Category: Voices from the Archives

When it comes to theatre, no one can bring people together quite like Shakespeare, his works being well-known and much performed across Eastern Europe, even at the height of the Cold War.

The Royal Shakespeare Company’s 1964 tour to celebrate the 400^th anniversary of the Bard’s birth was met with great enthusiasm behind the Iron Curtain. Bucharest was one of the cities in the eastern bloc visited by the company.

In today’s show we’re bringing you a rare recording from what was to become one of the most memorable theatre productions to be staged in communist-era Romania: the legendary staging of King Lear by Peter Brook featuring Paul Scofield as Lear and Diana Rigg as Cordelia.

With the US presidential elections coming up, let’s cast our look back in time to the first visit by an American president to Romania: Richard Nixon, at the beginning of August 1969, less than two weeks after the moon landing. This was also the first state visit by an American president to a socialist country.

For Romania’s then leader Nicolae Ceausescu, this was an immense foreign policy success. After coming to power in 1965, he had continued on the path initiated by his predecessor, steering the country further away from the Soviet Union to pursue a more autonomous foreign policy. Most notably, Ceausescu publicly denounced the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, when troops from four fellow Warsaw Pact states moved into Czechoslovakia to crack down on a programme of reforms. Despite being itself a member of the Warsaw Pact, Romania refused to take part in the invasion and its leader vehemently condemned it, earning a lot of sympathy from the West.

Richard Nixon’s visit to Romania may be seen as a reflection of this, while also marking a shift in US foreign policy, that of forging closer ties with socialist countries based on the idea of “realpolitik”; this new spirit of realism meant that countries governed by different ideologies and social systems could cooperate in areas where they had a shared interest.

President Nixon was received with great enthusiasm in Romania, not only by the country’s officials, but also ordinary citizens, with 1 million people reportedly taking part in the welcome events. The Romanian press of the day gave wide coverage to his visit, including Radio Romania, whose archive contains extensive live reports from the official festivities held.

Romania went on to host three more American presidents: Gerald R Ford in 1975, and, after the fall of the communist regime, Bill Clinton, in 1997, and George W Bush, in 2002 and again in 2008.

At the end of June 1964, Bucharest would host the executive committee of the World Federation of Scientific Workers, a non-governmental organisation bringing together trade unions and associations from the world of science and technology. C. F. Powell, who was also the president of the federation, travelled to Bucharest to attend the committee and his visit is documented in the Radio Romania archives.
Professor Powell had become well known internationally as an outspoken advocate for the abolition of nuclear weapons and international cooperation between scientists, irrespective of the political alignment of their countries. He had played a major role in the establishment of CERN and, in 1955, had been one of 11 signatories, alongside Bertrand Russell and Alfred Einstein, of a manifesto warning of the dangers of nuclear weapons at a time when the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union was in full swing and fears were growing of a possible nuclear war.
At the time, socialist Romania was itself a strong advocate of peace and international cooperation and disarmament, in particular nuclear disarmament. The country had also begun to distance itself from the Soviet Union and pursue a more independent foreign policy, seeing ties with international scientific bodies as a way to play a more prominent role on the world stage. On a national level, the regime placed great emphasis on scientific and technical education as an engine of economic development.
In a talk to reporters in Bucharest, Professor Powell called on scientists to play a more active role in ensuring that the results of their work are used for peaceful purposes and weighed in on the Romanian general education system of the day.

In the spring of 1965, at the height of the Cold War, the “Louis Armstrong and his All Stars” band embarked on an historic tour behind the Iron Curtain taking in East Germany Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, followed, in summer, by Hungary. The band met with ecstatic receptions everywhere they went. Indeed, jazz music was rapidly growing in popularity at the time across the entire Eastern bloc. That being said, things had not always been so. In the early days of communist rule, jazz was viewed with suspicion, being considered a symbol of the decadent American way of life.

However, by 1965 the communist authorities in Eastern Europe had relaxed their stance on jazz, not least on account of its association with the civil rights movement, which they supported, and its roots in African American culture. The United States itself had long been aware of the potential of jazz to break down ideological barriers and promoted it vigorously among foreign audiences, prompting the New York Times to name jazz “America’s secret sonic weapon”. Against this backdrop, Louis Armstrong turned out to be one of America’s most effective jazz ambassadors – not least in Romania, where the concerts he gave in 1965 would become the stuff of legend for generations to come.

This episode in the series contains various archive recordings, including a live report of Louis Armstrong’s arrival in Bucharest and clips from his press conference.