In 1940, he succeeded Viktor Smirnov as chairman of VOKS ("Vsesoiuznoe Obshchestvo Kul'turnoi Sviazi s zagranitsei" — Всесоюзное общество культурной связи с заграницей — All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries), a propaganda organization created in 1925 and restructured in 1958.
[5] In 1944, Mihail Sadoveanu hosted official Soviet envoys Kemenov and Andrey Vyshinsky in Romania shortly before he became president of the ARLUS "Literary and Philosophical Section.
In 1947, Kemenov published an article "Features of Two Cultures" in English, French, German, and Russian that caught wide attention during early years of the Cold War.
[3] Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. noted that Kemenov had attacked artists Pablo Picasso, Henry Moore, Georgia O'Keeffe, Paul Cézanne among others.
[7] In a 1950 article, Kemenov defended Socialist realism and Marxist–Leninist theory of history and attacked bourgeois art historians in a manner "lurid and angry.