Michael David-Fox, Showcasing The Great Experiment
Michael David-Fox, Showcasing The Great Experiment
Michael David-Fox, Showcasing The Great Experiment
M I C H A E L DAV I D -F OX
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Preface ix
Notes 325
Bibliography of Archival Collections 382
Index 385
vii
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PR E FAC E
As I made my fi rst visits to the Soviet Union starting in the late 1980s, it was
impossible not to become aware of the extraordinary stature foreigners, espe-
cially visitors from the West, were accorded by almost everyone from the most
humble to the most powerful. My own reception there, particularly as a partic-
ipant in certain foreign “delegations” that still bore the imprint of earlier eras,
gave me some personal insight, even if only on a small scale, into what foreign
travelers experienced when the Soviet experiment was still young: lavish yet
formulaic hospitality, evaluations on both sides, and, yet, also intense unof-
ficial exchange meaningful to visitors and hosts alike. The most recent turn—
from the eff usive post-Soviet opening to the outside world, to a frequently
anti-Western, Putin-era reaction against humiliating treatment as inferiors—
fits with almost perfect logic into the long-term patterns of the Russian histori-
cal process. So did the initial post-Soviet influx of Western travelers, experts,
and advisors. The idea for this book was born as I became increasingly aware of
the need to analyze continuities in the long history of European and American
interactions with Russia and the USSR that stretched across radical changes
of regime. Looking back, I can see how my personal experiences as a frequent
visitor and foreign resident in Russia contributed, in their own way, to the
original interpretive framework I have developed: to approach the reception
of foreign visitors through the prism of expressions of superiority and inferior-
ity on both sides.
In researching and writing this study, I received an extraordinary amount
of support, which allowed me to make eight research trips to former Soviet
archives lasting a total of about two years. Early on, a National Council for
Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER) grant gave me two semes-
ters for research. American Councils for International Education (ACTR/
ACCELS) provided unparalleled logistical support during several research
ix
x Preface
The interwar “pilgrimage to Russia” is one of the most notorious events in the
political and intellectual history of the twentieth century.1 During the 1920s
and 1930s, approximately 100,000 foreigners visited the Soviet Union, includ-
ing tens of thousands of European and American writers, professionals, sci-
entists, artists, and intellectuals who came to record their impressions of the
Soviet experiment.2 Their numbers increased steadily after 1922, jumped dra-
matically in the years of the fi rst Five-Year Plan and the Popular Front, and
then declined as the xenophobic terror of the Purges and the shock of the Nazi-
Soviet Pact cut their number to a trickle in the late 1930s. These interwar visits
marked a period of intensive Soviet-Western cultural and intellectual interac-
tions and were a crucial factor in the rise of Soviet cultural diplomacy in this,
its most successful era.
Th is book is a history of the Soviet reception of Central and Western
European and, to a lesser extent, American visitors in the interwar period. It
provides a new account of one of the most consequential encounters of the
twentieth century, the Soviet reception of prominent foreign visitors and intel-
lectuals, through the prism of evaluations of superiority and inferiority on
both sides. It aims to open up a neglected international dimension to the for-
mation of the Soviet system, for the way foreigners, and above all, representa-
tives of the “advanced West,” were perceived and treated deserves to be seen as
central to early Soviet and Stalinist culture, ideology, and politics. Indeed, the
journeys and accounts of European travelers are fundamental to the study of
Muscovy; the topic of “Russia and the West” is at the heart of imperial Russian
history starting with Peter the Great’s Westernization. For several genera-
tions, however, the formation of the Soviet system has been examined as a
domestic process, denuded of its substantial international and transnational
interactions. Almost completely unexplored is the way internal and external
initiatives of the Soviet party-state interacted and influenced one another. Th is
study suggests how the “West”—in the guise of models to be emulated or repu-
diated, the opinion of an outside world that needed to be cultivated or altered,
1
2 showcasing the great experiment
the crucial differentiation of friends and enemies, and, last but not least, the
far-reaching impact of the system devised to receive celebrated visitors—was
ever-present during the two tumultuous decades in which the Soviet system
took shape.
By the same token, the debate about Western views of communism, and
particularly the simultaneous cresting of European and American intellectu-
als’ hopes placed in the Soviet experiment and the murderous repressions of
Stalinism, has long been central to the intellectual and political history of the
twentieth century. Th is is also a topic that has long been cut off from its other
half: until the opening of formerly classified Soviet archives, the Soviet side of
this interaction remained something of a black box. Only now has it become
possible to revisit Western observers of communism through the prism of their
Soviet interactions while reconsidering Soviet history through the prism of its
intense international preoccupations. Once the Soviet side of the relationship
is better grasped, we can better understand the time spent inside the Soviet
Union by even some of the best-known figures.
Profound and troubling questions are raised by the central fact that the
height of Western admiration, including among some of the leading minds of
the epoch, coincided with most repressive phase of Soviet communism—the
Stalinist 1930s. Th is remains a durable and thorny problem without simple
answers—whatever the importance of the Great Depression and the rise of
fascism as factors pushing Western observers into pro-Soviet stances, what-
ever the importance of the gap between the presentation of Soviet socialism
and what was known by some then and most now about the nature of the
regime. Indeed, the topic of intellectuals and communism remains one of
heated debate in many Western countries, to a certain extent a proxy for ear-
lier debates about socialism and the Soviet model whose acrimony faded from
scholarship after the collapse of communism.
Yet, there remains a decisive gap between these long standing debates about
intellectuals, which date back to works such as Julien Benda’s 1927 Trahison
des clercs, or the 1950 The God That Failed, and what we now can learn from
Soviet sources about them. Unlike the sophisticated works on scientific and
cultural interactions across borders and leading biographical treatments of
key figures (which this book draws on whenever possible) the most influential
interventions on the fellow-travelers have been polemics attempting to expose
the flaws of intellectuals in general (their utopian disposition, alienation, or
naiveté in politics) or reduce their political blindness to one master explana-
tion. 3 We can gain much by shift ing focus: the center of this book’s inquiry
is the mutual interaction between Western observers and travelers with their
Soviet hosts and the Soviet system. Th is was an inherently unequal relation-
ship, to be sure, given that the hosts were officials of a powerful state. But that
I n t r o d u c t i o n : “ R u s s i a a n d t h e We s t ” i n a S o v i e t K e y 3
Ukraine and the Caucasus, he railed against fi lth, cockroaches, and vile gulash
that he declared would make Béla Kun start another revolution. Seemingly
always ready to condemn the lazy Slavs or to mystify the exotic East, Dreiser
also took a perverse delight in defending American rugged individualism to
his collectivist hosts. But Dreiser’s entire att itude changed quite suddenly
when he saw a skyscraper “which looked as though it had been taken out of
New York and set down here in the snow plains.” Th is made on him “a most
tremendous psychological impression,” because “it seemed to symbolise the
industrialisation of Russia.” Sett ing aside all his prejudices and accusatory bel-
ligerence, he went on to predict not only that a “Ukrainian Chicago” would
emerge in Khar´kov in ten years but that America would become sovietized.5
Dreiser’s 1927–28 journey was directly related to his transformation into one
of the most prominent fellow-travelers of the 1930s. His works were translated
by the Soviets in millions of copies.
Although the curmudgeonly progressive was hardly typical, Dreiser’s
extraordinary journey epitomizes the way images of Russia, political views of
the Soviet Union, and experiences inside the country were intricately inter-
twined. Why, though, did the Khar´kov skyscraper so win him over? Was it
because it meant the Soviet Union would become more like the United States,
because a new Soviet modernity would raise up the backward Russians, or
because the Bolsheviks were building a system worth emulating even in the
land that had invented the skyscraper?
In many ways, it was all three. The allure of the Khar´kov skyscraper, set in
a broader context, is emblematic of how Soviet communism offered vastly differ-
ent focal points of att raction to foreign observers, from modernization to a rad-
ically different path of development, from the gentle allure of the welfare state,
world peace, and disarmament to the ruthless logic of regimented mass mobili-
zation. Almost every Soviet sympathizer kept a key hope or concern especially
close to his or her heart: from labor to cooperation to women’s emancipation,
from sexual revolution to the national question, from the strong leader to the
vanguard party. In the land of the militant godless, even the Archbishop of
Canterbury was a fellow-traveler. Ultimately, the sheer breadth and diversity
of this att raction, while tempered by many condemnations and negative reac-
tions, is what made Soviet communism one of the most potent and expansive
touchstones of twentieth-century political and intellectual history. Soviet cul-
tural diplomacy, already inclined to distinguish audience by class and political
affi liation, was endowed with tremendous advantages solely by virtue of the
broad-based nature of the Soviet myth. By explicitly attempting to tailor its
message to many different audiences and individual visitors, Soviet outreach
to the “cultured West,” while its history was marked by many failures and mis-
understandings, took advantage of this great historical opportunity. 6
I n t r o d u c t i o n : “ R u s s i a a n d t h e We s t ” i n a S o v i e t K e y 5
At the core of this study is the voluminous archive of the All-Union Society
for Cultural Ties Abroad, known by its Russian acronym VOKS, and its pre-
cursor institutions from the early 1920s. VOKS was the key institution of
Soviet cultural diplomacy. It defi ned its mission as cultivating the “bourgeois
intelligentsia” and focusing on “culture” in Soviet dealings with the outside
world.7 Its focus, especially in the early years, was fi rst and foremost on the
West, defi ned largely as the advanced capitalist countries of Europe plus
the United States.8 Concentrating on the VOKS material from Western and
Central Europe (Germany, France, Great Britain, and, to a lesser extent, other
European countries) and the United States, while episodically comparing it to
material from non-Western countries, furthered the goal of an in-depth, and as
far as possible systematic, look at those records and the institution from which
they came.
The investigation, however, quickly became far broader than VOKS—
always a mid-level and frequently embatt led player in a much larger endeavor—
even as it closely analyzes and interprets its fortunes. VOKS (and hence many
of the documents in its archive) formed but one part of a much larger party-
state and international communist system that crystallized in the early 1920s
to handle cultural diplomacy, international propaganda, and attempts to influ-
ence Western public opinion.9 Th is work also deploys archival material from,
among other sources, the Trade Unions’ Commission on External Relations,
charged with handling workers’ delegations and resident specialists; the
Agitprop Department of the Comintern; Intourist, the Soviet foreign-tourist
agency founded in 1929; and the Foreign Commission of the Union of Writers.
Since in works on Soviet international behavior “Stalin” so oft en stands in as a
cipher for the entire Soviet system, approaching that evolving system fi rst and
foremost from the middle, as it were, yields a richer and more complex texture
in understanding other levels, from rank-and-fi le guides to the top leadership.
At the same time as these institutional sources are quintessentially political
documents, they also provide a rich vein of insights into Soviet practices and
the cross-cultural assumptions, insights, and misconceptions of key observers
and their European and American interlocutors.10 The new archival riches are
a window into political and institutional history, but in this book, they are also
read culturally and thematically to shed light on the reception of foreigners
and the effects of interaction on visitors and Soviets alike.
The list of visitors to the Soviet experiment is a virtual “who’s who” of the
international Left and intellectuals of the interwar era. Th is book develops its
range of biographical case studies of visitors on a selective basis: only when new
documentation was found and when a new avenue into understanding Soviet-
Western interactions was offered by the visit and visitor involved. The parade
of visitors included pedagogues, scientists, engineers, artists, and thinkers of
6 showcasing the great experiment
many political hues, and a number of them make appearances in the pages that
follow. But literary figures and writers played a special role, especially in the
1930s, reflecting the oversized role of the writer and the written word in Soviet
culture. Just as literature and the Union of Soviet Writers dominated the elab-
oration of Stalinist culture, so the “friends of the Soviet Union,” as the most
prominent foreign fellow-travelers were called by the Soviets, were dominated
by literary figures. Because the many dimensions of “friendship” (and its far
more frequently investigated yet closely related inversion, enmity) are key to
the entire relationship between foreign visitors and the Soviets, this book pays
special attention to the select club of “friends.” Those featured here include
Theodore Dreiser, Romain Rolland, Bernard Shaw, Sidney and Beatrice Webb,
André Gide, and Lion Feuchtwanger. Literary organizations also played a
major role in anti-fascist culture, a key arena during the Popular Front for a
Soviet quest for predominance and hegemony (and, hence, ultimately superi-
ority) in the realm of culture.
Most of the important Western figures examined here are thus non-Com-
munists, although the lives or activities of intellectual party members like
Henri Barbusse and György Lukàcs figure at key moments. Some scholars or
scientists, such as the prominent German historian and Russian expert Otto
Hoetzsch, become windows into the history of VOKS and its partner organiza-
tions abroad, while the German “National Bolsheviks” are explored in the con-
text of the litt le-known history of Soviet cultural outreach to the fascist Right.
Other characters are brought in to illustrate special themes; for example, the
African-American singer Paul Robeson is discussed in the context of his emo-
tional identification with the “socialist homeland” as a solution to racial and
national problems. While many important visitors are inevitably excluded,
their overall number is so great that a number of famous figures make cameo
appearances, from Walter Benjamin to John Maynard Keynes to the future
Czechoslovak Minister of Culture Zdeněk Nejedlý.
On the Soviet side, the cast of characters includes a group of prominent
Bolshevik intellectuals and shapers of Soviet cultural diplomacy, whom despite
their diversity I have united under the rubric of Stalinist Westernizers. These
were figures who knew European languages, had spent considerable time
abroad, and were connoisseurs of European or American culture and politics,
often through their experiences as émigrés. All of them were immersed in, and
often in one way or another admired, the Western world on the basis of fi rst-
hand knowledge.11 The term does not imply that they, like some of the classical
Westernizers of the nineteenth century, advocated that Russia should follow
a European path of development, which even in the previous century was far
from always the case. Nor does the label fit a number of the leading lights of
Soviet cultural diplomacy in the NEP period, such as Ol´ga Kameneva—the
I n t r o d u c t i o n : “ R u s s i a a n d t h e We s t ” i n a S o v i e t K e y 7
fi rst head of VOKS, the wife of Politburo member Lev Kamenev, and the sis-
ter of Lev Trotsky—who was not in any sense a Stalinist, even as many of the
practices she innovated survived her demise. By contrast, her successor during
the Popular Front, Alexandr Arosev, was from the outset an adherent to the
Stalinist wing of the Party. But even he was always a tormented, if ambitious,
figure in culture and politics. As this suggests, the term is not intended to char-
acterize these figures politically in a narrowly homogenous way. What it should
convey, rather, is that starting in the late 1920s the leading officials and intel-
lectuals involved in the reception of Western visitors adapted to the Stalin era,
and many contributed directly to the configuration of the Stalinist order in the
1930s. Maxim Gorky must be considered perhaps the most prominent archi-
tect of Stalinism in culture, although he is by no means a simple or undisputed
figure. Others featured here include two who miraculously survived the Terror
and Stalin himself in order to emerge as key figures in the Soviet re-opening to
the outside world in the Thaw: Ilya Ehrenburg and the diplomat and ambassa-
dor to London Ivan Maiskii. Most of the rest, including the head of the Union
of Writers’ Foreign Commission, Mikhail Kol´tsov, did not survive the Purges
of the late 1930s. The key players in Soviet cultural diplomacy are joined by a
host of more minor guides, translators, diplomats, and analysts who often had
strong views even as they operated within the bounds of official orthodoxy and
the political pressure cooker of the Soviet cultural revolution.
Soviets as a chief geopolitical rival; the United States exerted its own powerful
and particular pull through conceptions of efficient amerikanizm and indus-
trial modernity. But Soviet perceptions of the United States as young, uncouth,
and beneath Europe in the level of its culture put America into a distinctly
separate category within the West. The Soviet relationship with visitors from
Western and Central Europe engages most directly the rise of Soviet cultural
diplomacy and the communist interwar crusade to invert the old discourse of
Russian backwardness, and this explains their emphasis in this book. At the
same time, the large number of visitors from the United States and America’s
stature as an alternative to Europe on modernity’s Western flank are impor-
tant parts of the story. One of the advantages of a multi-polar, as opposed to a
bilateral, study is that it can probe these kinds of contrasts.
After all, Russia, and then the USSR, had its own longstanding history of
images and interactions with each European country. In the wake of Peter the
Great’s Westernization, moreover, Russia in many ways became European,
just as in the Soviet period it was in many ways modern—to what extent, and
on what continuum, and with what qualifications is the Sphinx’s Riddle of
Russian and Soviet history. The very notion of the West rested on large doses of
mythologizing, oversimplification, and sheer distance. It remained, however,
one of the most fundamental concepts in Soviet, as well as imperial Russian,
history.
In physics, the act of observation is known to influence the phenomenon
observed. Far more potent than any observer effect was the idea of Russian
and Soviet difference, which deeply shaped relations, and therefore historical
realities, for all involved. The idea of the West as a single aggregate, powerfully
potent in Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was only reinforced
by the communist tendency to lump together “bourgeois” capitalist countries,
using the West as a synonym for them.17 As the autocracy had for more than
two centuries before it, the early Soviet Union consulted and employed foreign
experts, attached even in rejection crucial importance to Western judgments,
and constantly reinforced the concept of the West as a single entity. In this
sense, the system that the revolutionary regime quickly built up after 1917 to
receive foreign visitors did not derive its specific practices, goals, or ethos from
an established tradition but, rather, was conditioned by this post-revolutionary
extension of the fateful dyad “Russia and the West.”
At the same time, the new regime, with greater resolve than even the most
reactionary tsars of old, followed a countervailing imperative to block out
pernicious influences from abroad. Here was another persistent dilemma that
the Soviet Union inherited: how to protect itself from perceived threats while
interacting, borrowing, and modernizing. Much of Muscovite and imperial
Russian history was marked by suspicion and curtailment of elite travel abroad.
I n t r o d u c t i o n : “ R u s s i a a n d t h e We s t ” i n a S o v i e t K e y 11
For the tsars, subversive political ideas, the “moral climate” monitored by the
Foreign Ministry and Th ird Section in reports on European countries, and
revolutionary movements near and far prompted isolationist moves.18 For the
Soviets, of course, the threats from abroad were labeled counter-revolutionary.
The Bolsheviks, with their universalistic revolutionary mission fueling greater
international ambitions than even the most far-reaching Westernizing tsars, at
the same time oversaw an unprecedented intensification of security measures,
isolationism, and, ultimately, autarky.
The Bolshevik Revolution thus produced a dual radicalization, intensify-
ing a dialectic of rejection and imitation, hostility and engagement, that had
arisen even before the “Petrine revolution” of Westernization.19 Th is study
traces how the two countervailing tendencies of engaging and distancing the
outside world crystallized and clashed in concrete circumstances, providing
one key to understanding the course of the new regime as it hurtled toward
xenophobic terror under Stalin.
It was a result of this dialectic that periods of openness, often associated
with international weakness, military defeat, or crises that appeared to neces-
sitate internal reform, were followed by periods of reaction, counter-reform,
and greater isolationism. The Russian historical process incorporated alterna-
tions between defensive repudiation of perceived external threats and radical
internal restructuring based on European models (and, under communism,
between popular frontism versus “socialism in one country” and crackdown
versus thaw). Of course, these oppositions are only points upon a continuum:
although heights of anti-Western isolationism were reached circa 1848 and
1948, and peaks of “cosmopolitanism” achieved after 1855 and 1987, even the
extreme periods contained countervailing trends, and each historic reversal
held its own formidable particularities. Insofar as the pattern was shaped by
intense pressures to borrow and restructure that combined with countervail-
ing imperatives to quarantine outside ideas and influences, the top-heavy state
was crucial, for it was the force that simultaneously imported and banned,
reversing the emphasis in successive periods of openings and closings. All the
great domestic reversals of both imperial Russian and Soviet history were inti-
mately connected to explicit shifts in policies and att itudes toward the outside
world.
Th is book is centrally concerned with one of the most crucial alternations
in all of Russian and Soviet history: the turn from the 1920s order to the 1930s
and Stalinism. In one sense, the Stalin Revolution, with its reversal of many
1920s forms of engagement with the outside world, represents one of those
great turning points in Russian and Soviet history during which the internal
order and the relationship with the West simultaneously were transformed.
