Page vii →Introduction

I only ever cared about the man. . . . I never gave a fig for the ideologies. . . . I never saw institutions as being worthy of their parts, or policies as much other than excuses for not feeling. Man, not the mass, is what our calling is about. It was man who ended the Cold War in case you didn’t notice. . . . And the ideologies trailed after these impossible events like condemned prisoners, as ideologies do when they’ve had their day. Because they have no heart of their own. They’re the whores and angels of our striving selves.

John le Carré, The Secret Pilgrim (1990)

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, relations between the United States and Russia have progressed through several stages. From the initial flurry of optimism about (and monetary investment in) Russia’s future as a new democracy and global trading partner, through fears of a return to Communism (or worse, the hypernationalism exemplified by Vladimir Zhirinovsky during the mid- to late 1990s) and an initially warm but increasingly strained friendship between Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush, American attitudes toward its former enemy have vacillated considerably since George H. W. Bush’s proclamation of a “New World Order” in January 1991. To be sure, things have changed, and all-out nuclear apocalypse has been largely forestalled—if only to be replaced by a host of alternate, less totalized, but no less immediate (at least in the popular imagination) threats, ranging from so-called rogue nations to stateless terrorist organizations such as al-Qaida. I believe this tendency is a dual effect of governments peopled largely with individuals who cut their teeth during the cold war and an incomplete, perhaps intentionally hobbled, effort to understand the ways in which the cold war was conducted.

As a result the philosophical and political landscape of the post–cold war world is dominated by volatility, from the economic catastrophes threatened by the 1997 Asian economic crisis and again by the international banking meltdown of 2008–9, to regional conflicts with global significance (such as NATO’s 1999 military intervention in the Balkans, the resurgence of the Palestinian intifada, and the long-standing Kashmir border dispute between India Page viii →and Pakistan), and finally to the growing influence of various forms of religious fundamentalism reacting against the generally secularist and rationalist tendencies of the past century. Despite one of its greatest periods of sustained economic growth through the 1990s, the United States also witnessed bitter political infighting at the national level and localized outbreaks of violence such as the Oklahoma City bombing or the Columbine shootings that seemingly alluded to disturbances in the ostensibly healthy national psyche. As the boom years subsided, these disturbances were exacerbated, first in the bitterly contested presidential election of 2000 and later in the national and cultural response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, especially the decision to go to war against Iraq in March 2003. Russia has likewise proceeded erratically in its efforts to move away from the unpleasant past of the cold war, including its continuing problems with rebellion in Chechnya, its lingering tendency toward authoritarianism in suppressing internal dissent, and its mixed results in retaining a preeminent role in global politics and economics.

Although only a small and relatively reactionary minority in either the United States or Russia advocates a return to the superpower rivalry of the cold war, the tumultuous situation of the early twenty-first century hints at a lingering social unease about the two nations’ recent past. Given the nuclear tension of varying intensity that existed from 1949, when the Soviets successfully exploded their first atomic bomb, until 1991, when the cold war effectively ended along with the Soviet Union, one obvious source of this cultural trauma is not difficult to identify.¹ Any diagnosis of contemporary cultural maladies must consider the shortcomings of the exalted (and exaggerated) rhetorical edifice of the “New World Order” the cold war’s victors erected atop the rubble of the Berlin Wall and innumerable toppled statues of Lenin. If the initial American cultural response to the end of the cold war was understandably celebratory (if perhaps overly self-congratulatory), it also lacked substantive inquiry into the potentially deleterious after-effects of nearly fifty years of extreme anxiety. Likewise the furious dash to “de-Sovietize” Russia under the iconic prodemocracy figure of Boris Yeltsin in the early and mid-1990s tempered widespread efforts to delve deeply into the past.² As statesman George Kennan, whose 1946 “Long Telegram” to Harry Truman from Moscow indirectly helped define the cold war in its earliest days, argued in a New York Times op-ed piece on October 28, 1992, the end of the cold war “is a fit occasion for satisfaction but also for sober re-examination of the part we took in its origin and long continuation. It is not a fit occasion for pretending that the end of it was a great triumph for anyone” (A21).

