.

Strangelove Well, that would not be necessary, Mr. President. It could be easily accomplished with a computer. A computer could be programmed to accept factors from youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence and a cross-section of necessary skills. Of course, it would be absolutely vital that our top government and military men be included to foster and impart the required principles of leadership and tradition. [His arm, seemingly against his will, gives a “Heil Hitler” salute.] Naturally, they would breed prodigiously. There would be much time and little to do. But with the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of, say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they then could work their way back to the present gross national product within, say, twenty years.

Muffley: But look here, doctor. Wouldn’t this nucleus of survivors be so grief-stricken and anguished that they would . . . well . . . envy the dead and not want to go on living?

Strangelove: No, sir . . . excuse me [fights with arm]. . . . Also when they go down into the mine, everyone would still be alive. There would be no Page 56 →shocking memories and the prevailing emotion will be one of nostalgia for those left behind, combined with a spirit of bold curiosity for the adventure ahead!

Their patriotism and sexuality equally aroused, the audience in the War Room leans closer to hear Dr. Strangelove’s ideas, at which point General Turgidson suddenly jumps onto a bench to give an impassioned speech that threatens to extend the arms race into the bomb shelters: “I think it would be extremely, uh, naive of us to imagine that these new developments are going to cause any change in Soviet expansionist policy. I mean, we must be increasingly on the alert to prevent them from taking over other mine shaft space in order to breed more prodigiously than we do, thus knocking us out through superior numbers when we emerge! Mr. President, we must not allow . . . a mineshaft gap!” Turgidson’s absurd reasoning that the cold war will continue even after the eradication of all life from the planet’s surface rests on the unshakable belief that elaborate civil defense strategies like Dr. Strangelove’s can actually work to preserve societies (and their values) intact regardless of their near-total destruction.²⁸ Any remaining sympathy among the audience for such a sentiment is erased by Kubrick’s immediate jump cut at the end of Turgidson’s oration to stock footage of nuclear explosions, implying that the Doomsday Machine has been triggered and that the end is truly near.

Despite the refrain playing over the closing scene of burgeoning mushroom clouds (“We’ll meet again / Don’t know where, don’t know when”), Kubrick chooses not to end his film with the kind of pointed direct address to the audience that Stanley Kramer uses at the end of On the Beach. That film closes with a wide shot of a banner hanging over a deserted Melbourne square. As a dramatic orchestral chord sounds, the camera zooms in on the banner so that we can read its cautionary warning: “There Is Still Time . . . Brother.” Kubrick seems less certain, but the ambiguous optimism of the ironically juxtaposed final song does allow the audience a brief moment of comic relief from the film’s satiric indignation. The ending also restores some sense that avoiding a scenario like that depicted in the film is both desirable and necessary if “we” are actually to “meet again some sunny day.” The satire shows that Russian and American secrecy, militarism, conspiracy, bureaucracy, warhead diplomacy, and emphasis on technology over humanity have created a nightmarish, self-destructive world in which love, especially when directed (as the subtitle states) toward the bomb, is indeed strange. As such it provides a suitable starting point for the discussion of the works of fiction that use satire in an attempt to subvert the cultures that spawned these various characteristics.