In another sense, however, it appears as one of multiple shifts within a single
12 showcasing the great experiment
historical period: the new Soviet system for receiving foreigners and influenc-
ing public opinion abroad was entrenched in the 1920s and only modified
thereafter. The dual nature of Stalinism in this sense explains the intensive
scrutiny given in this work to countervailing tendencies and shifting balances
of engagement and hostility within discrete phases of the 1920s and the 1930s.
It also accounts for the close analysis of the political and cultural dynamics
of periods and years in which the balance suddenly shifted, such as 1928–29,
1932–34, and 1936–37.
In talking about persistent factors, however, it is not enough to consider only
the strategies of the rulers or the state. For one thing, the Bolsheviks were not
only the political masters of the new regime but also heirs of the radical intel-
ligentsia; for another, far from everyone involved in Soviet cultural relations
was a Bolshevik. The rise of the intelligentsia and the emergence of national-
ism made the formative period for Russian national identity in the nineteenth
century a time when the multifaceted articulation of Russia’s relationship to
Europe was far less exclusively a matter of monarch, court, state, or nobility.
As Catriona Kelly has observed, the large-scale import of “foreign” values and
standards of behavior into post-Petrine Russia meant that “three quite sepa-
rate concepts—civilization, modernization, and Westernization—became
entangled, both among foreigners, and among Russians themselves.”20 More
and more, Russian imaginaires of the Western countries were shaped by the
educated public, high and popular culture, and “society”—something that
would already be a longstanding given by the time the Soviets pursued their
program of radical etatization in relations with the outside world. No modern
Russian thinker or movement could avoid this question; the “idea of Europe”
became the main referent by which the “idea of Russia” was defi ned.21 Some
of the paradoxes of this nineteenth-century legacy provide clues for digging
underneath the surface of the ideological pronouncements of the twentieth.
Looking West
Chief among these paradoxes was the fact that imported ideas were used to
construct notions of Russian uniqueness, on the one hand, and that the most
ardent Westernizers contributed mightily to notions of Russia’s special path,
on the other. Among the most cosmopolitan Russians of the eighteenth cen-
tury were the Freemasons, who were steeped in Enlightenment universalism
but nonetheless proved pivotal in the initial articulation of theories of Russian
spiritual uniqueness.22 Alexander Herzen famously likened the Slavophiles
and Westernizers to the two-headed Russian eagle: the heart that beat within
them was one. The classic nineteenth-century split between Slavophiles and
I n t r o d u c t i o n : “ R u s s i a a n d t h e We s t ” i n a S o v i e t K e y 13
the New Soviet Man were far weightier than what Maxim Gorky, on the cusp
of the Stalin Revolution, termed the “external glitter” of the West, the superfi-
ciality of its prosperity and technological advance.28
Were continuities enacted across the revolutionary divide by just such
perpetuations or reconfigurations of ideas? Empire, Orthodoxy, and autoc-
racy could leave subtle as well as overt imprints on the Russian intelligentsia,
including ardent foes of those institutions. Certainly, a similar thesis about
resemblances between pursuers and pursued born in the struggle between the
tsarist police and Bolshevism has long been present in the history of Russian
Social Democracy.29 More recently, a new generation of historians has inves-
tigated not only ideas but state practices and social institutions on both sides
of 1905, 1914, and 1917, positing, in place of simple continuity, novel, post-
revolutionary directions for previously established techniques and patterns. 30
There were, however, enormous differences between tsarist and Soviet
Russia. Despite the centuries-old tradition of importing skilled foreigners,
the travel of foreign visitors was vastly more decentralized in the imperial
period than it became shortly after 1917. While European national diasporas
were well established in the empire, each cut its own “deal” with the state—so
that “one can hardly speak of the ‘foreigner’ in the Russian Empire as a single
generic category.”31 The fi rst guidebooks aimed in part at foreign travelers
date to the late eighteenth century, but tsarist Russia lacked the myriad state
agencies dealing with foreign visitors and the fi rst steps toward the develop-
ment of a foreign tourist industry that were taken by the new regime in the
mid- to late 1920s. 32 With the rise of the mass press in the late nineteenth cen-
tury, Minister of Finance Sergei Witte—the pioneer in so many other parts
of Russia’s telescoped push to modernize—innovated ways of manipulating
Russia’s most influential daily newspapers for political goals. His targets were
not just domestic audiences but also foreign public opinion. Publications in
European languages, and even special ministry funds allocated for bribing
French editors, aimed at creating an image of Russia as an att ractive environ-
ment for foreign investment. 33 Even so, in terms of the role and capabilities of
the state, the big picture is largely one of discontinuity between the old regime
and the new.
By the same token, despite heavy borrowing in the international system
and constant circulation of practices across borders, there were also major dif-
ferences between that unique new formation, the Soviet party-state, and its
leading industrialized rivals in the West. Cultural diplomacy—if defi ned as
the systematic inclusion of a cultural dimension to foreign relations, or the
formal allocation of attention and resources to culture within foreign policy—
was largely a twentieth-century phenomenon. European state and diplomatic
efforts to manipulate public opinion in foreign countries and to deploy new
I n t r o d u c t i o n : “ R u s s i a a n d t h e We s t ” i n a S o v i e t K e y 15
propaganda into a bad word in the West, but its application was nonetheless
stretched in many countries to included activities later designated as cultural
diplomacy. For example, the Th ird Section of the Czechoslovak Ministry of
Foreign Affairs published foreign-language magazines, entertained foreign
visitors, ran a semi-private publishing house, and crafted an image of the coun-
try directed above all at Western elites.40
The period following World War I was also a caesura in the sense that states
had far more levers of influence on media and communications, including
cultural industries. Thus, the interwar United States loosely linked political
decisionmakers with the “private” activities of foundations and internationally
ascendant fi lm, radio, and other media and communications corporations.41
By contrast, even after the Soviet revolutionary regime reconstituted conven-
tional diplomacy, by 1920 the attempt to influence minds and transform cul-
ture was such a fundamental part of its ethos that shaping public opinion and
the Soviet image abroad was not subordinated to the foreign-policy apparatus.
Instead, it was pursued by an entire network of state, party, and Comintern
efforts.
What specifically, then, was new about Soviet cultural diplomacy? It is pos-
sible to exaggerate the uniqueness of the conspiratorial or Machiavellian nature
of communism. For example, the secret war-propaganda bureau the British
set up at Wellington House to secure U.S. entry into World War I, like many
Soviet initiatives, concealed the origin of printed materials and targeted influ-
ential, sympathetic figures who would then themselves direct the press and
public opinion.42 The Soviets aspired, however, to alter not merely the views
but also the world views of visitors. Their international aspirations of influence
were not localized in the foreign-policy establishment or to wartime aims but
were built into the very fabric of the drive to build socialism. International
initiatives, therefore, included a uniquely large and important domestic com-
ponent involving the reception of foreign visitors, the presentation of model
sites, and the inculcation of proper responses to the outside world. At the same
time, the entire early Soviet period was marked by an ongoing cultural revolu-
tion involving wrenching pressures and upheavals; the “cultural front” abroad
became an only partially insulated extension of intense batt les at home. All
these features of the Bolshevik Revolution, however novel, in their initial focus
served to preserve and expand the pre-revolutionary Russian obsession with
the West.
What is crucial is the whole into which the pieces are put. Th is work argues
that the Soviet Union developed an unprecedented system for receiving foreign
visitors and influencing the image of the Soviet Union abroad that crystallized
in the specific conditions of the early 1920s. The totalizing thrust of the Soviet
party-state ensured that there was a constant interaction between external
I n t r o d u c t i o n : “ R u s s i a a n d t h e We s t ” i n a S o v i e t K e y 17
and internal missions and tasks. The new regime was not motivated only by
ideological universalism; the isolated and diplomatically weak international
position of the revolutionary state made the sympathy of Western cultural and
intellectual elites into one of the only trump cards the Bolsheviks possessed,
and, thus, the development of new means to reach them became a matter of
relatively high priority. The early split between conventional diplomacy and
the pursuit of world revolution, moreover, ensured that international cultural
initiatives and operations were never exclusively, or even mainly, the province
of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs.
Soviet cultural diplomacy, as a result, can be defi ned as a phenomenon
with several distinctive features. Cultural relations (kul´turnye sviazi) were,
as befits the Marxist-Leninist regime from which they sprang, understood in
class terms as interactions with the foreign intelligentsia, which included sci-
entific and technical specialists. The realm of culture was closely associated
with the intelligentsia, or the “Western intelligentsia” as it was often called.
By the same token, relations with foreign Communists and visits by workers’
delegations were put in separate categories. At the same time, the regime’s
innovative and overlapping initiatives to engage international audiences went
well beyond cultural and scientific exchanges, exhibitions, and the like, for
they were closely connected with propaganda and novel attempts to influence
public opinion in other countries. They were also far greater than the sphere of
diplomacy, for the oversized importance of foreign visitors and tours inside the
land of socialism gave it a large domestic component. In this sense, Soviet cul-
tural diplomacy was both broader than culture and broader than diplomacy.
In this work, the term “cultural diplomacy” designates the entire complex of
missions the Soviet Union directed at the foreigners classified as members of
the intelligentsia, both inside and outside the USSR.43
In other ways, however, the Soviet Union fits well into a broader compara-
tive frame. In other sett ings, cultural diplomacy was also channeled according
to the priorities of political systems and societies and the international agen-
das of the policymakers. The French emphasis on language and high culture,
the German preoccupation with academic scholarship and ethnic Germans
outside Germany, and the importance of private philanthropies and corpora-
tions working in the “national interest” of the United States all reflected the
ways international behavior meshed with domestic orders. So did the intensive
Soviet concern with propaganda, political-ideological leverage, and scientific-
technological development.
To return to Greenfeld’s theory of ressentiment against the backdrop of
this broader panorama of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: if it is but
a partial explanation of pre-revolutionary Russian stances toward the West,
it is even more limited in the Soviet case. For one thing, it does not explain
18 showcasing the great experiment
Russian self-confidence in the superiority of its own political and social sys-
tem, which before the revolution waxed above all during the period ushered
in by the victory in 1812. Ressentiment loses some of its salience, moreover,
with the cultural effects of Russia’s far greater integration into Europe in the
late nineteenth century.44 The phenomenon of tsarist-era self-confidence can
be compared to convictions about present and future superiority fostered by
Soviet ideology. In particular, the Great Depression lent a certain plausibility
to propaganda about the demise of capitalism. More importantly, the depth
and complexity of Russian relationships with Western countries cannot be
reduced to a single social-psychological reflex.45
The theory of ressentiment, in sum, captures the long trajectory and defen-
sive pervasiveness of the Russian attempt to overcome inferiority vis-à-vis
Europe but avoids probing a long history of interactions that were condi-
tioned by practices and institutions. By contrast, Rieber has called attention to
Russia’s ongoing cultural distinctiveness from the surrounding world and the
internal debates over orientation that arose even in times of relative integra-
tion. The drive to overcome this persistent “cultural marginality” was made
more urgent and complicated by the canon of foreign commentary, established
in early modern Europe, that portrayed Russia as fundamentally non-Euro-
pean, a “rude and barbarous kingdom.”46
Looking East
At fi rst glance, the deeply ingrained Western discourse of Russian barbarism
and despotism provides precisely the opposite backdrop for the Soviet-Western
interactions in the interwar period, so marked by the eff usions of Sovietophilia.
But here as well, the picture is one of certain continuities amidst decisive his-
torical change. Narratives of barbarism and backwardness were perpetuated
across vast stretches of time in part through the tradition of re-reading and
imitating the most prominent early modern travelers’ accounts, thus multiply-
ing and disseminating notions that only in the nineteenth century were caught
up with the East-West divide.47 There was also, from the time of the earliest
European writings on Russia, a counter-strain of praise for Muscovy, through
which foreign observers used Russia to criticize their own societies.48 Russia in
the wake of Westernization was both radically different and noticeably famil-
iar, both Europe yet not Europe. For this reason, “Inventing Eastern Europe
was inseparably dependent upon the reciprocal process of inventing Western
Europe.” Russia, whether portrayed as redeemable or barbaric, was therefore
centrally in view during the birth of the modern concept of civilization in eigh-
teenth-century France.49 In the age of imperialism and European industrial
I n t r o d u c t i o n : “ R u s s i a a n d t h e We s t ” i n a S o v i e t K e y 19
Russian culture and society that was fueled by (and itself ignited) political con-
demnation and great power rivalry. Custine may have trotted out all the clichés
“brought forward by anti-Russian French publicists ever since the Revolution,”
but the particular resonance and mass printings of his work derived from his
ability “to reach beyond the strategic discourse and latch the image of the bar-
barian at the gate onto the wider issue of a Kulturkampf between Russia and
Europe.”56 The intricate links between views of Russian society and geopoliti-
cal interests and antagonisms remained as salient after 1917 as they did in the
age of Custine. What appears genuinely new was the way aspects of the com-
munist belief system and Soviet culture could influence, and even be internal-
ized by, significant numbers of Western observers in the twentieth-century age
of ideologies.
For the Russian state, the diplomatic and geopolitical stakes involved in
countering cultural prejudice and political criticism alike (and, mutatis mutan-
dis, for the Soviets in countering “alien” ideologies) were high. In moving to
counter Custine’s stinging 1843 bestseller, the autocracy took measures that
anticipated the later, more systematic practices of cultural diplomacy. The
tsarist government, in what the Soviets would later call a counter-campaign,
apparently sponsored anonymous essays that condemned Custine’s work. Also
in direct response to Custine, Nicholas and his ministers, subsequently backed
by a coalition of interested Russian groups and individuals, seized the chance
for the fi rst time to craft a positive image of Russia for a broad European public
by participating in London’s Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in 1851.57
In the wake of Custine’s bombshell, the tsarist government commis-
sioned Baron von Haxthausen’s four-month, 4,000-mile jaunt across Russia
in 1843–44. Tsarist largesse included an interpreter (von Haxthausen knew
no Russian), a government minder who was surreptitiously to observe him,
and others to censor or withhold information he requested. In a precursor to
precisely the kind of influential boomerangs and East-West entanglements this
book attempts to uncover in the early Soviet period, the Romantic German’s
theory of the egalitarian, propertyless Russian land commune proved so influ-
ential that it did more than just undergird generations of debates about Russia
and the West among the intelligentsia. Haxthausen appears to have actually
influenced the reality he purported to describe by helping to enshrine the
commune in the 1861 emancipation of the serfs. 58
As the case of Haxthausen suggests, the intellectual and cultural history of
“Russia and the West” developed a hall-of-mirrors quality that holds implica-
tions for how it is studied in this book. “Russia’s image and self-image,” notes
Daniel L. Schlafly, Jr., “perhaps more than any other country’s, has been shaped
from abroad.” Not only did an extraordinary panoply of resident foreigners
play a prominent role from Muscovy on, but “accounts by foreigners have had
22 showcasing the great experiment
state interventionism, rather than the old individualism, animated the entire
spectrum of communist, fascist, and social-democratic projects—not to men-
tion the New Deal in the United States. Despite the radical differences among
them, many of these projects shared certain common ideological lineages,
based themselves on internationally circulated practices, or were influenced
by experts who could migrate or convert from one to the other.65 The history
of the entire range of foreign visitors’ interactions with the Soviets opens a
window onto these kinds of exchanges and reactions to the Soviet alternative
modernity-in-the-making.
The wave of international Sovietophilia after the Russian Revolution was,
thus, a genuine historical novelty. Crucially, it could still be blended with ear-
lier currents of Russophilia and Russophobia in complicated ways.66 As many
of the visitors examined here suggest, longstanding prejudices about Asia,
Russians, and the Slavs could coexist with favorable views of the Bolsheviks,
who, after all, were bent on modernizing backward Russia. Many Western visi-
tors, even the most abjectly pro-Soviet, brought with them notions of cultural
superiority over the “Russian” national character; for many others during
the interwar crisis of liberalism, it was precisely the association of the Soviet
order with non-Western or non-European difference that was fascinating and
att ractive.
The Soviet revolutionary experiment thus enjoyed large amounts of what is
now commonly called soft power, but it was also handicapped by the legacy of
past prejudices. Some pro-Soviet observers confronted this new amalgam of
backwards Russia and the advanced Soviet Union by deliberately attempting
to disaggregate politics and ideology, in which Soviet Russia was now seen as
advanced, from economics and culture. Liberals and socialists, unsurprisingly
given that despotism had been central to European conceptions of Russia since
the early modern period, frequently found it possible to justify repression that
they deemed unacceptable in their own countries in the backward, perennially
autocratic land of the Bolsheviks.67 At the same time, even as the Soviet ques-
tion loomed large, the great experiment faced stiff competition on many levels.
As Mary Nolan has noted, in interwar Europe, Bolshevism appeared as but
one of two major “models for economic and social modernity”: the other was
“Americanism.”68 Culturally, moreover, there were multiple poles of att raction
with which the Soviets competed.
The Bolshevik Revolution thus created a situation in which both the new
regime and its Western interlocutors were deeply divided. The new regime
oscillated between new forms of engagement and heightened ideological
and security measures to limit contagion, between assimilating advanced
modernity and repudiating the bourgeois West. In Central and Western
Europe and the United States, older views of Russians as inferior and deeply
24 showcasing the great experiment
The master theme of this book, which connects the early Soviet era to the great
pre-revolutionary topic of “Russia and the West,” concerns expressions of
superiority and inferiority. As students of national identity have long observed,
these are always close to the surface in historical articulations of the self and
the other. In the words of Michael Geyer, “national imaginaries” are “never
I n t r o d u c t i o n : “ R u s s i a a n d t h e We s t ” i n a S o v i e t K e y 25
this was one of the most intensive and consequential cross-cultural and
political-ideological encounters between Western countries and another part
of the world in the twentieth century. It is interesting in many ways because
Soviet Russia was not distant and remote but in many aspects very familiar,
a proximate “other.” The Soviet engagement with the West was central to the
shape the Soviet order took, while contacts with Western intellectuals were
vital to a remarkably talented and often cosmopolitan generation of Bolshevik
and Soviet cultural and political elites. By the same token, Western visitors,
who included a virtual encyclopedia of European and American intellectu-
als and scholars, were actors in their own rights. Some were willing partners
and some were fi lled with naïve illusions, but they were all more than mere
dupes. Th is is why I prefer to differentiate among figures examined in depth
rather than extend the long tradition of either demonizing or heroicizing the
intellectuals.
The Soviet quest for influence and control itself becomes revealing when
it is historicized. Bolshevik proclivities to measure individuals as part of class
and political collectivities, the way Leninism was codified around political
maneuvering, and party-state practices of mobilizing and pressuring the intel-
ligentsia ensured that an instrumental approach to foreign visitors was given
high value in internal deliberations and thus taken to an extreme. The conspir-
atorial and instrumental language favored within Bolshevik political culture,
however, could conceal the avenues in which the huge investment in influenc-
ing the West ended up shaping the Soviets themselves.
For example, many early guides, with their methods of “cultural show,”
were involved in an effort not merely to pull the wool over foreigners’ eyes,
but to change or convert them. They tried to inculcate a mode of looking at
the heritage of the past and the promise of the future that became relevant,
even decisive, for Communists and Soviet citizens too. Or, alternately, they
assumed that foreigners could not overcome their bourgeois or intelligentsia
natures—itself the tortured goal of many Soviet citizens and Communists.73
The assumptions of Marxist-Leninist class analysis and political utilitarian-
ism on the ground, moreover, need to be interpreted against a broader, and
sometimes tension-ridden, set of Soviet aspirations toward the representatives
of Western Europe and the United States—which, on the individual level,
included doses of sometimes covert admiration.