My response to Kennan’s call for such “sober re-examination” specifically involves reexamining a group of socially conscious writers of satirical fiction who began, well before 1992, to question the various forces that contributed to the “origin and long continuation” of the cold war. Although the literature Page ix →of the cold war period has been studied extensively, in terms of not only its literary lineage but also its historical context, precious few critics have compared works by both Russian and American writers of satirical fiction that endeavor to condemn and in due course subvert the established power structure. Such a comparison yields a complex of thematic and structural similarities that transcends specific national/cultural origins. The cold war was a conflict that inextricably linked the governments and citizens of both countries, even as they ostensibly separated themselves from one another with ideological barriers. Similarly the literature that resisted and/or rejected the premises that guided this conflict is not confined by national borders, even though many of its creators and its physical manifestations—that is, printed texts—were. Together these works represent a thoroughgoing humanistic refutation of the cold war and its operative doctrines, an alternative to the exclusionary binary logic of the time. My goal in this book is first to reveal the existence and the scope of such nonaligned critiques and then to evaluate their philosophical merits. In my view such a process is an important step in addressing the cultural damage of living for so long “under the nuclear Sword of Damocles,” as John F. Kennedy called it in his September 25, 1961, address to the United Nations.

Although triumphalist discourses, especially those associated with neo-conservatism, are perhaps the most robust forces affecting the retrospective cultural attitudes toward the cold war in the United States, they are not the only ones whose insistent nationalism threatens to oversimplify and thereby distort the legacy of the cold war by marginalizing anyone who refused to take sides in the conflict, to say nothing of those who cast their lot with the “losing” side. A substantial number of condemnations have originated from within the intellectual Left as well. Of especial interest to me are the denunciations of literary authors who question(ed) fundamental notions of American self-image. Such allegations generally imply that raising such doubts during perilous times such as the cold war is at worst treasonous, at best woefully misguided.

In his Achieving Our Country (1998), for example, Richard Rorty singles out Richard Condon’s Manchurian Candidate (1959), Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1990), Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991), and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992) as “novels not of social protest but rather of rueful acquiescence in the end of American hopes” (3). Rorty’s interpretation is predicated on the belief that pride in American national identity is a necessary precondition for ethical national policies: “Those who hope to persuade a nation to exert itself need to remind their country of what it can take pride in as well as what it should be ashamed of. They must tell inspiring stories about episodes and figures in the nation’s past—episodes and figures to which the country should remain true” (3–4). I believe that his claim that writers such as Condon, Pynchon, Stephenson, and Silko fail in this task because Page x →they “view the United States of America . . . as something we must hope will be replaced, as soon as possible, by something utterly different” (7) is wildly off the mark in equating strident criticism of a system’s flaws with rejection of that system in toto. The writers that Rorty censures—as is the case with all of the writers included in this study—revisit the assumptions that underlie the moral imperative to “remain true” to particular “episodes and figures” in the nation’s past and present. They no more rule out the possibility of national pride than Sinclair Lewis did in satirizing the Babbitts of the 1920s; however, they also suggest, from a variety of perspectives, that there are ethical and moral standards that trump parochially nationalistic ones, especially those that have, for whatever reason, become resistant to scrutiny.

Silko articulated such a perspective in her novel Ceremony (1977), in which she describes the atomic bomb—developed, constructed, and tested on land taken from Native Americans—as “witchery’s final ceremonial sand painting.” This grave situation has created a new, if also perhaps unrecognized, universal alliance that transcends race or nationality: “From that time on, human beings were one clan again, united by the fate the destroyers planned for all of them, for all living things; united by a circle of death that devoured people in cities twelve thousand miles away, victims who had never known these mesas, who had never seen the delicate colors of the rocks which boiled up their slaughter” (228). Although Silko suggests earlier in the novel that European colonization was also an effect of the “witchery” that resulted in the bomb, she also makes it clear that the “destroyers” mentioned in the above passage are not just white people. In fact Betonie, an old medicine man and the moral center of Ceremony, corrects Tayo, the novel’s protagonist, when he tries to make precisely such an association: “The old man shook his head. ‘That is the trickery of the witchcraft,’ he said. ‘They want us to believe all evil resides with white people. Then we will look no further to see what is really happening. They want us to separate ourselves from white people, to be ignorant and helpless as we watch our own destruction. But white people are only the tools that the witchery manipulates; and I tell you, we can deal with white people, with their machines and their beliefs. We can because we invented white people; it was Indian witchery that made white people in the first place’” (122). Betonie’s words certainly suggest a state of existence that would be “utterly different” from the status quo of the novel’s post–World War II American setting; however, there is also a clear imperative to find and to redeem a shared identity that is more inclusive and less destructive than that of the segregated, nationalistic society that produced reservations and atomic bombs. Silko ardently derides the United States of the early cold war as an outgrowth of an older “witchery” but equally ardently rejects any tribalistic moral exceptionalism in formulating a cure to this condition. Betonie’s insistence on the need for change in traditional ceremonies articulates Silko’s position succinctly: “Things which don’t shift and grow are Page xi →dead things. They are the things the witchery people want. Witchery works to scare people, to make them fear growth. But it has always been necessary, and more than ever now, it is. Otherwise we won’t make it. We won’t survive” (116). Silko’s tone in Ceremony is neither one of “rueful acquiescence” nor righteous vengeance, but of insistence that one must break the spells that promote violence and division before peace and goodness can return to the world. In this regard she stands in rhetorical solidarity with many, if not all, of the writers I will examine in this study.

