Degeneration Gap

Andreas Huyssen

  • The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War by David Caute
    Oxford, 788 pp, £30.00, September 2003, ISBN 0 19 924908 3

The struggle for cultural supremacy between the Soviet Union and the United States began as soon as Nazi Germany was defeated. Waged primarily in Europe, it came to an end decades before the Soviet Union collapsed. Inside the Soviet Union, cultural and scholarly contact with the West slowly but steadily eroded the ideological cohesiveness of the Soviet elites and by the time The Gulag Archipelago was published in the West in the mid-1970s, Soviet Communism had already lost what little intellectual cachet it had left in Europe.

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