The superiority-inferiority calculus ultimately holds direct implications for
understanding Stalinism and foreigners’ reactions to it. In the 1920s, Lenin’s
dictum that the Soviet Union had much to learn from the advanced West was
widely disseminated even as the revolution’s “achievements” were touted, but
it is impossible to understand the 1930s without examining the new Stalin-
era declarations of across-the-board Soviet superiority. As this became the
I n t r o d u c t i o n : “ R u s s i a a n d t h e We s t ” i n a S o v i e t K e y 27
While the fi rst years after the October Revolution were foundational in myriad
ways for the Soviet system, the fledgling state was still quite insular. The num-
ber of travelers from abroad was severely limited before the early 1920s, and
cultural relations and international contacts were broken, for all intents and
purposes, as the Civil War extended and deepened the period of total war.1
Yet, in another sense, the period of war communism in 1918–1920 created the
Janus face of the Soviet approach to foreigners and representatives of the West:
it was marked simultaneously by internationalist euphoria and hostile suspi-
ciousness toward outsiders.
The fi rst phases of Bolshevik rule undoubtedly mark the most “internation-
alist” phase of Soviet power as Russia’s new rulers imagined world revolution
to be right around the corner. But the new regime’s stance in relationship to
foreigners was inconsistent. On the one hand, foreign radicals like John Reed
and Victor Serge were welcomed as comrades when they arrived as observ-
ers or to join the cause; sympathetic former prisoners of war were allowed
to stay. Class, not nationality, was supposed to determine Soviet citizenship,
and in 1918 the government declared its intention to allow foreign laborers
to become naturalized citizens of the proletarian homeland. Foreign citizens
also played a significant role in various Civil War fronts. On the other hand,
foreign intervention on all sides of the red zone bolstered a mentality of impla-
cable antagonism and determination to overcome “capitalist encirclement.”
A fi rm ideological link, reinforced by political violence, was forged between
the bourgeois enemy without and social and political opponents within. Both
were “alien elements,” and in general, “the Soviet government remained sus-
picious of foreigners.”2
With the belief that October would spark the outbreak of world revolution
further west, interest in the proletariat and the nascent international com-
munist movement overshadowed systematic concern with other segments of
“bourgeois” society. Major initiatives to showcase socialism triumphant were
initially made for foreign Communists and domestic audiences. For example,
28
C u l t u ra l D i p l o m a c y o f a N e w Ty p e 29
the arrival of delegates to the Second Congress of the Comintern was timed to
coincide with perhaps the greatest Soviet festival ever staged, the November
1920 reenactment of the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917, involving thou-
sands of actors and a viewership of one-quarter of the population of Petrograd. 3
May Day and Revolution Day became two times of year especially reserved for
foreign delegations and honored guests.
During the Civil War, there were a number of abortive attempts by state
agencies to set up foreign bureaus that would channel information and equip-
ment to the Soviet Republic, and the Commissariat of Enlightenment had an
International Section from the end of 1918, headed by F. N. Petrov (future
head of VOKS, the All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad, in the early
1930s), that was concerned with establishing ties with revolutionary artists.
Only by the early 1920s, however, did several state commissariats, including
the commissariats of health and enlightenment, have permanent representa-
tives abroad, while others invited and received specialists. Th is set up a situ-
ation in which virtually each commissariat maintained its own international
operations, inviting guests and arranging travel for its own officials.4 For exam-
ple, the Berlin-based Bureau of Foreign Science and Technology of Vesenkha,
the Supreme Council of the National Economy, whose activities were inter-
rupted in 1918 but restarted again in late 1920, bought up foreign publica-
tions and equipment, attempted to establish ties with sympathetic scientists
in European countries, and organized a group of German and Russian artists
to make production posters for Vesenkha’s Section on Economic Propaganda. 5
The avant-garde, one of the few intelligentsia groups to embrace the Bolshevik
Revolution, was particularly active in forging international contacts.
As soon as the military situation stabilized, the Old Bolshevik engineer
Leonid Borisovich Krasin, with his trade and fi nancial operations in London,
showed an early interest in importing foreign specialists and workers. His
archive contains a 1922 English-language declaration to be signed by American
trade unionists recruited to work in the Kuzbass, promising that they would
endure a “number of privations . . . in a country rather backward and unprec-
edentedly destroyed.” The foreign workers should pledge to maintain “produc-
tivity of labor and discipline surpassing the standards of capitalism, for else we
will not be able to surpass or even to reach the level of capitalism.”6 The lan-
guage of hierarchical competition with the industrialized West—to overtake
and exceed—was fi rmly embedded in this early document.
After the Revolution, a number of leading Bolshevik figures, the Old
Bolshevik writer Maxim Gorky included, made uncoordinated efforts to influ-
ence Western views of the new regime and establish Soviet international con-
tacts. In an era of non-recognition of the new state, intellectuals were often
seen as alternative channels to conventional diplomacy. At the same time,
30 showcasing the great experiment
precedents were established for the restricted import and hierarchical dis-
tribution of foreign information and literature. Th is was made accessible to
Bolshevik leaders and reflected great concern not only with countering the
criticisms of the Russian emigration but also “bourgeois” commentary on the
fledgling Soviet experiment. “Books for comrade Lenin” collected by Foreign
Affairs in 1920 included La Russie bolcheviste by the French economist and
jurist Étienne Antonelli, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism by Bertrand
Russell, and 43 other works in English.7
The ARA , Hoover’s quasi-private organization with close ties to the U.S.
government, launched a two-year relief expedition that, at its height in the
summer of 1922, was feeding nearly eleven million Soviet citizens a day.
The influx of foreign relief personnel and “bourgeois” operations deep inside
the Russian interior, by far the most important of which was ARA , coincided
with the “retreat” of the New Economic Policy (NEP), which ushered in a crisis
of revolutionary purity and profound anxiety within the Party about the fate of
the socialist revolution. The sheer extent of the famine-relief operation, which
after hard-fought negotiations gave the Americans an extraordinary degree of
autonomy, elicited a potent Bolshevik brew of intense suspiciousness of and
admiration for advanced American efficiency.
As David Engerman has shown, the ARA’s strict policy of channeling aid
only to relieve famine conditions, consistently avoiding the economic recon-
struction projects the Soviet leadership craved, was a major source of tension
between the two sides in the period between 1921–23. Hoover vetoed any
non-relief projects that might aid the Bolshevik cause, while many of his own
mid-level staff disagreed, believing that economic progress would hasten the
end of the regime.12
Lenin, for his part, initially displayed deep suspicion, pushing for Cheka sur-
veillance to “shadow Hooverites,” but he also saw the ARA presence as a golden
opportunity for the Soviets to “master trade” by emulating the Americans.13 A
hard-line opposition to ARA relief emerged immediately and was exemplified by
Aleksandr Eiduk, who in October 1921 was appointed RSFSR Plenipotentiary
for All Foreign Famine Relief Organizations. A leather-jacketed member of the
Cheka Collegium who had fought with the Latvian troops in the Civil War as
a machine gunner, Eiduk shadowed the Americans with a team heavily drawn
from the secret police.14 In a March 21, 1921, letter to Lenin and other top lead-
ers, Eiduk bitterly denounced the ARA for being neither apolitical nor “loyal.”
Formally, the ARA observed the text of the Riga Agreement, but its real goals
were to generate anti-Soviet publicity and self-enrichment: it attempted to use
any opportunity “to expose deficiencies in our Soviet apparatus.”15
Soviet hostility in the localities was ignited as the ARA employed and sup-
ported 6,000 Russian citizens, comprising large numbers of the old intel-
ligentsia and nobility. At the same time, the famine-relief operation led to
ARA celebrity in towns and villages across the country, where, as one Russian
co-worker noted, everything “American” holds “fascination and weight in
all classes of the population.”16 The aid operation had a deep impact on the
Soviet concept of amerikanizm, with all its positive connotations of modern,
industrial-age efficiency. An article in the journal Kommunist, summing up the
“results” of ARA activity, called famine relief with the presence of foreigners
“the fi rst significant business operation for us.”17
C u l t u ra l D i p l o m a c y o f a N e w Ty p e 33
book exchange and the photographic agency Russ-Foto, and began arranging
international exhibitions and artistic tours.23
Much later, Kameneva made a startling revelation about the origins of
Soviet cultural diplomacy and intelligentsia visitors. Under political fi re from
subordinates who smelled blood because of her associations with condemned
oppositionists—her brother, Trotsky, and her husband, Kamenev—she wrote
about how much she had personally achieved without much initial support from
the Party, saying, “In essence the material side of the cause was founded with
bourgeois money: from the leftovers (ostatkov) from bourgeois organizations
giving aid to the starving.” 24 Th is was corroborated by a letter from Kameneva
to Chicherin dated December 1924: all “informational” work with foreigners
had been carried out “with the funds coming for ‘food supply aid’ (the State
for all this work for 15 months has not given a single penny).”25 Kameneva
cited this fact to demand regular funding, not to express compunction
about diverting international donations sent to starving peasants.
The fi rst “propagandist of the achievements of Soviet construction abroad”
after the October Revolution was the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, the
Press Section of which was headed in the early 1920s by high official and
member of the commissariat’s collegium, Fedor Rotshtein. The Press Section
worked with Posledgol in its time on presenting information on the famine to
the world, and Rotshtein subsequently became Foreign Affairs’ closest contact
with the nascent Soviet organs of cultural diplomacy and propaganda.26 The
latter were initially formed in response to increasing opportunities for travel
in 1922–23, as well as heightened interest in early Soviet culture in Europe.
Among the fi rst Soviet art exhibitions, for example, were those held in 1922
in Berlin, Florence, and Prague, and the interest they sparked highlighted the
need for a more specific focus on the foreign “intelligentsia.”
Thus did the immediate precursor to VOKS take shape. In December 1923,
KZP formed a United Information Bureau (Ob″edinennoe Biuro Informatsii)
to coordinate information, as it was put to other Soviet agencies, for “all for-
eigners arriving here to acquaint themselves with the scientific and cultural
life of the USSR.” The tasks of OBI, which at its founding had only seventeen
employees, were defi ned as “propaganda among the foreign intelligentsia
through acquainting them with the cultural gains (zavoevaniia) and work of
the Soviet Republic.” In an initial attempt to convince foreigners of the neu-
trality of a Soviet international cultural initiative, the existence of OBI was
announced abroad as an “unofficial” informational center with no links to the
Kremlin. OBI published a bulletin on Soviet cultural life, started the attempt
to place articles in the non-communist press abroad, and worked with Soviet
diplomats stationed in foreign countries, who were asked to steer foreign trav-
elers to the new outfit.27
C u l t u ra l D i p l o m a c y o f a N e w Ty p e 35
The contours of OBI’s work that emerged from the particular circum-
stances of the famine period were, in embryo, the set of functions that would
later be formalized and expanded with the creation of VOKS in 1925, which
at that time became the primary agency involved in showcasing Soviet cul-
ture for foreigners and arranging the visits of members of the intelligentsia
(generally, but not always, excluding such groups as foreign Communists,
diplomats, trade union delegates, and journalists). All of OBI’s activities
would continue to be pursued in similar or expanded form; among the only
things new about VOKS were its officially non-governmental status as a “soci-
ety” and, connected to that, its deeper involvement with Soviet intellectuals
and public groups (obshchestvennost´). Moreover, KZP’s negotiations with
foreign philanthropic missions and involvement with visa and travel permis-
sion for their representatives, such as the Vatican-funded Catholic Mission,
brought Kameneva into close working contact with secret police leaders such
as Genrikh Iagoda and Viacheslav Menzhinskii. 28
The early-1920s conjuncture from which Soviet cultural diplomacy emerged
linked heavy state involvement in international cultural exchange to attempts
to influence foreign (above all, Western) public opinion and target all those
classified as part of the Western “intelligentsia.” The reception of foreign visi-
tors became squarely embedded in this constellation of tasks. Th rough this set
of missions, OBI and then VOKS became involved in “external” operations
abroad and domestic functions involving visitors and the Soviet non-party
intelligentsia, creating a powerful, live link between foreign and domestic
agendas and pressures that was exemplified more broadly in the history of
party-state engagement with the outside world.
The driving force behind OBI (and later VOKS) was Ol´ga Davydovna
Kameneva (née Bronstein). She and her brother, Lev Trotsky, were born in
rural Kherson province to a father who had the distinction of being one of
the few substantial Jewish landowners in the empire. Like her more famous
brother, Ol´ga was an early adherent to Social Democracy, following him into
the party in 1902. As the wife of Lenin’s lieutenant, Kamenev, the young Ol´ga
helped the Bolshevik leader with the editing of party publications. Educated
in Bern and a “graduate” of the Bolshevik leadership’s long European emigra-
tion before 1917, Kameneva had the ability to make herself appear the imperi-
ous commissar or energetic patron to non-party Russian intellectuals and the
polished “Madame Kameneva” to visiting foreign dignitaries. Like a number
of wives of the top Old Bolshevik leaders, Kameneva took up a cultural post
after the Revolution, heading the Theater Administration of Narkompros in
1918–19. Th is apparently did not satisfy her ambitions, for the Politburo noted
in 1919 the “constant requests from comrade O.D. Kameneva to leave for polit-
ical work.”29
36 showcasing the great experiment
In creating OBI and later, VOKS, Kameneva’s main project in the 1920s,
she remained in “cultural” work but with a heightened political significance.
Kameneva threw herself into the bureaucratic politics of state building with
the revolutionary energy typical of the Bolshevik intelligentsia in the 1920s:
OBI, centrally located in Moscow at the Metropol Hotel, was known as the
“Kameneva Institute” to foreign visitors. 30 Facilitating Kameneva’s efforts was
her place in the top echelon of the Bolshevik elite, but in many respects she
faced quite an uphill batt le—funding was scarce in conditions of early NEP
and only a small group of party members had the foreign-language skills to
work in this area.
Kameneva’s whole career in state building during NEP was caught up with
a certain paradox. Much of what was “modern” about the Soviet project related
to the strong commitment to mold minds and alter psyches; much of what was
new and even unique about the totalizing Soviet project was the extent of its
concern with creating and managing the new culture. In conditions of fiscal
constraint, however, Bolshevik statism and Marxist economic determinism
contributed to a situation in which party-state initiatives had greater clout
if they were connected with such areas as industry, technology, trade, and
interstate relations—or even agitation and propaganda on a mass scale. Much
later, when she faced political attacks in the late 1920s, Kameneva reminded
the Central Committee that she had created a very successful venture “from
scratch” without “even much moral support from the Party.”
I’ll risk saying it even more sharply: there was even an open dis-
dain for this work . . . From the TsK [Central Committee] all direc-
tives were limited to the laconic pronouncement: ‘Do not object’
(Ne vozrazhat´).
campaign, from the Americans. 37 At the same time, the innovative use of pho-
tography in his flagship mass publications, such as Die Welt am Abend and
Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung, and his later investment in fi lm and fi lm clubs
were in close dialogue with the Soviet “propaganda state.” They were also very
much in interaction with the politically committed Russian avant-garde. 38
Münzenberg’s IAH was a prime mover behind the 1922 Berlin exhibition of
Soviet art on Unter den Linden that featured many avant-garde works and had
an electrifying effect on the German public. The Soviet Foreign Affairs press
analyst was ecstatic: the exhibit’s success strengthened Soviet prestige abroad
and refuted the charge that the Soviet order could not produce significant
works of art. 39 Much as in the case of Kameneva’s outfit, the initial famine-
related concept behind IAH soon expanded to a much broader set of image-
shaping projects.
There were, however, differences and rivalries between Kameneva’s and
Münzenberg’s initiatives. Kameneva, in Moscow, placed great emphasis on the
reception of foreign visitors, and sett led on cultural and scientific exchange
as the main vehicle for her activities; Münzenberg’s activities among intellec-
tuals, while a personal forté, were nonetheless a sideshow for mass political
propaganda. Coming out of the early 1920s conjuncture, however, the two
functioned together as part of the network of new communist institutions deal-
ing with the image of the Soviet Union abroad.40 Like Kameneva, who started
her work by taking the “left-overs” from bourgeois philanthropy, Münzenberg
always put propaganda and the operations of his organization ahead of any
actual famine relief.41
In a movement that initially scorned or feared bourgeois intellectuals, both
Münzenberg and Kameneva, in their own ways strong and independent opera-
tors, cleared the way for cementing Soviet and Comintern backing for inten-
sive, patient, and artful work among groups that many communist militants
would have preferred simply to attack. Münzenberg had seemingly endless
energy and a rare talent for drawing people in; Kameneva had the skills and
polish to forge working relations with Western scientific and cultural elites.
Certainly, Münzenberg’s claim on resources in the 1920s was greater than
that of Kameneva’s, but by the 1930s the Soviet state was allocating vast sums
to receiving the most famous foreign intellectual dignitaries. Kameneva pur-
sued a deliberate strategy of keeping a focus on cultural and scientific activities
and a low-key and ostensibly neutral tone in publications; Münzenberg, while
using fronts to avoid the stigma of Comintern sponsorship, was more inclined
to a staccato burst of high-profi le campaigns—against fascism, foreign inter-
vention in the USSR, and so on.42 Both Kameneva and Münzenberg were cre-
ators of institutions that required a degree of organizational independence and
ideological flexibility.43
40 showcasing the great experiment
scholars and cultural fi gures. VOKS’s status as a “society” came into play
with the formation of a galaxy of “sections” that involved leading non-party
fi gures in various fields, initially including fi lm, science and technology,
law, museums, ethnography, and pedagogy. The list of the society’s “found-
ers” included high officials like Lunacharskii, Foreign Aff airs Press Section
Deputy Shubin, science administrator and Sovnarkom executive manager
(Upravdelami) N. P. Gorbunov, and representatives of the Comintern and
Central Committee, along with a range of fi gures such as the cooperative
non-party permanent secretary of the Academy of Sciences, the orientolo-
gist S. F. Ol´denburg, the pedagogue A. P. Pinkevich, and academician V. N.
Ipat´ev, a leading chemist.46
Kameneva initially thought of these sections as useful camouflage: “These
scientific, literary etc. sections will endow to the work an externally civil (obsh-
chestvennyi) character.”47 She soon realized, however, that they offered greater
possibilities: the various VOKS sections would draw in leading figures from
their respective fields, facilitate the establishment of ties with foreign scholars
and cultural figures, and expand the clout of the organization beyond the capa-
bilities of its permanent staff. What was not made public was that the VOKS
administration (praveleniia), in a fashion typical of Soviet state institutions
in the 1920s, also had a communist “fraction,” in addition to the five VOKS
“responsible workers” who were Communists.
The institution Kameneva created was at best a modest, mid-level force
in power-political terms within the party-state, but, at the same time, it was
a major player among agencies dealing with shaping public opinion abroad.
In terms of scientific and cultural travel and exchanges, it became crucial. Its
Moscow center and leadership was relatively small (a staff of 60 in 1929), but
it was a sprawling operation; VOKS representatives abroad held primary posts
elsewhere, mostly at embassies, and their number was increasing around the
globe. Bureaus within VOKS included those for the reception of foreigners,
press, book exchange, fi lm exchange, banquets, exhibitions, translations, and
the photographic agency Russ-Foto. These were important priorities, but “the
basic operative unit” of VOKS, something that became the main counterpart
to the public sections, was its geographically based referentura, or analysis
unit. Referenty would follow the cultural life of their assigned countries and
locate foreigners who could become “conveyors of our cultural influence.”48
The VOKS referentura mirrored the structure of Foreign Affairs, except that
the fi rst four VOKS sectors all dealt with Europe and the United States; at the
end of 1926 the “Eastern” section was still not set up.49
The Soviet intelligentsia was thus accorded a prominent yet subordinate role
in VOKS, and VOKS participated in what might be called the Sovietization of
civic life. Mobilizing Soviet intellectuals to work with foreigners for the goals
42 showcasing the great experiment
of the state, and sponsoring their travel abroad, marked the advent of a new
kind of Soviet obshchestvennost´, an untranslatable term connoting the pub-
lic sphere, civil society, the educated public, socially and politically engaged
groups, and even the intelligentsia. A sharp reduction of non-governmental
(“social”) organizations came in the late 1920s, after which the number of all-
Russian or all-union institutions dropped precipitously, to fewer than twenty
in 1934–38. In the early 1930s, the VOKS sections lost importance, and the
referentura became dominant in its activities. 50 By that time, however, the sec-
tions were deemed less necessary. Expectations for non-party intellectuals
to play proscribed “civic” roles in “international” activities—such as signing
petitions and meeting visitors—became much stricter toward the end of the
1920s. The history of VOKS reveals how prominent members of the Soviet
intelligentsia were involved and mobilized, becoming one of Soviet cultural
diplomacy’s greatest assets.
