Wind of Change Brought by Art and Culture
Aristotle, Sergey Parajanov, Frida Kahlo, Robespierre, Lenin. All of these people knowingly or unknowingly proved the emptiness of any frames. Some through the means of art, some through fraud and the others through deception. These are the people who had a major positive or negative impact on the people, living in different parts of the world, through their deeds. These examples proved that social, political and economic change have cultural and art implications too (1990 opening of the McDonalds in Moscow).
Art and culture erase all the frames. A cultural uprising or an emergence of a new phenomenon in arts in one part of the world affects people in the other part of the world and the state borders are never able to stop it. The Soviet Union is a great example of how much the arts and culture impacted its social, political, and economic life.
“Everything is beautiful in the frames,
But what are the frames, who set them?
Who measured and cut those frames?…
People shaped in these frames
Are everywhere.” — Paruyr Sevak (1924–1971), Soviet Armenian Poet
Try to define a universal standard of beauty, a universal standard of good taste in music or fashion or art. It is impossible. It limits freedom. It prohibits creativity, discourages diversity, and creates artificial boundaries. It was all framed and pre-decided for the people living in the Soviet Union. This never meant that people stopped being curious about the outside world. The frames were actually empty and it was just a deception. That is the reason why even before the rise of the internet, the Iron Curtain, serving as an ideological and cultural boundary between the Soviet Union and all the others, collapsed.
Art and culture define us, humans. Therefore they can impact and change us, our environment, and our approaches. There are truly great examples from the last century that had an impact on the deterioration and later collapse of the Soviet Union. For example, during the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow, a bunch of common foreigners from a totally different culture eventually got the chance to enter the Soviet Union and realize that bears don’t run crazy on the roads and the Soviets got the chance to see how diverse the world is. Arno Babajanyan’s rock song “The Beauty Queen” written in 1965, at a time when rock was prohibited in the Soviet Union, changed the Soviet mindset and later helped to expand the boundaries to the point that in August 1989 for the first time Western heavy-metal acts had been permitted to play in Moscow and Scorpions had the chance to perform their “Wind of Change” which became the anthem for the end of the Cold War. Most importantly, the former British spy Leslie Woodhead claims that The Beatles played a big role in bringing down communism. “The Beatles played an important part in triggering a cultural revolution and the cultural revolution led on to washing of totalitarianism,” said Mr. Woodhead (CBS News, 2013).
In a country where every piece of art and every note of music had to align with the communist ideology, cracks in the system were unavoidable. Interaction between the Soviets and the others, though very limited ones, happened to affect all the sides involved, not instantly of course, but over time for sure. The big part of these interactions is the exchange of ideas and cultural traits. These are the two main components of change. It is also certain that these limited interactions between the Soviet Union and the conditional West had a social, economic and political impact. Russian writer and critic Artemy Troitsky said that “In the big bad west they’ve had whole huge institutions that spent millions of dollars trying to undermine the Soviet system. And I’m sure the impact of all those stupid cold war institutions has been much, much smaller than the impact of the Beatles” (Vulliamy, 2013). To cover those cracks, certain political decisions were made like Mikhail Gorbachev’s ‘glasnost’ and democratization which eventually helped to ease the path towards the collapse of the Soviet Union.
However, this doesn’t mean that the arts and culture of the Soviet Union didn’t impact the world. For example, Aram Khachaturian, a Soviet-Armenian composer, started in 1950 touring around the globe with his concerts. He performed in most of the European and American cities (e.g., Prague, Warsaw, Berlin, Sofia, Budapest, Bucharest, Vienna, Paris, Rome, Brussels, London, Helsinki, Leipzig, Salzburg, Reykjavik, Washington, New York, Chicago) and his concerts were always a success (“Khachaturian as a Conductor,” n/d). Mr. Khachaturian also had “extremely interesting meetings: with the Queen of Belgium, Elizabeth, and the Pope of Rome, John 23th, with Jean Sibelius, Arturo Benedetti Michelangelo, Ernest Anserme and Nadia Boulanger, Charlie Chaplin, Sophia Loren, and Ernest Hemingway…” (“Khachaturian as a Conductor,” n/d). All of these unique interactions affected both sides. The same is true in the case of Sergey Parajanov. Parajanov’s“Color of Pomegranates” revolutionized the Soviet movie industry and had a long-lasting impact to the point that Lady Gaga got inspired by it when writing the “911” song released in 2020. These are only a few examples of how the Soviet Union also impacted the world but, certainly, there are many more.
References
CBS News (2013), The Beatles: Bringing down the Soviet Union, Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDWUJkWnaJQ
Virtual Museum of Aram Khachaturian (n/d), Life and Creative Work, Retrieved from
http://www.khachaturian.am/eng/biography.htm
Virtual Museum of Aram Khachaturian (n/d), Khachaturian as a Conductor, Retrieved from http://www.khachaturian.am/eng/conductor.htm
Vulliamy, E., (2013), For young Soviets, the Beatles were a first, mutinous rip in the iron curtain, Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/apr/20/beatles-soviet-union-first-rip-iron-curtain
Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia (2021, June 2). Aram Khachaturian. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Aram-Khachaturian
