Yves Montand in the USSR. Cultural Diplomacy and Mixed Messages is the first book to focus on Yves Montand’s tour of the Union of Sovjet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1956-1957. The volume is particularly noteworthy for its strong interdisciplinary dimension, since Mila Oiva, Hannu Salmi and Bruce Johnson frame their research at the crossroads of history, film history, musicology, and even oral history. The multiplicity of these perspectives and the methodologies they imply make it possible to explore the complexity of the issues at stake in Yves Montand’s decision to travel and sing his French songs in several Soviet cities (Moscow, Leningrad and Kyiv), from 17 December 1956 to 19 January 1957, just a few weeks after the violent repression of the Hungarian uprising by Soviet tanks. The undeniable value of the book lies in the way the various sources are presented and linked together: the authors translate official Soviet sources into English, both on the preparations for the tour and also on the production of a documentary film (Yves Montand Sings/Poet Iv Montan, Mikhail Slutsky, 1957) about the tour, and combine them with extracts from the memoirs of the singer and his wife, the actress Simone Signoret, press articles, even album covers, samizdats and extracts from interviews with around twenty Russian witnesses who share their memories or family memories of Montand and Signoret’s time in the USSR. These sources often reinforce each other, but also sometimes are contradictory – hence the “mixed messages” of the subtitle, and also the interest in untangling the different threads of this singular experience of cultural diplomacy during the Cold War.

The volume opens with three chapters outlining the international background of 1956, the Soviet Thaw, and Yves Montand’s life. They recall the singer’s humble Italian origin, his close ties with the French Communist Party (emphasizing that Montand was never a member of the Communist Party, unlike his brother), and the couple he formed with Simone Signoret. Chapter five looks back at the “Preparations, Hesitations, and Decisions" involved in organizing this tour. Here, the authors highlight the key role played by puppeteer Sergei Obraztsov and his wife Olga Obraztsova in the 1950s, “as mediators and popularisers of foreign cultures to Soviet audiences” (p. 61-62), and mention their extensive correspondence with many cultural partners, especially in France, held by the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts (RGALI). Olga Obraztsova is notably the co-author of a Russian translation of Montand's memoirs, while Sergei Obraztsov met Yves Montand at a concert in 1954: Mila Oiva, Hannu Salmi, and Bruce Johnson identify this meeting as the possible starting point for the idea of organizing a tour of the French singer in the Soviet Union. In addition to this personal contact, Yves Montand’s tour was made possible by various organizations, such as the Soviet Ministry of Culture and the French Literary and Artistic Agency, and followed on from the organization of other Franco-Soviet cultural events, such as two French art exhibitions in Moscow and Leningrad and the first French film festival in the USSR in 1955. These favourable circumstances were complicated, however, first by the delayed shooting in Babelsberg of the Franco-East German co-production Die Hexen von Salem (Raymond Rouleau, 1957), in which Yves Montand starred alongside Simone Signoret, and mostly by the Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising of 4 November 1956, which deeply shocked Western opinion and particularly destabilized all the French artists and intellectuals close to the Communist Party. The authors recount that it was a phone call from a French producer that decided Montand to maintain his tour in the USSR: Henri Deutschmeister threatened to cancel his contract if he went to the USSR despite the events. “Montand replied that he had not intended to go, but in the face of this kind of threat, he was changing his mind” (p. 69).

One very fascinating chapter traces the development of the Soviet craze for Yves Montand, through the care taken in translating his memoirs and in broadcasting his songs on the radio well before his tour. The appendices also list the number and price of Montand postcards printed in several Soviet cities. This economic issue is far from anecdotal: the sections devoted to the difficulty of obtaining tickets to attend a Montand concert are particularly interesting because they reveal the paradox of the Soviet regime in the organization of this tour. While Yves Montand's persona was built on his image as a man from modest origins, the price of tickets sometimes represented up to a third of the monthly salary of an ordinary citizen, and therefore out of reach for normal people. The accounts gathered in interviews with witnesses also shed light on how Montand's tour was received by the general public, with people recounting the interminable queues to get a ticket and those who were lucky enough to obtain one in a more or less roundabout way.

The tour was also the subject of a documentary film, Yves Montand Sings, directed by Mikhail Slutsky, a Ukrainian renowned film director, and co-written by Sergei Yutkevich, who also won different prizes. Apart from the fact that the film lasts almost twice as long as a standard documentary, presumably to give the songs their full place, the film embodies the difficulty of shaping Montand's image and delimiting the enthusiasm that a Western star (despite Montand's claims to be a pacifist) arouses in the USSR. Just as interestingly, the final chapter devoted to the music and analysis of Yves Montand's songs raises the question of the jazz in the USSR – the authors point out that while jazz was initially favourably received in the USSR because it was associated with the oppressed Afro-American minority, it was later seen as a product of capitalism and banned as a result. The jazzy aspects of some of Yves Montand's songs, notably “Il fait des...”/”Le fanatique de jazz”, raise this question of dissonance: while in Montand’s song, “jazz fanatique is merely a harmless idiot” (p. 171), the official discourse of the documentary translates it as “stiliaga”, who was then “a potential criminal, subverting the state ideology” (p. 171): therefore, “the message Montand was sending is not the message being received by the Soviet authorities or proclaimed in the documentary” (p. 170).

The meticulous exploration of this tour underlines the difficulty of this type of cultural diplomacy. After reading the book, two points of frustration remain: The first one is that the authors have “limited” their study of Yves Montand's tour to the USSR, leaving out the other socialist countries. Although it is fully understandable that the language barrier makes this a difficult task, it would have been very interesting to compare Montand's reception in the USSR with his reception in the other socialist countries. Similarly, French sources (except for a few online documents) are generally lacking, although that diplomatic archive, or those of the France-USSR Association, the French Communist Party, or simply the examination of the press would have told more about the French perception of this tour of the USSR. Nevertheless, these reservations can also be seen as signs of the book's success in arousing even more curiosity about this stimulating research subject.