VOKS’s status as a society was not merely a fiction for external consump-
tion, then, but part of a broader project to involve and mobilize the Soviet
intelligentsia, in this case in international cultural relations. Th is status car-
ried with it unexpected political ramifications, however. It meant that VOKS,
deprived of a single oversight agency, became something of an orphan within
the Soviet bureaucratic hierarchy. Initially, it had seemed that this role, at least
for VOKS’s precursor OBI, might be at least partly fi lled by Foreign Affairs,
which would have fit the model of cultural diplomacy in European countries.51
While the new agency continued to maintain close contacts with Foreign
Affairs and foreign policy goals, VOKS developed according to a unique
political paradigm. The secret police had a strong presence in VOKS’s work,
particularly in terms of invitations to foreigners, their presence inside the
USSR, and information-gathering activities about them. High-level strategic
decisions involved the Central Committee and party leadership. All the same,
VOKS was not the special province of any one supervisor. As Kameneva told
the Central Committee in 1928, VOKS made sure to “agree in advance with
all interested organizations (Foreign Affairs, the Executive Committee of the
Comintern, the Commissariat of Enlightenment, the OGPU, etc.).” The “soci-
ety’s” anomalous position within the party-state left it open to bureaucratic
attack, even as the scale and importance of its activities increased dramatically
after 1925. In 1929, Kameneva noted that each commissariat had its own set
of international activities, but “each year the existence of our organization was
put into question.”52
One bureaucratic victory Kameneva did score for VOKS was to keep its
international work “centralized,”—that is, it fended off attempts to involve
the union republics as independent actors in cultural diplomacy. Proposals to
involve the union republics more substantially were present during the debates
C u l t u ra l D i p l o m a c y o f a N e w Ty p e 43
about the creation of VOKS in 1924, but Kameneva used all her efforts to
ensure that the new organ would be “authoritative” and therefore “all-union.”
A Central Executive Committee official she enlisted in this cause wrote that
any new organization that involved the union republics as separate players
on the international stage would “undoubtedly lower its authority abroad.”53
VOKS moved quickly to establish offices in the union republics. 54 To be sure,
there were a number of challenges to this centralization in the 1920s and
VOKS could not simply monopolize all international contacts by decree. But
after 1925, VOKS was in a position to gather material from the union republics
and present it in its foreign-language materials distributed abroad within its
own framework. For example, Kameneva turned to the Transcaucasian party
organization to provide materials for a special VOKS bulletin. The explicit
goals were to counter Georgian and Menshevik émigrés active in Europe and
to shape French interest in Armenia, to present a positive image of the Baku oil
industry to “capitalist” and intellectual circles, and to show the “real successes”
of Soviet power in developing national culture and the liberation of women. 55
The twin emphasis on achievements and counter-campaigns was also the cor-
nerstone of VOKS press and public opinion work in other areas.
The divergences between the organs of the Comintern and of the Soviet
state formed the context for a more serious political challenge to VOKS from
the Agitprop Department of the Comintern. Headed by exiled Hungarian
communist leader Béla Kun and the German writer Alfred Kurella, the
Comintern’s Agitprop maintained one of its primary levers in communist
party publications abroad. A combination of the need for covert action in
Western states and the period of United Front tactics with other parties, how-
ever, led to a new emphasis on broadening the scope of operations to include
“masked” or front organizations (not only IAH, but also International Red
Aid, the Pacifist League, and others). Ludmila Stern has recently argued that
the Comintern forged the prototype for international cultural propaganda
and the engagement of foreign intellectuals by VOKS and other Soviet state
organs. 56 Yet the multi-agency system that included both organizations fi rst
emerged out of the conjuncture of the early 1920s and matured in tandem in
the period 1923–26. Not only were there overlapping memberships and com-
mon subordination to the Soviet party leadership, but interagency commis-
sions attempted to systematize work precisely in this period—for example,
coordinating “placing information abroad” between the Comintern, Foreign
Affairs, ROSTA, the telegraph agency Inprekorr, and VOKS (which was given
the task of propagating “cultural information”). 57 What Stern portrays as the
Comintern’s innovative methods—placing “counter-material” (kontrmate-
rial) in its organs to parry without explicitly replying to “anti-Soviet” publi-
cations in European countries, and the organization of “campaigns” around
44 showcasing the great experiment
specific themes—were pursued in the early 1920s in the Soviet response to the
Russian emigration, in the former case, and developed as a component part of
the Central Committee Agitprop’s modus operandi, in the latter.
What can be said is that within the new, interrelated system that emerged in
1923–26, Comintern organs developed distinguishable emphases and goals.
For example, if a cornerstone of VOKS “information” work was to highlight
Soviet “achievements” (dostizheniia), the Comintern’s Agitprop considered
its focus the “achievements” specifically of the Communist Party. Its coun-
ter-material was aimed at other political parties, countering the “slanderous
campaigns” of Social Democracy and anarchism, and the intended audience
was concentrated in communist and labor movements. 58 Just as the Central
Committee’s Agitprop was a hard-line agency within the organs of Soviet
cultural policy at home, disdaining “cultural-enlightenment” work as insuf-
ficiently political, so the Comintern’s Agitprop looked down on VOKS’s
missions of targeting the “bourgeois” intelligentsia, which included non-com-
munist left ists and establishment elites.
In a mid-1926 power play, the Comintern’s Agitprop called for a reorien-
tation of VOKS’s work abroad to encompass “proletarian organs” and the
communist press. VOKS’s orientation around the “bourgeois intelligen-
tsia” should be coordinated with communist parties in order to create more
“ideological unity” with communist propaganda work, and the Comintern
itself would exercise a “certain control” (eine gewisse Kontrolle) over VOKS.
To the Comintern’s Agitprop, Kameneva replied vigorously in German that
“the whole work of VOKS is based on communist ground and is present in the
propaganda of Soviet culture. How can one make it into an opposite of com-
munist propaganda?” With justification, she insisted here and elsewhere that
if VOKS were to become an appendage of the Comintern, it would lose the
chance to cultivate many of the “big names” among European intellectuals.59
Similar skirmishes followed in the years to come.60
Münzenberg went ahead with his separate, labor-oriented organization
close to the communist parties, confusingly called the Bund der Freunde der
Sowjetunion (League of Friends of the Soviet Union). He enraged Kameneva
and VOKS officials by enlisting some of the very same intellectuals who were
members of the VOKS-run cultural friendship societies.61
Attacks on VOKS for making intellectuals and not the “working masses”
into its main priority did not subside until the mid-1930s, after the end of the
militant “proletarianization” policies of the Great Break.62 The critique of
Kameneva’s orientation toward the intelligentsia gained traction especially in
the period starting in the late 1920s, when workerism and “proletarianization”
policies held the cachet of ideological orthodoxy and the appeal of potentially
influential “mass” work.
C u l t u ra l D i p l o m a c y o f a N e w Ty p e 45
with visiting foreigners and in its publications, VOKS could hardly limit itself
to presenting Soviet “culture,” because foreigners were interested in the entire
Soviet system. VOKS never engaged solely with left ists or the intelligentsia,
however defi ned. Nationalists and right-wing figures fascinated by the Soviet
example, as well as non-left ist scholars, were constituencies, and in practice,
a wide array of tourists and other visitors used VOKS’s services, especially
before the rise of Intourist in 1929.67 Kameneva had fought tenaciously to
carve out and defend a roughly defi ned sphere for her brainchild. The intense
politicization of culture during the Great Break at the end of the 1920s, during
the fi rst phase of Stalinism, would jolt, but not destroy, the defi nition of roles
and the approaches taken within the party-state system of international work
set up under NEP.
Yet Kameneva was aware of the bigger picture: the unprecedented scope of
Soviet ambitions to choreograph foreign visits and manage the external cultural
relations of the entire country, even if those ambitions were far from realized.
She had reason to boast to an audience of VOKS guides in 1927 that no com-
parable institution existed elsewhere, given that cultural diplomacy in other
countries was largely a subdivision of ministries of foreign affairs.68 VOKS had
built on the historically novel aspirations of the party, state, and secret police to
control travel and information to and from the Soviet Union. The most unusual
aspects of Soviet cultural diplomacy lay elsewhere, however, for they grew out of
the intensely didactic thrust of Soviet political culture itself. Foreigners would be
not merely influenced, but won over and converted, and if that were not possible,
they could at least be taught to see the Soviet system through different eyes.
The Soviets wanted very much not merely to shape those outside impres-
sions but to recruit sympathizers and identify enemies, and they set them-
selves the task of evaluating the foreigners. Soviet scrutiny of these visiting
personifications of the “West” was intense. The height of intellectual sympathy
for Soviet socialism in this period hardly prompted the international wing of
the party-state to let down its apprehensive guard, nor were the Soviets com-
placent about how easy it was to manipulate naive foreigners. If anything, the
opposite was the case; the Party was highly suspicious of even the most ardent
friends.
Along with the new institutions of cultural diplomacy, a new Soviet culture
of evaluation emerged in the early 1920s that attempted to measure and predict
foreign visitors’ judgments and to gather useful information. Soviet evaluators
had to fi nd ways to counter the most common criticisms; they inevitably grap-
pled with the issue of explaining, and often deflecting, outsiders’ assertions of
Western superiority. For these reasons, the nascent Soviet system of receiving
foreigners, lashed as it was from the outset to the complementary external task
of influencing the Soviet image abroad, became a site of innovation for ways to
teach foreigners to focus on Soviet achievements and the bright future rather
than on grim poverty, backwardness, or repression.
If political and ideological evaluations were so important to both foreigners
and Soviets, why did the Soviets so persistently try to assess visitors’ cultural
level? In the context of the great concern with “culturedness” already present
in the Bolshevik project in the 1920s, it is clear that by judging Western visi-
tors’ cultural level, often harshly and derisively, Soviet evaluators implicitly
showed they stood above the stereotypical association of Europeanness with
cultural superiority.
Th is strategy was combined with highly practical motivations, as well. One
of the earliest significant Soviet reflections on the new methods for receiving
foreigners, written by OBI around August 1924, demonstrates that many fea-
tures of what became standard VOKS practices were already in place. First,
“record-keeping” (otchetnost´) had turned into an important part of the opera-
tion, even though at that point only fi ft y-three foreigners had been welcomed
over the previous twelve months.70 Second, visitors were sorted by importance
and connections: Kameneva personally received only those visitors who came
with recommendations from Münzenberg’s IAH or were known to her own
staff. Finally, an embryonic mode of guiding foreigners proceeded in “three
directions.” The fi rst was to effectively respond to foreigners’ questions. The
second was to interest them in questions they did not ask but that had sig-
nificance in illuminating the progress of socialist construction. Th is was to
be done with great care, so that foreigners would not, as it was put, believe
they were being shown a “Potemkin village.” The third, which became VOKS’s
48 showcasing the great experiment
superiority in other realms, except that in Soviet guides’ reports this is fre-
quently recast as a bourgeois—and in this case specifically non-European—
lack of culturedness.
All the same, neither the shadow sparring of the VOKS guides with the
Westerners’ arrogance nor the ideological exposé of their flaws negated psy-
chological insight about individual personalities. Trakhterov, in 1928, painted
the following portrait of the American coal engineer Sidney W. Farnham, an
unusually energetic yet “typical American engineer”: “Completely at home
in the technical details of his profession . . . Mr. Farnham builds his theory of
economic prosperity according to an all-American ‘standard stamp’: the basis
of welfare is ‘personal efficiency,’ that is, the individual productivity of labor,
which in his opinion is bound to stimulate personal competition based on pri-
vate capital – and not at all on the principles of socialist construction, which
appear to him as very weak stimulus for productivity.”78 Reducing visitors to
typical examples of their class or occupation, Trakhterov still felt compelled to
explain and polemicize against the key weaknesses of their worldviews.
Guides reported extensively on the merest hint from any foreigner about
Soviet insufficiency, including in the realm of culture or everyday life, in part
because to do so was a form of political insurance—they needed to suggest
how they had corrected the criticism. The exception proves the rule: when the
American director Herbert Biberman (who during the McCarthy era was one
of the “Hollywood Ten” jailed and blacklisted in 1947 for refusing to answer
questions from the House Committee on Un-American Activities) visited in
October 1927, he toured Soviet theaters and met with artists and directors.
There he happened to express the view that Soviet poster art “had not achieved
the level it could.” The “guide-translator Gal´perin”—born in 1905, Jewish, a
non-party student at the Second Moscow University who nonetheless had good
political credentials as a member of the editorial board of the journal Krasnyi
student [Red Student]—neglected to report if or how he countered this innoc-
uous, yet negative, judgment. Th is provoked a big blue question mark (and pre-
sumably an inquiry) from the VOKS administrative reader.79 More typically,
guides took enormous care to show how they corrected “wrong” ideas. In addi-
tion, the contents of political conversations were recorded in depth, such as
an American journalist’s discussion with Lunacharskii, who assured him that
Soviet censorship was not nearly as great as believed abroad and mostly sup-
pressed pornography.80 When a father and son from Cincinnati by the name
of Kenig were led by M. Geiman on a tour of the Lenin Museum and a china
factory in September 1927, they were surprised not only by the “great number
of beggars and homeless children in Moscow” but also by the guide’s descrip-
tion of the great measures the state was taking to fight child homelessness. The
guide’s evaluations suggested how positive impressions of political sympathy
C u l t u ra l D i p l o m a c y o f a N e w Ty p e 51
figures within the Soviet Union far more than it did with the blunt aggregates
of social engineering, which “reduced the population from a complicated mass
of individuals to a range of simplified types.”85 By recording sympathetic and
critical actions and comments, the VOKS system of information gathering
permitted officials to track levels of friendliness over time and to prioritize
resources for inviting and hosting in an advantageous way.
The VOKS information-gathering system that emerged in the 1920s serves
as a reminder that the secret police’s activities in surveillance and classifica-
tion were but one part of a broader effort that involved an entire archipelago of
party-state organizations. A main goal of information–gathering on foreigners
in the new cultural diplomacy was to win them over and convert them into
friends, bearing out those historians who have emphasized how the Soviet
state ideologically measured outlooks in order to transform them.86 On the
other hand, data gathering on foreigners can also be considered a form of clas-
sification that established undesirables by recording their dubious activities
and thoughts, fi xing the stigma of enmity. It thus conforms with the views
of historians who have argued for the key importance of Soviet registration
(uchet) of compromising information in marking enemies.87 Ultimately, in the
case of foreigners, as elsewhere, the branding of individuals and the urge to
use information as a form of influence appear as intertwined functions within
Soviet surveillance.88 The difference between the system directed inward at
Soviet citizens and that directed outward toward visitors was that strategically
important foreigners were routinely given far more leeway about their pasts
and ideological outlooks than Soviets, whose paper trails could turn deadly
long before the cataclysm of the Great Terror.
As in so many other areas, VOKS’s aspirations (and, by extension, those
of the entire multi-agency apparatus for receiving foreigners and influenc-
ing foreign opinion) greatly exceeded its capabilities. The VOKS archives are
fi lled with constant and sometimes comical problems with fluency in foreign
languages and political acumen, as well as basic lack of familiarity with cul-
tural context in dealing with visitors. Materials were sent abroad sporadically
or with a large degree of randomness. These human failings were combined
with poor facilities, long delays, disappearing transports, lost baggage, and so
on, which hurt or spoiled relations with many guests. Bureaucratic bumbling
and gross inefficiency, well-known features of the Soviet bureaucracy writ
large, permeated contacts with foreigners. In 1925, Leonid Krasin, then at the
Commissariat of Foreign Trade and an old hand at foreign relations, lectured
his colleagues on how properly to conduct affairs with French scientists:
Abroad they have their own habits and customs. If some scholar or
litterateur writes to you with one or another question and does not
C u l t u ra l D i p l o m a c y o f a N e w Ty p e 53
receive from you a written reply in the next few days, then this rude-
ness, extremely common here, will spoil relations with the given
person, in all probability forever. It is not hard to see what kind of dis-
appointment is produced in foreigners as a result of that chaotic and
inefficient approach that we often take in establishing cultural ties.89
should study each group for its specifics in advance; they should know how
to address and explain the thorniest questions (bol´nye voprosy) in a compre-
hensible manner. They should be skilled enough to independently “verify the
methods and manner of acting on the foreigner.”92 One tool, given that so few
visitors were fluent in Russian, was creative, partial, or openly mendacious
translation. Th is was an admitted focus of VOKS’s Translators Department,
which that year had 300 translators on its lists. The VOKS translator had to be
“politically literate” and “he himself must choose” what to say—in addition, of
course, to translating “exactly.”93
Far-reaching implications flowed from the innovations VOKS, and by
extension the entire multi-agency system that emerged in 1923–26, developed
to present Soviet socialism to foreigners. For new guides, Kameneva brilliantly
encapsulated the approach of blaming the past and pointing toward the bright
future. As she put it, foreigners must know of the terrible heritage of tsarism and
the international blockade during the Civil War. “You know, for example, that
our most vulnerable issue (samoe bol´noe mesto) is child homelessness . . . You
need to know how to relate that this is our heritage . . . from the past.” If the
problems of the present were to be blamed on the past, the present would also
appear much more promising if presented as the kernel of the bright future
around the corner. “We cannot ‘impress’ foreigners with our economic wealth,
although in science we are not backward,” Kameneva continued. “We can
only impress foreigners . . . from the point of view of speed [in which things are
changing] and from the point of view of development.”94 Soviet reality needed
to be presented not as it was, but as it was becoming.
An identical focus on heritage and achievements, the one shunting pres-
ent problems into the past and the other magnifying present strengths by pre-
dicting the future, found its origins in the broader effort in 1923–26 to craft
the Soviet image abroad. The Comintern’s Agitprop may have placed special
emphasis on the Soviet Communist Party so as to provide a model for foreign
Communists, but the underlying stress on highlighting achievements was
also present. The Comintern also placed emphasis on what might be called
managed authenticity: whenever possible, the oppression of the tsarist past or
the success of such social measures as workers’ sanatoria should be expressed
through the voices of ordinary workers and Soviet citizens.95
In keeping with the twin focus on receiving visitors at home and shaping
public opinion abroad, the strategies developed for VOKS guides meeting for-
eigners on the ground were roughly similar to those reflected in VOKS pub-
lications. In keeping with Kameneva’s expressed desire, the twelve issues of
the VOKS bulletin in 1925–26, translated into major European languages,
strove to keep a low-key approach that listed a range of Soviet publications and
events. The red thread that ran through the articles on contemporary Soviet
C u l t u ra l D i p l o m a c y o f a N e w Ty p e 55
science, art, literature, exhibitions, music, and national cultures was that they
were framed, often explicitly, in terms of “achievements.” Here, though, the
past was not solely invoked as the source of contemporary problems; efforts
were made to prove that the Soviet Union preserved the best cultural and sci-
entific legacies of the past, a theme that emerged as refutation of the post-1917
émigré charge that the Bolsheviks were destroying culture. The 200th jubilee
of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1925, which happily combined preserva-
tion of high culture, the scientific achievements of the present, and the prom-
ise of the future, was featured in no fewer than three successive issues.96
There is evidence that the Soviets had more than a litt le success in “teach-
ing” sympathetic foreigners to read Soviet reality simultaneously in light of
yesterday and tomorrow, both in the 1920s and during the heyday of Socialist
Realism.97 Both temporal perspectives were strongly present in efforts to con-
vince representatives of the “advanced West,” who needed not only to hear
about the future but also to appreciate the oppressive weight of the past. The
fundamental approach of reorienting the observers’ sense of the present was
therefore at hand simultaneously in “information” aimed abroad and the
efforts of VOKS guides enjoined to impress foreigners from the “point of view
of development.”
