Kiril Tomoff's book is a serious, innovative study of the beginnings of the cultural Cold War, which officially was presented by its participants as “cultural diplomacy.” Tomoff focuses on an especially important period of the Cold War: the transition from late Stalinism immediately after World War II to the easing of tensions under Nikita Khrushchev, which eventually became a model for the cultural dialogue and competition between the two sides not only during the East-West détente of the 1970s but also in the post-Soviet years under Vladimir Putin.
Using archival documents and engaging the recent literature on the cultural Cold War, as well as Joseph Nye's studies about “soft power,” Tomoff persuasively demonstrates how classical music became an integral part of both competition and integration in the two rival imperial projects—the U.S. and Soviet—after World War II. As he argues, despite the Soviet Union's initial short-term success in a music...