Rorty defends his support for the cold war by invoking his pedigree as part of “the anticommunist reformist Left in mid-century,” a comment that illustrates what I find to be an overly reductive attitude toward antiauthoritarianism common in the aftermath of the cold war. While attributing a kind of reform-minded patriotism to himself and to others like him, he claims that the new generation of leftists abandoned all hope of changing their own country into something better: “They wanted to hear that America was a very different sort of place, a much worse place, than their parents and teachers had told them it was. . . . For if you turn out to be living in an evil empire (rather than, as you had been told, a democracy fighting an evil empire) then you have no responsibility to your country; you are accountable only to humanity” (66). The rigid binary within Rorty’s rhetoric—are one’s choices truly limited to an “evil empire” or “a democracy fighting an evil empire”?—is not so different from the more overtly nationalistic “my country, right or wrong” thinking that he presumably encountered in his activist days and that vigorously resurfaced in American political discourse in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. If all flaws within national behavior must be signs of either something irreparably (because “deeply”) wrong or “mistakes correctable by reform,” then branding someone as a “revolutionary” (and subsequently dismissing them, as Rorty does) becomes a simple task. Rorty matter-of-factly denies the possibility that the atmosphere of the cold war might have created or exposed problems within the country that actually did make it “a much worse place” than it had been or that it claimed to be.

I concur with Rorty’s assertion that “nothing a nation has done should make it impossible for a constitutional democracy to regain self-respect. To say that certain acts do make this impossible is to abandon the secular, anti-authoritarian vocabulary of shared social hope in favor of . . . a vocabulary built on the notion of sin” (32). However, Rorty overlooks the extent to which the cold war was perpetuated by both sides using precisely this latter kind of rhetoric, usually attributing “sin” of some kind to the enemy while claiming “purity” for oneself, whether through dialectical materialism or puritanical nationalism. Many of the American writers examined in this study explicitly satirize exactly this sort of self-sanctifying rhetoric in its cold war setting. Furthermore the deflation of Marxist-Leninist propaganda about the inevitably glorious future of Communism is practically inescapable in dissident Soviet Page xii →satire. The point, thus, is not that such writers themselves “abandon . . . [the] vocabulary of shared social hope” but that they very clearly do adhere to and even defend it by demonstrating the ways in which various powers-that-be have callously misused the “vocabulary built on the notion of sin” to further their own ends. The writers I examine herein may feel themselves accountable to their country (if not necessarily to particular institutions and leaders) to some extent, but any “social hope” they invoke is shared among humanity as a whole, not merely a subset thereof.

Refusing to fight the cold war, regardless of which side one was being asked to fight on, meant rejecting an ideological conscription that required the acceptance of a particular rhetoric of national, political, economic, and often cultural superiority. Rorty complains that writers like Pynchon, Silko, and Stephenson were either unable or unwilling “to formulate a legislative program, to join a political movement, or to share in a national hope” (8–9), as though these three were both equivalently reform-minded gestures and the only forms of meaningful sociopolitical action. His insistence on separating participation in political processes from participation in political dialogue is problematic precisely because it denies any reformative power to a writer who does not propose a course of action that can be applied directly to improving existing political institutions. This book argues that the act of satirically recontextualizing the language of the public sphere during the cold war is inherently political because of the extent to which that language was intentionally controlled and, by extension, corrupted by the political elite of both superpowers. In my view it was satirists, both Russian and American, who acted as genuinely conscientious objectors to the cold war by pointing out the fallacies, self-serving fabrications, and otherwise disingenuous rhetoric and policy that kept it alive for nearly fifty years. I find dismissal of passionate criticism of a half-century’s dangerous and occasionally deceitful policy as “rueful acquiescence in the end of American hopes” disturbingly close to jingoism, no matter the location on the political spectrum from which such an interpretation arises.