The Soviet culture of evaluation of individuals emerged in tandem with a
highly hierarchical mental map of the globe implicit in the international cul-
tural apparatus’ orientation and writings. If the Soviet Union was leaping
ahead, other countries and nations were ranked according to their place on the
scale of development—industrial, technological, economic, and also cultural.
In 1926, for example, VOKS sponsored a short-lived journal, West and East.
With a circulation of 5,000, it was designed, according to Kameneva, to inform
Soviet readers about the outside world so that one could know the capitalist
enemy better. The journal, as its title suggested, was to try to look in both
directions, but Kameneva’s introduction was mostly concerned with “bour-
geois” countries, and when she spoke of knowledge of the world abroad, it was
focused on “the countries with highly developed technology and economics.”
The eminent non-party orientologist Ol´denburg deliberately reversed the
title of the journal in his own article, “East and West,” lambasting ignorance
of the East. Instead, he claimed, “We are free from European prejudices about
the superiority of the West over the East, and in this is our great strength.” Well
before 1917, Ol´denburg and a number of prominent colleagues built Russian
Oriental studies by propounding the notion that Russia could know the East
better than could Europeans, a position that was radicalized along with anti-
German sentiment in World War I and presaged anti-bourgeois positions after
1917.98 In Kameneva’s introduction to Ol´denburg, those “European” preju-
dices were well on display: when it came to the East, knowledge was important
56 showcasing the great experiment
not to advance socialist construction but because it would be useful for Soviet
nationalities’ policies. The peoples of the East needed “help” in develop-
ment, “help” in the reconstruction of their national cultures, and, because
the intelligentsia there was small, “help” in “developing culture” (v kul´turno-
sozidatel’noi rabote). The journal West-East itself had, aside from Ol´denburg’s
article, only a lone piece on Chinese language reform; it was heavily oriented
toward European cultural events and, to a lesser extent, science and technol-
ogy. Kameneva made her stance even more explicit when opening the courses
for guides in 1927: the greatest goals (maksimal´naia programma) in interna-
tional work were to share Soviet experience and “to study that technology, that
science, that degree of achievement in scholarship that Europe and America
have achieved.”99
The teleological view of the world reflected in the hierarchical ranking of
individuals and countries was not simple or inflexible, for cultural and politi-
cal factors were inserted into it along with industrial and scientific levels of
advancement. Soviet class analysis, proletarian internationalism, and revolu-
tionary universalism could at least potentially invert some of the hierarchies
born in nineteenth-century ideologies of progress, which purported to rank
humanity by objective criteria ranging from levels of industrialization and
national character to race. Someone like Ol´denburg, although himself highly
concerned with European scientific literature and contacts, was an important
exception to the crude exclusivity of Kameneva’s “Western” orientation. But
despite the exceptions, the ubiquitous practice of ranking foreigners’ impor-
tance and orientation reinforced hierarchical assumptions.
The preoccupation with the West, moreover, went far beyond rhetoric.
Even as European contacts and initiatives had been growing rapidly since
the early 1920s, Kameneva reported to Chicherin in August 1925 that VOKS
had “practically no ties” with China and had managed just a small exchange
of scientific literature through the embassy in Japan. The disproportion was
of course heightened by the practical factors of relative European proximity
and difficulties of operating elsewhere, but it also reflected the priorities of
the Old Bolshevik emigration with its European contacts and experiences. In
fact, VOKS contacts with scholars in China and Japan were furthered only
on the initiative of professors in the Far Eastern University in Vladivostok
in 1925.100 A friendship society in China was not founded until a full decade
later, in October 1935, by which time the rise of authoritarian nationalism in
Japan had necessitated the closing of the Japanese-Soviet Cultural Society.
The most important exception to the rule was the Mexican Revolution, which
made Mexico the fi rst country in the Western hemisphere to establish dip-
lomatic relations with the Soviets, facilitating visas and cultural exchange.
Many visitors from the other revolutionary state were searching for way of
C u l t u ra l D i p l o m a c y o f a N e w Ty p e 57
One key fact about the organizational structure of the secret police is that
internal dissent and foreign contagion were institutionally connected. The
primary secret police agency charged with operations abroad and foreigners
within the USSR was the Foreign Department (Inostrannyi otdel, or INO),
which, when founded in 1921, included a chancellery, a section of agents (agen-
turnoe otdelenie), and an office for visas (biuro viz). From 1923–29, INO was
headed by Meier Abramovich Trilisser—born in 1883 in Astrakhan, party
member since 1901, and Cheka member since 1918—who also became deputy
director of the entire OGPU. Trilisser was the secret police official most heav-
ily involved in VOKS affairs in the 1920s judging by the frequency with which
his name appears on documents.103
Like other Soviet agencies involved in international operations, the Foreign
Department had one foot in international operations and the other in domestic
activities involving foreigners inside the USSR. Starting in 1921, it maintained
an informer section (osvedomitel´naia chast´), and contacts between foreigners
and Soviet citizens fell within its purview. INO itself was a subdivision of the
Secret-Operative Administration (Sekretno-Operativnoe Upravlenie). During
the famous “philosopher’s steamboat” affair in 1922 that deported dozens of
the country’s most prominent scholars and thinkers deemed a threat to the
new order, the Secret-Operative Administration began much more actively
to maintain agents, informers, and an investigative apparat to uncover “anti-
Soviet” movements among the Russian intelligentsia. At the same time,
informers drawn from the network of secret associates (sekretnye sotrudniki, or
seksoty) were, in addition to their role in surveillance throughout Soviet soci-
ety, attached to foreign visitors or attended gatherings of foreigners. Seksoty
generated the material for agent reports sent to the leadership of the secret
police and the party.104
One set of documents from 1932 shows how VOKS facilitated secret
police tracking of the movements of foreign visitors, including their visits
to the sites of communism, by furnishing planned arrivals and excursions
of individual foreigners for the upcoming months.105 In addition, some
VOKS representatives abroad, like other fi gures in Soviet international cul-
tural institutions that were used to conceal espionage activity, were NKVD
rezidenty. In terms of secret police recruitment of foreigners as agents, the
young Soviet Union enjoyed the almost unique advantage that many poten-
tial spies were willing to cooperate out of ideological sympathy as opposed
to material incentives. Anthony Blunt, the art historian and senior mem-
ber of the famous Trinity College, Cambridge, spy ring that included Kim
Philby, was recruited after he published a favorable account of an Intourist
trip to the Soviet Union in 1935, during which he was observed by the
agency’s personnel.106
C u l t u ra l D i p l o m a c y o f a N e w Ty p e 59
foreigners and those who met them. VOKS checked with INO before inviting
foreigners, to see if there was any “compromising evidence” on figures who had
previous Soviet contacts—such as work in the American Relief Administration
in the early 1920s.112 Sometimes the organs checked with VOKS on individual
foreigners to see if it would vouch for them.113 As suggested earlier, there is
evidence that the catalogue of information VOKS compiled on foreigners—
guide reports and evaluations, summaries of discussions and meetings, clas-
sifications as friends and enemies—was put at the disposal of various other
institutions, including the secret police. These materials ranged widely, from
the record of a long conversation between Kameneva and a visiting American
agricultural expert whose contacts had relevance for the highly sought U.S.
diplomatic recognition of the USSR to chance tidbits and remarks made by
foreign guests. In the latter category, in 1936, VOKS dutifully sent the NKVD
materials on conversations with foreigners that had a bearing, however slight,
on security and espionage—including a French psychologist who mentioned
Trotsky’s brief sojourn in Paris and a Czech pedagogue who asked where Stalin
lived in the Kremlin.114
The secret police itself was the most powerful player in developing Soviet
practices of evaluation and recordkeeping, which preserved political and psy-
chological “characterizations” of Soviets and foreigners alike. As it developed
its own system for classifying foreigners, VOKS became an auxiliary player
in the secret police’s effort. For example, VOKS’s portrait of one visitor—“a
person in theory highly sympathetic to the Soviet system, but in practice more
than anything else interested in his own personal career”—was received by
the NKVD.115 How the NKVD reacted, we do not know. But by summing
up foreigners’ profi les, such subjective interpretations, culled from conversa-
tions of guides and staff with visitors, held direct implications for operational
practice.
All these activities were facilitated by their domestic sett ing, in which the
party-state reigned supreme. Assembling information and exerting power
would present many more challenges to the newly established initiatives of
Soviet cultural diplomacy when it came to acting abroad.
2
In the fall of 1926, engraved invitations to an Arbat venue were sent to high party
officials, diplomats, and intelligentsia luminaries. Dubbed an “evening of rap-
prochement” (vecher sblizheniia), the VOKS event was devoted to Soviet-German
relations. The honored guest was the Berlin historian Otto Hoetzsch—a lead-
ing figure in German Ostforschung, a foreign policy expert with close ties to the
German Foreign Office, and a center-right nationalist proponent of Germany’s
“Eastern orientation” that sought a post-Versailles alliance against the Western
powers. Hoetzsch was also the spiritus rector of one of VOKS’s most important
partner organizations in Germany, the German Society for the Study of Eastern
Europe (Deutsche Gesellschaft zum Studium Osteuropas).1
The diplomatic significance of the event was suggested by the attendance
of Soviet Foreign Affairs deputy director Maksim Litvinov. In his speech, tai-
lored for German ears, he emphasized the importance of the Rapallo treaty,
signed by the two international pariahs in 1922, as well as the Soviet Union’s
anti-Versailles credentials. Also present were high Soviet foreign trade officials
and a delegation of twelve industrialists from East Prussia, underscoring the
economic importance of the reception, and the role cultural diplomacy could
play in fostering international trade. VOKS was eager to cultivate a Russian-
German Club in Königsberg, founded earlier in 1926, in which representatives
of Soviet economic organs mixed with high East Prussian officials, industrial
figures, and social scientists “primarily from right-wing circles.” Introducing
Hoetzsch, Kameneva frankly acknowledged that he was far from being “our
ideological sympathizer.” She announced that it was precisely for that reason
that “he was trusted” when reporting positively on the USSR in his home coun-
try.2 In doing so, Kameneva highlighted a major reason Soviet cultural diplo-
macy was interested in non-sympathizers such as Hoetzsch, a strategy that
would come under increasing stress with the great clash brewing in Germany
and Europe between extremes of Left and Right.
61
62 showcasing the great experiment
Hoetzsch, who had fi rst visited Russia in 1904, made Kameneva’s remarks
about his intellectual distance from the Bolsheviks seem like a tactful under-
statement. Quoting Alesha from The Brothers Karamazov, he spoke of the
“Russian land” with its birch trees as the basis for the “Russian soul.” Playing
on the Russian émigré slogan, “Rossiia byla i Rossiia budet” (“Russia was and
Russia will be”), he summed up his geopolitical credo: “Rossiia sushchestvuet”
(“Russia exists”). Telegrams and press releases emanating from Moscow left
out the Russian soul but underlined the hopeful expressions of various speak-
ers about Soviet-Weimar relations. 3
The cultivation of ties with key individuals and partner organizations
was perhaps the largest part of the VOKS’s external operations, although this
emerged in tandem with a broad repertoire of “informational” work connected
to publications, photographs, exhibitions, and analysis of cultural and political
developments abroad. The emergence of two classes of partners—ideological
sympathizers and influential yet ideologically distant figures interested in Soviet
connections for diplomatic, economic, or scholarly reasons—dates to the arrival
of the first wave of foreign visitors in the early 1920s. More specifically, it was
linked to two types of German visitors in the fall of 1923.
The fi rst was Hoetzsch himself, the earliest “bourgeois” German scholar
to visit the Soviets, during a month-long stay in Moscow that began on
September 20, 1923. Earlier that year, Hoetzsch had played a leading role in
sett ing up the Westphal Committee, a group of forty-four leading German
professors and scientists, including Max Planck and twelve members of the
Gesellschaft, who were interested in furthering scientific relations. Preparing
for his visit, Hoetzsch wrote to the German ambassador in Moscow, Graf
Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, an ardent proponent of the Eastern orienta-
tion, playing up the importance of cultural exchange for economic and politi-
cal relations. In the midst of visits to museums and scholarly institutions,
Hoetzsch met with Chicherin and consulted with Kameneva. On his return,
in published statements well known to Kameneva and recalled by her during
his 1926 visit, Hoetzsch’s impressions were largely positive, although he com-
pared the Communist Party to a religious order and lamented the disappear-
ance of the old, cultivated classes. His visit paved the way for a longstanding
partnership with VOKS.4
Before the illustrious bourgeois scholar had even departed, Kameneva wel-
comed a very different group of Germans: the pro-Soviet founding members
of the newly created Society of Friends of the New Russia (Gesellschaft der
Freunde des neuen Russlands), the prototype for VOKS’s cultural friendship
societies around Europe and, later, the world. Among the visitors were the radio
engineer Georg Graf von Arco, the art critic Max Osborn, and the women’s
rights activist and pacifist Helene Stöcker. All three had attended the founding
G o i n g We s t : S o v i e t “C u l t u ra l ” O p e ra t i o n s A b r o a d 63
meeting of the Society of Friends in Berlin on June 1, 1923, and became core
members of the society’s presidium. Kameneva found that the visit cemented
their outlook as actively “sympathizing” journalists and litterateurs. 5
Germany deserves special attention because the Weimar Republic was at
once a paradigmatic and an exceptional site for the nascent Soviet cultural
diplomacy to confront this division between sympathizers and convenient
bedfellows. At fi rst the chief repository for hopes for a Soviet-type revolution,
which waned considerably only after the failure of the “German October”
in 1923, Germany became the crown jewel in Chicherin’s foreign policy of
“peaceful coexistence” after the Rapallo pact. Germany, of course, had occu-
pied a position of exceptional importance in Russian scientific, scholarly, and
cultural life in the two centuries preceding the revolution, and the particular
international conjuncture, leading to favorable diplomatic and military coop-
eration of a kind decidedly absent in relations with all the other major powers
(despite the counter-force of Gustav Stresemann’s Westward tilt after 1923),
served to perpetuate the special significance of German-Soviet connection in
other realms. Despite all German and subsequent invocations of the “special
relationship,” however, this did not mean the Soviets were not actively seek-
ing influence and partners elsewhere or that they consistently valued German
connections more.6 There were numerous rivalries among foreign scientists,
experts, and organizations jockeying for access or scrambling for position
within the great new Soviet “laboratory,” which seemed to offer new vistas
for experimentation. That said, Berlin was the epicenter of Soviet European-
centered activities of all kinds in the 1920s, including VOKS’s international
cultural policy. For these reasons, innovations fi rst applied in the German
context—such as, most obviously, the friendship society—served as models
for Soviet activities elsewhere.
Yet German-Soviet relations, despite their influence as precedents for the
Soviets, proved exceptional in crucial ways. In the wake of Versailles, there
were far more nationalist and right-wing partners with an “Eastern orientation”
hoping to engage the Soviets; philo-Bolshevism was uniquely strong on both
sides of the German political spectrum. To be sure, geopolitical factors and
“enemy-of-my-enemy” thinking were hardly unique among the factors pushing
many other Europeans toward the Soviet Union. For example, anti-German and
anti-British sentiment played an important role among pro-Soviet circles gath-
ered around the Soviet embassy in interwar Paris; in the mid-1930s in Britain,
during the years of the Popular Front and collective security, Soviet ambassa-
dor Ivan Maiskii launched initiatives to foster ties with British Conservatives,
whom he viewed as increasingly ready to engage the Soviets, essentially because
of the foreign policy conjuncture.7 Soviet analysts dealing with foreign intellec-
tuals, moreover, routinely formulated plans to alter their message depending
64 showcasing the great experiment
decade between its pre-war founding and its emergence as a leading center of
Eastern European studies deliberately linked scholarly, state, diplomatic, and
economic interests. One might expect that the Gesellschaft’s close ties with
the German government would have aroused the suspicions and hostility of
the Bolsheviks, but these connections were in fact responsible for much of its
allure. In the 1920s, the Gesellschaft became the most important German
organization devoted to Russian studies. At its height, it included about 300
members, most of them in Berlin, from within and without the academic
world.Even as it found in VOKS a reliable partner for ensuring access to travel
and publications, the Gesellschaft continued to maintain the tight linkage
between the worlds of academia and policy that had characterized its existence
since its founding in 1913.16
The various interests represented within the Gesellschaft’s member-
ship constitute a virtual encyclopedia of non-left ist motivations behind the
“Eastern orientation” favoring positive relations with the USSR. Hoetzsch’s
main partner, and president of the Gesellschaft, was the science organizer
Friedrich Schmidt-Ott, a longtime higher education official in the Prussian
Kultusministerium who rose to the rank of minister in 1917. In 1920, Schmidt-
Ott assumed the leadership of the Notgemeinschaft der deutschen Wissenschaft
(Emergency Association for German Science), which became the leading
German force behind Soviet-German scientific cooperation. Schmidt-Ott thus
boasted close ties to the German cultural and foreign policy establishments and
great administrative experience in science. Like Hoetzsch, he assumed that
scientific and cultural connections with Russia were “above all political”—a
phase that could have come from any Bolshevik—in that cultural initiatives
would serve the goals of German foreign policy. Indeed, the Gesellschaft was
directly supported by funding from the Cultural Division (Kulturabteiling)
of the Foreign Office, VOKS’s counterpart as the main German vehicle of cul-
tural diplomacy.17 As a scholarly center promoting “modern” research agendas
with contemporary relevance for German-Soviet relations, the Gesellschaft
actively sought out fi nancial, industrial, and trade interests. Leading figures
from Deutsche Bank, Siemens-Werke, AEG, and other fi rms interested in pro-
moting exports or economic relations with the USSR were represented in the
organization’s leadership.18
Soviet relations with Hoetzsch’s Gesellschaft developed with most inten-
sity in 1923–25, the period leading up to the foundation and emergence of
VOKS, ensuring a continuing and ubiquitous comparison with the left-leaning
Society of Friends. The fi rst issue of the Gesellschaft’s organ Ost-Europa
appeared in August 1925. In the month before its appearance, the general
secretary of the Gesellschaft , Hans Jonas, who had learned Russian as a POW
during World War I, formally requested VOKS “support” for the journal,
68 showcasing the great experiment
by which he meant that VOKS would supply articles from Soviet authors.
Ost-Europa became the fi rst German scholarly publication devoted solely to
contemporary Soviet and Eastern European affairs. The range of its articles,
relatively high level of coverage, and regular commentators made it valuable
to the German Foreign Office, and most embassies in Moscow subscribed.
Hoetzsch’s own prolific output “registered German-Soviet relations like a
seismograph.”19
For its part, VOKS greatly valued the opportunity to publish promi-
nent Soviet authors—including such figures as Commissar of Education
Lunacharskii, the pedagogue Pinkevich, the sociologist Reisner, and many
others of a more “specialist” bent, such as jurists and statisticians—in a non-
left ist venue.20 Kameneva agreed to send contributions on the condition that
Ost-Europa would ban Russian émigré authors, make no changes to Soviet
articles, and provide a larger honorarium. Hoetzsch proved willing to break
his ties with members of the Russian emigration.21
Despite a number of moments of friction over publications in Ost-Europa
that VOKS considered unflattering or anti-Soviet, the relationship proved
att ractive to both sides. Indeed, Hoetzsch jealously guarded his VOKS con-
nections. There was a distinct element of rivalry and competition between the
Gesellschaft and the Society of Friends as the society of sympathizing “friends”
arose under the aegis of the very Soviet institution with which the Gesellschaft
was most closely involved. Symbolically, in her trips to Germany, Kameneva
visited both organizations. On one occasion, in 1928, when Kameneva was in
Cologne for the Pressa exhibition, she urged the mayor, the future German
chancellor Konrad Adenauer, to create a local branch of the Society of Friends.
The Gesellschaft reportedly responded by warning Adenauer about the “politi-
cal character” of its Soviet-sponsored rival and tried to persuade him to open a
chapter of the Gesellschaft instead.22
By 1925, the allure of potential influence over prominent German policy-
makers had so turned the heads of Soviet embassy personnel in Berlin that
some began to favor a complete reorientation of VOKS’s cultural efforts
toward the Gesellschaft . Significantly, the most optimistic assessment of
the Gesellschaft’s potential came from the Soviet embassy in Berlin, where
the VOKS representative and Berlin diplomat Nikolai Nikolaevich Shtange
became the point man for the publication of Soviet authors in Ost-Europa.
Precisely because the Gesellschaft was conservative and nationalist in orienta-
tion, Shtange maintained, it would not be suspected of Soviet manipulation and
might thus better serve as a cover for Soviet interests. On August 24, 1925, he
wrote to Kameneva that the Gesellschaft held “more and more significance for
us.” It had great resources, visible names, and a “purely German character”—a
phrase that could have come from any German nationalist—that endowed it
G o i n g We s t : S o v i e t “C u l t u ra l ” O p e ra t i o n s A b r o a d 69
Of course, we must not close our eyes to the fact that bourgeois figures
and scholars who are “well-disposed” toward us will hardly defend
our interests in the case of a serious crisis between Germany and the
USSR. But they will all the same not speak out openly, even if we were
not connected to them by other means. During the confl ict [in Soviet-
German relations] last year many of the members of the “Society of
Friends of the New Russia” distanced themselves from the society
and even left it. In normal circumstances we have in the Gesellschaft
a highly powerful apparatus, which we can use for the propaganda of
the idea of rapprochement among bourgeois circles in Germany.24
Kameneva agreed with Shtange that the Gesellschaft deserved “broad sup-
port,” and she agreed to provide articles for its journal, set up a book exchange,
and arrange lectures, securing the approval of Litvinov for all of the above.
Significantly, Shtange also favored ceding the Society of Friends to Comintern
control, in this case not out of militancy but out of his overwhelming inter-
est in the non-left ists. Yet Kameneva, who did so much to fend off Comintern
incursions into VOKS affairs, was adamant about maintaining oversight over
the Society of Friends and insisted on cultivating the German left ists and
nationalists simultaneously. Her sharp retorts to Shtange on these questions,
it seems, prompted the latter to proffer his resignation as VOKS representative
in September 1925. 25
Relations between VOKS and the Gesellschaft continued to progress, and
reached their high point after the 200th jubilee of the Russian Academy of
Sciences in 1925. Gesellschaft cooperation with VOKS did play a role in help-
ing to bring to fruition a series of high-profi le scientific and cultural events,
including, among several others, the week of Soviet natural science and his-
tory, held in 1927 and 1928 in Berlin, and the week of German technology in
Moscow in 1929.26 By claiming some of the credit associated with the peak
70 showcasing the great experiment
Yet, a diff use influence was hardly the same as calling the shots from
Moscow. Although the Society of Friends’ membership was sprawling, size
was always considered an asset by the Soviets. Equally important was that
it included a number of cultural and scholarly luminaries. While a number
of famous figures joined at the outset—including Albert Einstein, the writ-
ers Thomas and Heinrich Mann, the sociologist and political economist
Franz Oppenheimer, and the fi rst director of the Frankfurt School for Social
Research, (karl Grünberg—they rarely took part in the Society’s activities. In
the late 1920s, VOKS analysts boasted about the membership of other cul-
tural figures who were deeply involved in Soviet affairs, including theatrical
director Erwin Piscator and the architect and urban planner Bruno Taut. In
1925, the Society of Friends was reported to have 700 to 800 official mem-
bers, who “more or less” paid official dues; this number was supplemented by
a large group of KPD members who also took part in its activities (these com-
prised the approximately 200 “unofficial members” who were not registered,
clearly because they would have altered the Society’s claims to neutrality). The
German Society was also unique in its proximity to the Soviet colony in Berlin,
and from the outset, Kameneva’s personal emissary worked to add twenty to
twenty-five high-level Soviets who knew German well to “liven up” the orga-
nization. In 1930, the Society, including its several new regional affi liates, was
reported to have 1,300 members. 38
The ethos of the Society was consistently pro-Soviet: Kameneva herself vet-
ted the core group of active members of the Society for their sympathy to the
Soviet experiment. 39 The activists were a motley group of radical democrats,
social reformers, pacifi sts, and others united by the pull of the fi rst social-
ist society. The membership over the years also included teachers, doctors,
jurists, and artists interested in Soviet activities in their disciplines; scien-
tists and scholars primarily interested in broadening German-Soviet schol-
arly relations; parliamentarians and public figures, including a small group
of Social Democrats; and politicians and even some non-left ist or national-
ist intellectuals whose primary interest lay in the “Eastern orientation.”40
The communist head of the Society, the publicist Erich Baron, underlined
to Kameneva in 1928 that a number of high German officials attended the
Society’s talks and evenings depending on the Soviet topic presented; for
example, when Soviet law was discussed, officials from the Justice Ministry
attended. When well-known Soviet figures such as Lunacharskii or Semashko
spoke, “all of intellectual Berlin” showed up. The number of non-left ist visi-
tors also included parliamentarians and officials, professors of varied political
persuasions, and, on many occasions, the German ambassador to the USSR,
Brockdorff-Rantzau. All these figures and more would be lost, according to
Baron, if Soviet connections behind the Society of Friends were revealed.41
G o i n g We s t : S o v i e t “C u l t u ra l ” O p e ra t i o n s A b r o a d 73
Some members of the Society of Friends were the same kind of non-left ist
men of influence who prompted such marked Soviet enthusiasm for the
Gesellschaft . Despite the Society’s left ist profi le and orientation, there was
a degree of overlap between the Society and the Soviets’ nonleft ist German
interlocutors of the era.
Some intellectuals who considered themselves deeply interested in Soviet
politics and culture, such as Walter Benjamin, found tensions between the
official neutrality of cultural exchange and the society’s role as a space for a
Soviet-German intellectual cross-fertilization problematic. Freshly back from
his Moscow journey in 1927 and reflecting on the news of the founding of the
new Franco-Soviet friendship society, Benjamin hoped the organizers would
go beyond what he disparagingly called the “harmless treadmill of interna-
tional cultural relations.” Th is he contrasted with the “eminently political
fact of an acquaintance with the intellectual agendas of Russia.” All the same,
he praised the Berlin society as “a very useful informational institution.”42
Benjamin craved access to the latest Soviet cultural trends, themselves obvi-
ously political, rather than any quasi-official, outward segregation of culture
and politics.
The openly pro-Soviet nature of the Society of Friends did significantly
affect the kinds of goals VOKS articulated for it, as opposed to those it for-
mulated for more politically and ideologically distant figures. One constantly
reiterated task was to propagate a favorable view of Soviet “achievements” in
culture and science specifically, as well as in the construction of Soviet social-
ism as a whole. The possibilities opened up by the Society of Friends, there-
fore, revolved around influencing the att itudes of cultural elites, the outlook
of the “intelligentsia,” and, as it was often termed, “mobilizing public opinion”
in Europe. By contrast, Soviet aspirations with the non-left ists and national-
ists revolved less around openly disseminated cultural propaganda and more
around influencing foreign policy, neutralizing hostility on the part of politi-
cally influential figures in the event of a crisis, gathering information and
covert contacts, and penetrating otherwise closed groups and milieus.
Unlike Hoetzsch’s Gesellschaft, the Society of Friends was a cultural front
organization that offered the Soviets the prospect of behind-the-scenes direc-
tion. Soviet cultural diplomacy produced skilled practitioners of the art of
directing front organizations by establishing a covert chain of command, either
with a selected local leader or a pliable presidium. Th is remained VOKS’s pre-
ferred modus operandi with the friendship societies for decades. In the German
case, matters were initially made easier by the fact that Baron was a KPD mem-
ber close to Lunacharskii. He served as the main contact with VOKS until
1933, and a succession of VOKS representatives in the German embassy served
as liaisons between Baron and the VOKS leadership. The record shows that in
74 showcasing the great experiment
Red Vienna
Each country’s internal political configuration, particularly the relations
between the communist and social-democratic parties, was decisive for the
membership of the new friendship societies. In Germany, where both the far
Right and the far Left were substantial, polarized, and extreme, KPD relations
with the SPD were hostile—not only on ideological grounds but also due to
intensive political competition. 57 The German Society of Friends was able and
willing to att ract and retain only a tiny handful of Social Democrats. In “red
Vienna,” by contrast, where the Social Democrats after 1918 launched their
own experiment in municipal model building, VOKS encountered great inter-
est on the part of sympathetic Social Democrats. Austrian Social Democrats
and academic figures formed two large blocks within the initial membership,
and they reportedly did not see the need for att racting different groups, be
it among the political elite, industry, or “nonpolitical” figures. On the other
hand, the Social Democrats in the Austrian society were wary of appearing
too pro-Soviet. Inevitably, they provoked Soviet suspicions that the society
could fall under the influence of their party organization. The VOKS repre-
sentative announced efforts to reduce the Social Democratic contingent and
recruit non-party members supposedly immune to its leadership. As late as
1932 half of all present and former members in the Viennese “citadel of social-
democracy” were either “left” Social Democrats or party members who were
not politically prominent. 58
In another departure from the Berlin “model” (skhema) that the VOKS
representatives in Vienna were supposed to replicate, a significant group of
Austrian friends favored including the improvement of Austro-Soviet trade
relations as one of the society’s major functions. Asked by her deputy in Vienna
if that should be sanctioned, Kameneva admonished that “the main task is to
att ract cultural and scientific workers of the West into closer relations.” The
Commissariat of Foreign Trade welcomed the foundation of a friendship soci-
ety but vetoed any “operational functions of a commercial character” as com-
pletely impermissible. 59 In the decade after its founding, however, hopes for
an economic dimension to cultural friendship apparently remained a notable
current in the Austrian membership; its failure to materialize was the reason
given in 1931 for an overall drop in society activities. In the period leading up to
and following outbreak of Civil War, in February 1934, and the establishment
78 showcasing the great experiment
Arosev in Prague
Recruiting friendly intellectuals in the friendship society in Prague, also
organized on the German model in 1924, was shaped by a factor not present
elsewhere in Western Europe: Slavic solidarity. Russophilic sentiment was a
widespread feature of Czech intellectual life since the national revival in the
nineteenth century. Numerous VOKS reports on the First Czechoslovak
Republic note a Slavic or “Slavophile” interest in Soviet art and science, a factor
also noted as creating fertile soil for “our influence” in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia.
One 1931 analyst judged the level of knowledge about Russian culture and
the Soviet Union in Czechoslovakia to be greater than in any other Western
European country.61
The unusual strength of the political and cultural Left in Prague was also
key. In 1924, Baron, writing from Berlin, informed Kameneva of the “large
number of friends” in Czechoslovak “intellectual and economic circles.” Baron
was in close contact with his counterpart in Prague, the musicologist Zdeněk
Nejedlý (1878–1962), as the latter assumed the leading role in founding the
Czechoslovak society.62 As a student of history and aesthetics at Charles
University in 1896, Nejedlý had traveled to the Caucasus and met Lev Tolstoy.
As a professor ordinarius at the same university after 1919, he became an active
publicist close to the Communist Party in the 1920s. We will meet Nejedlý
again as one of the most enthusiastic visitors to the USSR in the 1930s. His
fellow-traveling days prepared the ground for Moscow exile in 1939 in the
wake of Munich. After teaching at Moscow State University, he returned to
post-war Czechoslovakia as minister of education and culture during the late
Stalin period. In this case, committed “friendship” led to great prominence in
the Czechoslovak Communist Party.
The Czechoslovak Left was stronger, freer to act, and hence more legitimate
than in any other country of Eastern or Central Europe, and the Communist
Party operated above ground throughout the twenty years of the First
Republic’s existence. Left-wing politics exerted a strong hold among interwar
Czech intellectuals, in particular among the literary elite. 63 Calculating strat-
egy, Soviet analysts also highlighted the potential uses of national tensions as
a recruiting tool—in this case, Slovak resentments of Czech dominance in the
new republic. Furthermore, the Czechoslovak society, unlike, for example,
those in New York or Chicago but in this case very much like in Berlin, could
G o i n g We s t : S o v i e t “C u l t u ra l ” O p e ra t i o n s A b r o a d 79
draw on a large and influential Soviet colony to further its activities. When
Vladimir Maiakovskii visited Prague in April 1927, he gave poetry readings
once to an invited audience of 150 at the Soviet embassy and then to a crowd
of 1,000 Czechs, Soviets, and Russian émigrés at the friendship society, pro-
viding “incalculably valuable propaganda beneficial for the USSR.”64
The Soviet ambassador to Czechoslovakia from 1929–32 was Aleksandr
Iakovlevich Arosev, who, from 1934–37, during the height of the Soviet
Union’s outreach to Western intellectuals during the Popular Front, became
the most important director of VOKS after Kameneva. Born in 1890 in Kazan
into the family of a merchant of the fi rst guild, he was a third-generation
radical. October 1917 found him a member of the Military Revolutionary
Committee of the Bolshevik Party of Moscow and Moscow Region, where
he was prominent in the Bolsheviks’ armed uprising. 65 Arosev’s close ties
to Viacheslav Molotov, later Stalin’s right-hand man, almost certainly
prompted his early adherence to the Stalinist wing of the Party. With two
other middle school students, Molotov and Arosev formed the fi rst Social-
Democratic fraction in Kazan, and in 1909, the two friends were impris-
oned together. Arosev also had personal connections with Nikolai Ezhov,
head of the NKVD during the Terror, with whom he served during the Civil
War. 66
Arosev was thus a seasoned Old Bolshevik with high-level political connec-
tions, but he was also a minor celebrity from the early years of Soviet literature
in his own right. As ambassador, he was inclined to pay significant attention
to Czechoslovak intellectuals and cultural affairs (Litvinov once called him
more a writer than a politician).67 Th is points to an important factor on the
Soviet side affecting the success of cultural diplomacy: the att itude of the
Soviet embassy and the energy and interests (and, not infrequently, the basic
competence) of the VOKS representatives in them.
Despite his natural affi nity for Stalin and Molotov during the inner-party
struggles, Arosev’s cosmopolitanism led him to disdain the masses of untrav-
eled, uncultured apparatchiki whom the rulers promoted rapidly in the Party,
starting in the late 1920s. His identity as an Old Bolshevik Europhile made
Arosev into a great asset for VOKS in Prague, however. In the salon-like
atmosphere of the villa Tereza, the ambassador’s residence in Prague, Arosev
declaimed Silver Age poetry and made his presence felt among Czechoslovak
intellectuals. An example of a mediator between the Soviet Union and
European culture as the borders became increasingly difficult to cross, Arosev
traveled around the continent from Prague so that his daughters would “suc-
ceed in knowing and loving Europe.” He married a Czechoslovak ballerina
of Jewish origin, Gertrude Freund, who was remembered by Arosev’s daugh-
ter from his fi rst marriage as very non-Russian, a “European woman” highly
80 showcasing the great experiment
English intellectuals.” She wrote: “As you know, from the beginning I have
said that we must choose between a Communist cultural Society, and a
Society, which, while being on friendly terms with the Soviet Government,
must not be in any way dominated by it . . . I would not remain Chairman if
the Society became an official Communist one.” Strong resistance to Soviet
political meddling, as opposed to activities considered cultural, reappeared in
the early 1930s. By then, however, VOKS had to conduct a “struggle on two
fronts” against both independent-minded members and radicals on the Left
who wished to put the society in the service of the English Revolution.79
VOKS’s delicate balance of attempting to direct behind the scenes while
allowing the societies to trumpet their independence foundered in the coun-
try with the weakest Communist Party in Europe and a prickly insistence on
rights. Perhaps this was what Kameneva intriguingly referred to as “the speci-
ficities of English conditions.” Forced to take a hands-off approach, Kameneva
confessed in London to Soviet diplomat A. P. Rozengol´ts that the society “is
developing its work rather freely and independently.”80 In this context, the
rhetoric of manipulative control that VOKS served up to the party leadership
was itself a front.
British-Soviet relations became strained in the wake of the May 1926 General
Strike, since Soviet support channeled to the strike movement stoked fears of the
“red menace.” Most British Conservatives, unlike the German nationalists under
Weimar, saw in the Soviet Union an implacable and unreformable opponent. For
their part, most Bolshevik international analysts viewed the British Empire as
the Soviet Union’s primary enemy, and the 1927 crisis in relations with Britain
formed a key part of the war scare of the same year. On May 12, a large group of
British police raided the extraterritorial premises of Arcos, Ltd., the Soviet trade
delegation in central London, seizing documents in an effort to confirm Soviet
espionage activities. In the resulting uproar, the Baldwin government nullified
the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement of 1921 and ended up severing diplomatic
relations until the summer of 1929, while the Soviets conducted an operation of
rounding up and executing citizens accused of being British spies.81 The depar-
ture of a large number of Soviets in the wake of the Arcos raid was only the most
direct effect of the crisis on the friendship society. Helen Crawford, who belonged
both to the society and to the Central Committee of the British Communist
Party, was charged with reporting on its internal state, and she briefed Kameneva
three times in Moscow in 1927. Crawford reported that it was “financially” in a
“very poor way” after Arcos, since it had been financed largely by the Soviets in
London. While it enjoyed just a “sprinkling of support” from “cultural elements in
London,” it had no roots elsewhere and “is of practically no value whatever.”82
In 1928, Kameneva confessed that she “absolutely [could not] imagine”
how VOKS’s subsidy to the British society of 300 pounds sterling per year,
84 showcasing the great experiment
more than any other country’s friendship society received, was being spent. In
a plaintive refrain of inveterate and frustrated mobilization that runs through
all the friendship-society documents of the period, she hoped yet again to make
the society more active. After the Arcos affair, VOKS became far more cir-
cumspect in protecting the society from accusations of communist influence,
and by the early 1930s even the society’s printed letterhead declared it was
“non-political—non-sectarian—non-propagandist.” But the British Society
never overcame its fi nancial problems through membership dues, even during
the rising tide of Sovietophilia during the Depression and Popular Front. On
paper, its membership did reach a height of 1,700 members, more than 1,000
of whom were in newly formed affi liates throughout the country, including a
gallery of prominent new adherents such as Beatrice Webb and the “red” Dean
of Canterbury, the Very Reverend Hewlett Johnson.83
Even as the Popular Front made conditions favorable for att racting
non-communist sympathizers to the friendship society, however, the foreign-
policy conjuncture made courting Conservatives in the diplomatic establish-
ment a more rewarding proposition for ambassador Ivan Maiskii, who had been
a trusted and committed collaborator of Kameneva and VOKS in the 1920s.
In the hundreds of pages of his diary entries between 1934–39, Maiskii fi xated
on the foreign-policy establishment and wrote about the Society of Cultural
Relations only once. On this occasion, moreover, he thought of it only as part
of plans to att ract “more respectable and politically less radical representatives
of the English intelligentsia” into the Soviet orbit. Thus were friendship soci-
eties a victim of the dual policy: involving quintessentially ideological work,
they had to be separated from the Comintern and local communist parties
while diplomats often had distinctly different concerns.
Infighting in Paris
In Paris, diplomatic and political relations were less favorable in the early-to-
mid 1920s than in Berlin or even London, and there were fewer Soviet orga-
nizational outposts than in the other two capitals. Soviet cultural diplomacy
in France also faced a more challenging atmosphere in the press and among
intellectuals than in, for example, Germany or Czechoslovakia. The late rise of
a stable friendship society in France also demonstrates how VOKS’s search for
heterodox “bourgeois” partners, ranging from influential non-left ists to ardent
sympathizers, led to a degree of incoherence compounded by French faction-
alism and Soviet organizational failures.
As in the United States, the general political climate for Soviet work in
France was tough: non-recognition before 1933 in the case of the United States,
G o i n g We s t : S o v i e t “C u l t u ra l ” O p e ra t i o n s A b r o a d 85
the most intractable set of foreign relations among Western powers even after
recognition in 1924 in the case of France, and a history of virulent “red peril”
coverage in the press in both countries.84 No fewer than three attempts were
made to found a friendship society in France: the short-lived Nouvelles amités
franco-russes in 1924, a scientific committee for rapprochement in 1925 that
was primarily linked to the Soviet Academy of Sciences and tied to the French
Ministry of Public Education, and, fi nally, the society Russie neuve, created
only in January 1928 after false starts and delays.85 The fi rst contained the kind
of political elites with influence that the Soviets cherished in Germany, but it
quickly fell apart; the second was made up of scientists brought into contact
by the preparations for the 200th jubilee of the Soviet Academy, which largely
bypassed VOKS and was suspected for its ties to a French state institution.86 In
the case of Russie neuve, some of the eminent intellectuals involved in 1927, in
particular the writer Georges Duhamel but also the prominent Slavist André
Mazon, proved too independent minded and insufficiently motivated.
In late 1927, the VOKS analyst for France, Tsetsiliia Rabinovich, advised
that left ist sympathizers rather than “representatives of the intelligentsia who
were too eminent” would be more reliable partners. One historian presents this
remark and early organizational failures in France as proof of a Soviet require-
ment for pliant, ideologically committed partners. True, VOKS’s often inad-
equate formula for influencing the friendship societies from afar rested heavily
on close contact with a friendly leadership and covert links with selected prox-
ies. It is also true that the number of Communists active in the French society
was higher in the 1930s than in the 1920s. Typically, although the member-
ship at times exceeded 1,000, at most 50 figures in any given period were con-
sidered “active,” and a VOKS analyst revealingly referred to the “decorative”
part of the organization.87 The search for influential opinion makers of various
political orientations, and not just pliant tools, carried on in France as else-
where, however. Moreover, the earlier failures in France, such as the demise
of the abortive society in 1924, had litt le to do with Soviet disillusionment
with insufficiently subservient members, since these included members a
VOKS representative enthusiastically called “the most visible Fr[ench] politi-
cians and scholars.” The problem in France was constant internal splits among
diverse groups of French scholars, publicists, and intellectuals. Kameneva was
fully exasperated by her laconic representative in Paris at the time, who was
preoccupied as the embassy’s main legal advisor and admitted “I just can’t fi nd
out” why the society broke up.88
Ultimately, Soviet emissaries, in France as elsewhere, found fault with all
the many varieties of bourgeois intellectuals they dealt with. The wide net cast
by Soviet cultural diplomacy from the outset ensured they would always be
looking for what they did not have. In 1931, reflecting on the Depression-era
86 showcasing the great experiment
upsurge in interest in all things Soviet, Foreign Affairs and VOKS French ana-
lysts were once again dreaming of att racting larger and more prominent circles
of French scholars, some of whom were repelled by Russie neuve as overly pro-
pagandistic.89 The same year, however, the sympathizers in Russie neuve were
disparagingly evaluated for not being quite sympathetic enough: they “are not
distinguished by great courage in political questions, especially when it comes
to political actions directed against generally accepted views or government
policy.” Taking into account “French psychology” and French “individual-
ism,” a Soviet diplomat ventured to say, it would be difficult to imagine one big
society successfully uniting “industrialists, fi nanciers, journalists, scholars,
the pett y-bourgeois intellectual and the pacifist.”90 The increasingly left ist pro-
fi le of the French society from the 1920s to the 1930s reflected the possibilities
created by the political polarization in the fi nal decade of the Th ird Republic
and one hoped-for solution to longstanding organizational dilemmas particu-
larly apparent in France.
Science, ate breakfast with the editors of The Nation, and found much time for
research on a brochure about American folklore. In between, he held talks on
a friendship society during his visits to New York and Washington. In his per-
ceptive remarks, Veller reported that “the picture of the USSR among a huge
number of Americans cannot even be called false; it simply does not exist.”
He also discoursed on the distinctiveness of American “idealistic liberalism,”
which sought in the Soviet experiment that which was unrealized in the con-
temporary United States; at the same time, he explained, private rather than
state solutions were the norm, which would make potential sympathizers
especially suspicious of Soviet state institutions. The main goal Veller foresaw
in a friendship society, in keeping with the prime objective in many Soviet cal-
culations at the time, was to influence public opinion in order to further U.S.
recognition of the Soviet Union. He concentrated most of his energy on the
VOKS book exchange, which, unusually in the case of the Library of Congress,
held out the possibility of securing hard currency for VOKS.92 Veller, who had
shown energy and initiative during his time at VOKS, later disappeared from
its affairs. He had used his ARA contacts from the famine-relief days to fi nd a
job at Macy’s department store.93
When the American Russian Society for Cultural Relations with Russia
was founded in 1926 and met for the fi rst time in April 1927, it was through
the initiative of the “local intelligentsia”—a New York group including Lucy
Branham and Graham Taylor. Th is, according to VOKS’s own analysis, stood
in contrast to Britain, where emissaries from the Soviet colony took the lead in
sett ing up the friendship society. VOKS reports from the late 1920s and early
1930s—partly in keeping with “proletarianization” campaign radicalized dur-
ing militant turmoil of the Great Break, which pointed to a preference when-
ever possible for the “laboring” and “democratic” intelligentsia abroad—were
dissatisfied with the prominence within it of the intelligentsia’s “elite layers”
and wealthy left-leaning socialites. Like the London group, the New York soci-
ety reportedly had a closed character and too many “respectable gentlemen.”94
VOKS’s evaluation was, in fact, accurate. The American society kept a low pro-
fi le to avoid confl icts whenever possible. With headquarters on East 55th St. in
New York—and music, arts, and book committees formed by 1928 and rather
less active affi liates to follow in Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco—the
new institution, in the words of one historian, was populated by “affluent and
generally respected” figures engaged with “the liberal social causes of main-
stream America.”95
Notable in the U.S. society was the preponderance of liberals, mainstream
academics, and social reformers who predominated over a sprinkling of social-
ists. In 1928, the society’s president was William Allan Neilson, a professor
of English and the president of Smith College from 1917 to 1939. The group
88 showcasing the great experiment
emigration. The friendship societies were places where VOKS supplied its
bulletin and a library of materials on Soviet politics and culture; where Soviet
scientists, scholars, writers, and poets regularly gave lectures and recitals; and
where Soviet diplomats and Communists mixed with interested local figures.
But the cultural friendship societies were also places where the Soviet pres-
ence was, by political necessity and design, kept relatively unobtrusive and
where the foreign sympathizers and experts predominated with their own
reports and activities. The German society took the lead in forming special-
ized sections by field, and critical, independent views were also solicited by
the societies themselves. For example, on November 2, 1925, John Maynard
Keynes spoke at the London society. The economist had visited the USSR
for two weeks that year after marrying the ballerina Lydia Lopokova, but
he bluntly criticized Marxist economics as an anachronism and described
Marxism-Leninism as a political religion.103 In other words, the friendship
societies created not just a piece of the Soviet Union abroad but a syncretic mix
of Soviet exports and largely sympathetic yet distinctly non-Soviet approaches.
A comparable phenomenon on a larger scale, in which Soviet and foreign pro-
Soviet contributions combined to create a new admixture, occurred in the
1930s with the rise of anti-fascist culture. Also a hybrid, the European culture
of anti-fascism was sponsored and spread through various front organizations
and cultural interaction.
Travel to and from the Soviet Union and the regime of Soviet patronage
att ached to it played a distinct role in the rise of this syncretism. From the
fi rst, Kameneva made it a priority to “provide service to” (obsluzhivat’) the
friendship societies—in the same sense that visiting foreigners, as it was
put, were “provided service” when their visits and tours to the USSR were
arranged. Th is meant publications, exhibitions, and visits from traveling
representatives of the Soviet intelligentsia and political elite, from stars like
Lunacharskii and Maiakovskii, to Soviet academicians, to a galaxy of lesser-
known figures.102 In 1925, Kameneva asked the head of the Foreign Section
of the secret police (INO OGPU) to provide VOKS with information on all
Soviet scholars, artists, pedagogues, engineers, and cultural figures traveling
abroad when they were issued foreign passports, so that VOKS could attempt
to secure their participation in its program of “cultural rapprochement.” In the
other direction, the practice began of sponsoring leading foreign liaisons in
the friendship societies to visit the socialist homeland as a reward for friend-
ship but also to cement their relationships with VOKS. “Th rough experience
with Germany we know that such trips can bring great results” Kameneva
wrote in 1925 to the VOKS representative in Paris.104 Foreign friends will-
ingly became enmeshed in patron-client relations across the boundary of the
Soviet border.
G o i n g We s t : S o v i e t “C u l t u ra l ” O p e ra t i o n s A b r o a d 91
November 23 meeting in the House of Scholars provided grist for radio and
press reports.117 Soviet intellectuals who traveled abroad inevitably had to give
something back to their party-state patrons—fi rst and foremost, evidence of
ideological loyalty that took increasingly concrete form.
The upsurge in demands altered the tenor of patron-client relations and
made foreign “bourgeois” contacts distinctly more dangerous. If the great con-
cern of the early 1920s was that intelligentsia travelers would not return from
abroad or talk to the émigré press, the fear after travel controls tightened over
the course of the 1920s was that those with marketable skills might defect.
Th is was expressed in a denunciation to Kameneva of ballet dancers whose
international travel she was warned against.118
Because making foreign contacts through VOKS seemed to offer politi-
cal protection, the intelligentsia desire to approach VOKS appeared notice-
ably greater after the anti-specialist assault of the Great Break. Professor A.
A. Sidorov of the Academy of Arts (GAKhN) wrote a handwritten appeal to
Kameneva regarding his Berlin-published album about the city of Moscow,
which VOKS had recommended to German intellectuals. By April 1929, the
album and Sidorov were attacked in the Soviet press because the work dis-
played an incriminatingly high number of churches. Using the emotional
language of the supplicant, Sidorov turned to Kameneva “in great personal
pain.” He then got down to business. Citing “concrete services rendered in cul-
tural relations with the West,” he insisted that this gave “VOKS every reason
to rehabilitate my book from exclusively hostile attacks.”119 The avant-gardist
Sergei Tret´iakov, who traveled to Berlin in 1930 under VOKS auspices, ful-
fi lled his assignment of promoting the collective farm system and justifying
the death sentences of the Industrial Party trial. But he also made lasting intel-
lectual connections in a series of mutually influential interactions with Brecht,
Benjamin, Piscator, and other Berlin avant-garde figures as he pursued his own
mission—which did not contradict that of VOKS—of promoting Moscow as
the center for an avant-garde international.120
VOKS developed into a mid-level patron of members of the Soviet intel-
ligentsia within the byzantine system that became entrenched in the 1920s for
allocating travel permissions out of the USSR. Its role was augmented by a sim-
ple fact: travel requests from scholars and artists were rejected with far greater
frequency than those of technical and trade specialists, diplomats, and other
state officials traveling abroad. In 1921, Cheka chairman Feliks Dzerzhinskii
protested to the Central Committee about Commissar of Enlightenment
Lunacharskii’s “systematic” endorsements for foreign travel for figures in the
theater and art worlds. “Iron Feliks” charged darkly that some were linked to
foreign intelligence. The need for recuperations and cures were hardly con-
vincing justifications for foreign travel, he remarked caustically; let them
G o i n g We s t : S o v i e t “C u l t u ra l ” O p e ra t i o n s A b r o a d 95
travel to the provinces for their holidays. As this suggests, genuinely “private”
travel after the early 1920s became largely a thing of the past. Travel had to
be arranged, even if at one’s own expense (za svoi schet), through a sponsor-
ing state institution. Approval and paperwork from several layers of bureau-
cracy and its special committees became more daunting. These included, most
frequently, endorsements from place of work (and from the party hierarchy
for Communists), organizations sponsoring travel abroad to conferences or
for exhibits or events, commissariat to which one’s institution belonged (i.e.,
the commissariats of enlightenment, health, national economy, etc.), and,
after 1924, the Central Committee’s cumbersomely named Commission for
Verification of Foreign Travel for State Institutions and Social and Economic
Organizations. Each of these layers of approval, of course, increased the chances
of delays and rejections. Each traveler had to be checked by the secret police,
representatives of which sat on the Central Committee’s commission. The pri-
mary destination for cultural and scholarly travel before 1933 (trips sponsored
by Narkompros), as for technical and economic specialists, was Germany, with
other European countries and the United States a distant second.121
VOKS participated in the politics of foreign travel in many ways. It was itself
a clearing house for invitations from abroad and thus could serve as a primary
sponsor for international travel. Starting in 1924, KZP and then VOKS played
a role in determining, often in conjunction with the relevant Soviet embassy,
the desirability of travel for artists, musicians, and performers on tour. It also
routinely supported the travel requests from people traveling through other
institutions, and this co-sponsorship (sodeistvie) was actively sought by a wide
array of scientists, scholars, students, and other members of the intelligentsia.
VOKS provided “interventions” (khodataistva) and formal expressions of
support within the bureaucracy. Figures with ties to VOKS initiatives, such
as the linguist and phoneticist S. K. Boianus in 1928, who hoped to travel to
London, were granted aid. He was helping VOKS’s new program of promoting
“foreign languages for the masses,” and his work was thus endorsed as having
positive “civic benefit.” When a Lappologist, Professor Griuner, who had made
a good impression on the VOKS representative in Sweden for his reports on
the conditions of Soviet scholars, was found “literally starving” in that coun-
try in 1927, VOKS attempted to obtain 500 rubles for him from the Special
Hard Currency Directorate (Osoboe Valiutnoe Upravlenie) to pay his debts,
given his past services and the blow to Soviet prestige created by his condition.
Professor V. Bunak, director of the Anthropological Institute of the fi rst MGU
in 1930, also was traveling to London for the Conference of the International
Federation of Eugenic Institutions. VOKS’s Anglo-American sector fully sup-
ported his application because he was prepared to give a paper at the Society
of Cultural Relations on the position of Soviet scholars, repudiating reports in
96 showcasing the great experiment
the Times and elsewhere that Soviet “non-party scholars are supposedly not
given the opportunity to conduct scientific work, etc.”122
As this suggests, the record of services rendered by the intellectual in
question and the political-ideological and foreign-policy justifications for his
travel were prime considerations in the messages of evaluation that Soviet offi-
cials sent through the system. Such categories were also routinely involved
in VOKS’s participation in higher-level commissions involving group travel,
exhibitions, and policy matters regarding travel. Considerations of technical
expertise could replace the political justification, as when Kameneva partici-
pated in a special Orgburo commission approving travel for a Soviet delegation
to an international cinematography exhibition in Holland. The clinching argu-
ment was that eleven Soviet directors would be able to familiarize themselves
with the latest developments in the “fi lm production of the West.”123
When the same figures who dispensed or withheld the coveted komand-
irovki (business trips) for others themselves wished to travel, they suddenly
turned to the same combination of wheedling and political grandstanding that
their clients also displayed. Kameneva reported to the Central Committee sec-
retariat that a two-week vacation in Turkey was ordered by her doctors and
received “full support” from Chicherin and Mikoian. It would also be impor-
tant for VOKS, not to mention the non-Western world: “Eastern ambassadors
have jokingly told me on many occasions that I show special sympathy for
Europe and do not give them attention.” Permission for international travel was
a constant concern at the highest levels of the Party and the state. Radek, once
the peripatetic chief strategist of the Comintern in the early 1920s, reported
to Stalin that he had not been allowed out of the country after the time he
fell into disfavor as a member of the Trotskyist Opposition. Now a top advi-
sor to Stalin, he wished to become oriented again by traveling as an Izvestiia
correspondent to the Geneva disarmament conference; there he could also,
he implied, play a role in securing U.S. recognition of the USSR by talking to
American representatives in the wake of Franklin Roosevelt’s election to the
presidency. The Politburo approved his request.124
The patron-client relations endemic to the functioning of the Soviet system
in general have often been taken to prove that in the Soviet case personalistic
ties trumped institutions. Patron-client networks were supposedly pre-mod-
ern, what Sheila Fitzpatrick has called an “archaizing” feature of Stalinism. In
Soviet-style patronage, Fitzpatrick has noted, “the ultimate allocational deci-
sions were made by bureaucrats—but on personalistic, not bureaucratic-legal
reasons.”125 The case of VOKS and Soviet intellectuals traveling abroad, how-
ever, illustrates a longstanding relationship between party-state patrons and
intelligentsia clients defi ned in terms of the organization’s particular need for
international services to the party-state. Even as the intelligentsia rendered
G o i n g We s t : S o v i e t “C u l t u ra l ” O p e ra t i o n s A b r o a d 97
The arrival of significant numbers of travelers in the years after 1923 quickly
spurred the development of novel methods and modes of presenting the Soviet
experiment. The mid-to-late 1920s marked the emergence of a set of ways of
guiding foreign visitors that became known to its adepts as kul´tpokaz—one
of those newspeak Soviet acronyms that can be translated as the presenta-
tion of culture, or cultural show. Fundamental to this practice were visits to
model institutions, the display of which became recognized as “the very best
method of propaganda of our ideas.”1 Even the relatively small number of the
most famous and well-visited sites played a historical role not only for visiting
outsiders but also internally within the Soviet system. Far from all the places
visited by foreigners were either showcases or model institutions, however. A
larger number of sites were simply in good enough condition that they made it
onto the long list of places approved for foreign visits.
There were good reasons that arranging visits to selected sites became
the linchpin of presenting the Soviet system to outsiders. Prima facie
conditions—what visitors could see, smell, and feel—were hardly favorable
for the kind of awed public praise that the Soviets craved and, in this era,
so often received. To Western eyes, even those of the many sympathizers
during the few relatively stable periods in the mid-1920s and mid-1930s, the
cities appeared drab, the store shelves bare, and the population thin and poor.
The scale of child homelessness was shocking, and the system’s inefficiency,
even for honored guests and those paying a premium in hard currency, was
at once frustrating and comical. Overcoming outsiders’ often negative fi rst
impressions and reshaping the perception of general conditions became a
crucial task.
The term “cultural show” itself has a great deal of resonance. The noun
pokaz, which means “display” or “presentation,” also contains the root of the
adjective pokazatel´nyi, or “demonstration,” used in the term “show trial” to
denote a staged political lesson. Demonstrative political lessons were at the
heart of Soviet political culture, and so were models; the adjective “show” was
98
T h e Po t e m k i n V i l l a g e D i l e m m a 99
heralding what socialism could be once the heritage of the past was overcome.
Th is was not necessarily staged exclusively for foreigners. Designing models
became a quintessential practice for a group of revolutionary modernizers
with scarce resources in a sea of “backwardness.”
Model institutions were hardly unique to Soviet socialism. They were, for
example, widespread in interwar Romania, where post-World War I agrarian
reform led to “model” and “demonstrative” farms, villages, and even sanitary dis-
tricts. Just as the Soviet models influenced much larger projects, these Romanian
microcosms provided conceptual precedents for the murderous project of eth-
nically pure model provinces in wartime Bessarabia and Bukovina.3 Like their
Soviet counterparts, Romanian models were supposed to be beacons of con-
quered backwardness; they, too, were facilitated by a strong state, a Kulturträger
tradition, and activist intelligentsia involvement. If, however, the focus on agri-
cultural models emerged in a country in which the peasantry was seen as the
backbone of the nation, Soviet “socialist construction” aimed at transforming
virtually everything—here the scope and extent of models turned out to be
unprecedented. Unique as well was the extent to which Soviet model institu-
tions became part and parcel of an elaborate system of impressing and con-
verting foreign visitors, as the world-historical, universalistic thrust of Soviet
communism was layered on top of the ingrained comparative sensitivities
of “Russia and the West.”
Model-based methods of cultural show held a deep and many-faceted
ideological resonance. Model communities, such as those rehabilitating pris-
oners or forging new people, harked back to utopian community-based blue-
prints for socialism and the religious, political, and experimental communes
with which socialist utopianism was historically intertwined, in both Russia
and the Western countries. Building on pre-revolutionary intelligentsia and
reformist traditions embedded in a European context, and sometimes consti-
tuted in the early Soviet period with the participation of foreign experts, many
model institutions highlighted commitments to science and culture, industry
and the proletariat, and, not least, the social-welfare measures through which
Soviet socialism made one of its most important appeals to non-socialists in an
age of embatt led liberalism.
Precisely because they were so central, the ideological significance of model
institutions spanned the divide between displays aimed specifically at outsid-
ers and the simultaneously emerging Soviet and Stalinist domestic order, cen-
trally concerned with altering the psyche of its own citizens. The practices and
strategies that emerged to convince foreigners and that became embedded in
cultural show in the 1920s arose at the same time that the Soviet state and
Soviet culture designed unprecedentedly widespread methods of molding the
outlooks and psyches of the domestic population.
T h e Po t e m k i n V i l l a g e D i l e m m a 101
show, and they will of course show only that which is allowed to be seen. Now
I see that this is untrue.”5
The Soviet architects of cultural show did not jett ison their vocabularies
or world views when they talked about foreigners in closed meetings among
themselves. Even top-secret documents repeat the mantra of “telling the
truth” about the Soviet Union. To penetrate practices and att itudes, one needs
to decipher and fi nd clues in documents of several provenances. For example,
it was easy to deny the existence of Potemkin villages (and the Comintern ana-
lyst wrote of foreign expectations of “something like” them), because the term
historically signified something erected specially to hoodwink visiting nota-
bles, whereas genuine yet unrepresentative model institutions were ubiquitous
in the Soviet system. In one sense, understandings of the Potemkin label were
academic: the circle that needed to be squared in Soviet cultural show was to
isolate foreigners from unpleasant discoveries and to shutt le them from one
favorable model to another, yet at the same time attempt to allay the wide-
spread fears that they were being isolated and manipulated.
When the American engineering prodigy Zara Witkin crossed the Soviet
border from Finland in April 1932, he was fi red up with sympathy for the
Soviet experiment and ready to donate his considerable talents and energies
to the cause. In one of the most perceptive memoirs ever written of a Soviet
sojourn by a technical “specialist,” he recalled the shock of his fi rst glimpse of
the promised land:
Suddenly the border! The train stops . . . About the litt le station clus-
ters a group of people, clad as I have never seen people clad before, in
rags and tatters of furs. They move slowly. They are slovenly. Neglect
and disorder all about. The station house is broken down. Pieces of
equipment lie scattered in the snow.
The vast train station in Leningrad and his hotel room, both “unbelievably
dirty,” did nothing to improve his fi rst impressions.6 Travelogues and other
literature suggest such initial negative reactions as well as critical judgments
about conditions and standards of living were common among Western visi-
tors but peaked in periods of the most acute hardship and social dislocation,
notably the early 1920s and the early 1930s.7
Pro-Soviet travelers often recorded euphoria at the border and experienc-
ing the crossing into the “new world” as a significant moment; for the Soviets,
the potent combination of security concerns and a two-camp ideology made
the border a powerful symbol of Soviet patriotism, replete by the 1930s with
a cult of border guards. The border-station greetings for delegations and the
most honored guests originated simultaneously out of pragmatic concerns for
T h e Po t e m k i n V i l l a g e D i l e m m a 103
targeted as recruiting grounds for delegates, with a view toward aiding the
strategies and recruiting policies of the foreign communist parties. Th ird, the
goal was not merely to solicit positive public declarations but also to promote
targeted counter-propaganda. Examples ranged from delegations that were
urged specifically to refute individual articles on Soviet workers’ unrest in
the Social Democratic press to directing a delegation in the winter of 1933
to Ukraine in order to repudiate reports circulating abroad about the man-
made famine of the collectivization era that left millions dead of starvation and
hunger-related diseases. Th is deadly bit of counter-propaganda thus formed
part of a concerted international cover-up campaign that enlisted foreigners to
deny the famine. Why did a delegation such as the one to Soviet Ukraine play
its part? A major part of the explanation comes from Rachel Mazuy’s research
on French delegations. Mazuy revealed elaborate preparations made for the
selection of delegates, who were designated by local Communists according
to specific procedures in advance of their “elections.” Delegations were seeded
with a proportion of communist delegates, and special attention was paid to
oral preparation before the trip and on the train, where the delegation head
led sessions on how travelers should pose questions to Soviet workers. The
Soviet journey was thus both a rite of passage and a part of cadre politics, since
it could—providing positive testimonials were given—boost careers in the
trade unions and the French Communist Party.12
British communist Albert Inkpin, head of Willi Münzenberg’s working-
class League of Friends organization (not to be confused with VOKS’s friend-
ship societies), wanted a fi xed percentage of non-communist workers who
were “capable of being convinced” in “accordance with a prepared informa-
tional plan.” Delegates’ motivations for visiting the USSR often diverged from
Soviet plans, however. During the Great Depression, Soviet trade union fi les
were jammed with requests from delegates who attempted to stay and fi nd
work.13 Some Soviet strategizing was specific to workers’ delegations, but the
principles of planning travel based on elaborately ambitious political scenar-
ios, the practice of advance preparation of the travelers, and the crucial role of
post-departure measurements of sympathizers’ loyalty were principal features
of the reception of intellectual visitors as well.
The visits of foreign delegations prompted unusually explicit discussions
of measures devised to affect the psychology, political loyalty, and memory of
the time spent in the Soviet Union. On the eve of departure, delegates were
presented with bound leather albums with photographs, posters, and “photo
series,” which in 1932 included eighteen items, among them portraits of Lenin
and Stalin.14 Delegates thus returned home with visual “evidence” that might
help shape their memories. Delegations always went through a ritual of ham-
mering out signed parting resolutions. Tamara Solonevich’s Notes of a Soviet
T h e Po t e m k i n V i l l a g e D i l e m m a 105
Sites of Communism
In October 1930, the head of VOKS’s Department for the Reception of
Foreigners (Otdel po priemu inostrantsev) wrote of the intolerable nervous stress
his organization faced. Foreign visitors wanted to see everything connected
to the Five-Year Plan, including industrial enterprises, factories, and planning
organizations. But in most cases, Soviet economic institutions wished only to
avoid foreign visitors, and even for eminent guests his office was forced to call
T h e Po t e m k i n V i l l a g e D i l e m m a 107
10-15 times in advance and “virtually beg” for a visit to be scheduled.22 In 1936,
the Central Committee passed a resolution declaring the work of Intourist was
unsatisfactory, in part because too many museums and other “old” places of
traditional tourism were being shown—partly because of difficulties in per-
suading economic commissariats to agree to open up factories and industrial
sites.23 As this suggests, the “showing of sites” (pokaz ob”ektov) was based on
the principle of pre-approved selectivity, but visitors were not taken to a small
number of displays specially designed for foreigners. Of the hundreds of loca-
tions routinely visited, relatively few might be called showcases: institutions,
like the Lefortovo prison or the secret police’s Bolshevo children’s commune,
where conditions were carefully groomed for regular group visits. A second
group comprised institutions that were not standard destinations for foreign
inspections, although those sometimes did occur, but that were designated as
“model” (obraztsovye) or “model-experimental” (obraztsovo-opytnye) within
various Soviet hierarchies. The great construction projects and industrial
“giants” of the Five-Year Plan were by nature showcases, because their mon-
umentalism was, from the fi rst, politically motivated. The largest number of
locations for political tourism—including educational and research institu-
tions, medical and hygiene institutions such as prophylactoria for reforming
prostitutes, social-welfare institutions such as sanatoria, collective farms,
museums, theaters, and many others—were simply prominent and present-
able enough to be approved for organized foreign access.
Master lists of approved sites, which could differ among host organizations
depending on their connections to the commissariats in charge of each, were
far larger than those planned for specific groups’ schedules, and they were,
moreover, continually shift ing. In 1930–31, for example, VOKS listed more
than 300 “objects of show.” In 1935, it founded a special “protocol” depart-
ment to keep track of the list and the selection of sites thereon. Since VOKS
and other agencies that hosted foreigners had to obtain permission from reluc-
tant commissariats to gain entry to the sites they controlled, VOKS’s reception
department turned to higher party organs in 1931 for “pressure” (nazhim) to
force them to permit visits.24
“Programs,” or schedules of places to visit, were treated as important politi-
cal decisions, and ratified in advance for important guests and delegations.
Much like the itineraries for foreign travel through the country, there was not
only the possibility but the expectation that the plan would vary depending
on the interests and professions of the visitors. As with all important inter-
national matters, these had to be approved at the highest levels of the Party.
In 1925, for example, the size and itinerary of the German workers’ delega-
tion, proposed by the trade unions and the Comintern, was approved by the
Politburo. The Commission on External Relations’ list of fourteen Moscow
108 showcasing the great experiment
factories for this delegation included only one (a newspaper factory) labeled
a “model”; another, the top chocolate factory Krasnyi oktiabr′ (Red October)
was a regularly featured treat for foreign guests. Lists of factories in Moscow
oblast′ set for delegation visits in 1932 included five metal works, two textile
factories, four chemical plants, and four railroad enterprises. Whereas, during
the same year, foreigners celebrating the fi fteenth anniversary of the October
Revolution were directed to three factories and twelve “cultural institutions,”
including a school, a hospital, a sovkhoz, and the Dzerzhinskii commune for
reforming juvenile delinquents, which the leading pedagogue of the Stalin
era, Anton Makarenko, headed from 1927–32.25 Busy schedules kept foreign-
ers occupied with presentable places, while some foreigners’ suspicions about
Potemkin villages were allayed simply by the sheer quantity of institutions.
The Soviet reception of foreign visitors was always focused on certain
designated parts of the country, because visitors’ “programs” of travel (most
frequently arranged by the institutions inviting them) were concentrated in
certain standard routes. In 1931, Intourist had developed only twelve stan-
dard itineraries from which tourists could choose; by 1933, there were thirty-
six. Each had a special role to play in the presentation of the country. Sunny
Crimea, for example, would demonstrate the successes of Soviet nationalities
policy.26
Given jumps in the number of visitors fi rst during the Great Depression
and again in the period of the Popular Front, shortages of suitable locations
were still being felt in the mid-1930s, when Intourist’s Service Bureau (Biuro
obsluzhivaniia), like VOKS before it, reported serious opposition to regu-
lar visits by foreigners on the part of those in charge of industrial and agri-
cultural sites. The reasons are not hard to discern: the presence of foreigners
demanded preparation, disrupted work schedules, and made local conditions
into a matter of high political importance. In the peak tourist year of 1936,
the Commissariat of Heavy Industry attempted to curtail the number of vis-
its per month to each factory. As this dispute made clear, Intourist turned to
the Politburo both when sparring with the commissariats over sites and when
compiling the “general list of objects of show.”27 The work of the censorship
agency Glavlit revolved around a constantly updated master list of items that
could not be mentioned, popularly known to officials as the Talmud; similarly,
agencies receiving foreigners continually revised the master list of those places
that could be shown.
In his widely known work on Western intellectuals and communism, Paul
Hollander emphasized fi rst and foremost the power of utopian-seeking pre-
dispositions among left ist intellectuals, more so than Soviet techniques of
hospitality, to generate the naive and uncritical enthusiasm they expressed
about their visits to the “good society.” It is indeed striking how the most
T h e Po t e m k i n V i l l a g e D i l e m m a 109
scholar Owen Latt imore, who published prolifically on China and Mongolia,
when he led a group of U.S. economists and businessmen interested in Soviet
agriculture to a recommended collective farm in 1935. Hit with impressive
facts and figures—“How many hectares! How many tractors!”—the Americans
took notes with their big golden ballpoint pens. Their disgust visibly increased,
however, in the course of a lengthy visit to a run-down, muddy farm at which
they could not fi nd a single person at work—despite a rich variety of contradic-
tory explanations and excuses. As Semper recalled, “I did not know where to
hide from shame.”31
In fact, the ecstatic credulity described by Hollander and the exaspera-
tion stemming from botched exposure to unfavorable conditions described
by Semper are both reactions commonly reflected in Soviet archival sources.
The very system of identifying suitable places for foreign presence—above and
beyond the general crisis of the post-collectivization countryside—is partly
responsible for some of the mishaps. Lists of kolkhozy and sovkhozy suitable
for display, with directions on how to get there included, were sent to VOKS
by collective farm authorities, who listed as many as ten of each in Moscow
oblast′ with laconic notations, such as “a new livestock pen of the American
type” and “the mood of the collective farm workers is healthy, optimistic.”
In May 1931, VOKS’s reception department maintained a more limited set:
“Right now we have three kolkhozy selected by Kolkhoz Center available for
visits.” The Soviet countryside was devastated by the massive dislocation of
collectivization in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Given the nature of Soviet
bureaucracy, the number of institutions needed to keep foreign programs full,
and the levels through which recommendations had to pass—from those who
inspected or knew the farms, to the Kolkhoz Center, to VOKS or Intourist,
to the guides—it is not surprising that far from favorable conditions could be
revealed. At the same time, “show” farms certainly were maintained, and were
referred to as such, as in a 1934 trip of Austrians to “southern plantations, show
(pokazatel′nye) kolkhozy and show sovkhozy and other agricultural and agro-
nomical institutions.”32 As this suggests, a small number of special showcases
were maintained within a larger group of farms approved for foreign eyes—
exactly the same situation prevalent for the other sites of communism. One
guide-translator who took Americans into the hungry countryside around
Kiev around 1934 recalled receiving a list of three kolkhozy suitable for for-
eigners’ visits, and in each case, he had to take up to a day to contact the farm
director through poor telephone connections before arrival. 33
Among the thousands of foreign technical experts inside the USSR dur-
ing the era of industrialization was a smaller group of foreign agricultural
specialists advising the Soviets on modern mechanized farming. Most of the
American agriculturalists were advisors on the mammoth State Experimental
T h e Po t e m k i n V i l l a g e D i l e m m a 111
Farm Verbliud (Camel), the second largest Soviet sovkhoz, located forty miles
southeast of Khar′kov. Its massive 375,000 acres, which dwarfed the largest
American farm at the time almost fourfold, stunned the foreign experts and
led them, Deborah Fitzgerald has argued, to view the “giant Soviet farms as
huge experiment stations on which the Americans could test their most radi-
cal ideas for increasing agricultural production.” Not only the image of Soviet
agriculture but also the experience of these experts’ supremely confident,
large-scale experiments inside the USSR played a role in the industrializa-
tion of American agriculture. 34 Interestingly, “Verbliud” also figures in VOKS
documents and memoirs as one of the model collective farms shown to VOKS
and Intourist visitors; its condition on the eve of the Ukrainian terror-famine
of 1932–33 was monitored by the secret police. 35 In an unforgettable descrip-
tion of his 1932 Intourist visit to Verbliud, Zara Witkin found absent admin-
istrators, “paralysis” in the fields, and “indescribable” waste and disrepair in
the machine shop. 36 In a triple irony, the Soviets took an American-influenced
experiment and showed it as a model of collectivized agriculture to foreign-
ers; at the same location, American experts downplayed differences between
Soviet and U.S. agriculture in order to promote dubious theories for their
own country. Even so, the farm created a terrible impression on Witkin, the
American tourist.
The embarrassing failure of “cultural show” described in Semper’s mem-
oirs was, thus, hardly an isolated event. One English economist complained to
VOKS about a lengthy Intourist trip to a collective farm in 1936, after which
“it turned out there was nothing to see—everything was in deplorable condi-
tion and we had difficulty fi nding one cow.” Not everyone was predisposed to
swallow Soviet boasting about achievements. Much like the foreign workers’
delegations in the factories, some visitors seized the chance to pose pointed
and challenging questions—about agricultural output levels lower than in
tsarist times, attacks on kolkhoz officials by peasants, the fate of kulaks, and
industrialization fi nanced by the “exploitation” of the peasantry. These visitors
were told that the kulak was alien to the masses of the peasantry, which on its
own initiative had demanded the liquidation of kulaks as a class. 37
At the same time, Soviet fi les were also fi lled with foreign praise for collectiv-
ization based on what foreigners were shown even in the midst of a virtual civil
war in the countryside, massive dislocation, and famine. As the improbably
successful international Soviet cover-up of mass famine in 1932–33 Ukraine
demonstrates, the most elaborate measures to stage conditions of prosperity
for foreign visitors were deployed for the most important visitors and the high-
est priority counter-campaigns. A number of contemporary foreign and post-
war émigré memoir accounts converge on the scale of preparations made for
such visits in the early 1930s, which paved the way for mid-1930s receptions of
112 showcasing the great experiment
individual heroes that was emerging within Stalinist ideology of the time. The
Central Committee’s August 5, 1931, resolution requiring the Commissariat
of Enlightenment to create “model” elementary schools was more specifically
connected to the broader repudiation of attacks on established institutions
and “leveling” tendencies during the 1928–31 period. School No. 25 became a
leading actor in the 1930s repudiation of the educational experimentalism of
the 1920s. Clearly, foreigners were shown an exceptional place. It was represen-
tative, however, in that it exemplified the stress on discipline, orderliness, and
drill that came to dominate Stalinist education. Its model status was meaning-
ful to Soviet pedagogy, influencing the twists and turns of Soviet educational
practice throughout the country. It was not created for foreign eyes, but the
presence of foreign observers was a major factor, in this case and elsewhere, in
the affi rmation of its model status.44
The Soviet Union turned to models on such a scale in no small part because
Soviet development, mating a war on backwardness with scarce resources
and a vanguard ideology, was predicated to a significant extent on singling
out high-priority sectors. The designating of models fit in with a deep Soviet
political logic of instruction through signals and official approbation; models
provided the real-life material for a future-oriented culture, anticipating the
centralizing and sacralizing features of Stalin-era Socialist Realism. The need
to present images of progress to the world became one more factor spurring
the designation of unrepresentative models; lavish and prestigious foreign
praise, in turn, served to increase the authority of those already designated as
special institutions.
Models were so ubiquitous in the early Soviet Union that there was no
uniformity of model status. Whereas schools were formally designated
as models in the turn away from Great Break “leveling” in 1931, another
common way of designating models was to give them the label opytno-
pokazatel′no, or “experimental-show.” Makarenko’s fi rst labor colony for
rehabilitating “morally defective” waifs, the Gorky agricultural colony
near Poltava, became one of two model-show institutions of the Ukrainian
Commissariat of Education in 1923 at a time when Makarenko was not
hosting foreign visitors but was instead engaged in a tough struggle for food
and resources. The status merely meant that it was a prototype of some-
thing that did not exist on a broader scale. Juvenile labor colonies were
promoted as an alternative to what was by far the dominant institution for
homeless children, the detdom, or orphanage. The methods based on disci-
pline and competition that Makarenko fi rst elaborated at the Poltava colony
went against the dominant pedagogical trends of the 1920s. Makarenko’s
move to the Dzerzhinskii commune, a far better-equipped industrial com-
mune run by the OGPU, put him in a place that was a prime destination
T h e Po t e m k i n V i l l a g e D i l e m m a 115
for foreigners and on the road to an all-union fame that made him into the
dominant pedagogue of the Stalin era.45
The Lefortovskii Isolator might be considered more a showcase than
a model; a standard stop on foreign tours, it was clearly maintained for for-
eign eyes in order to demonstrate humane penal conditions and the prin-
ciple of rehabilitation. The translator Tamara Solonevich recalls taking two
Australians to this “show” prison, where, followed by two Chekisty, they were
warmly welcomed and told that the USSR had no prisons, only correctional
houses with workshops, clubs, libraries, and lectures. There were even model
prisoners. One, whom Solonevich considered to be acting out the role of pris-
oner, just happened to speak very convincingly in French to a group of French
visitors. Indeed, one guide reported that a French socialist lawyer who was
at fi rst “reserved” and skeptical became enthusiastic about prisons as places
of learning after meeting some French-speaking prisoners.46 But prisoners
speaking foreign languages were not always plants—in 1927, political prison-
ers speaking German and French complained to the foreigners that they were
being held without charge.47
Even in the case of Lefortovskii prison, there is evidence that it acted as a
positive symbol for those Bolsheviks who continued to believe in the origi-
nal promise of rehabilitation. With no connection to foreigners, for example,
a member of a commission sent to investigate the status of “political enlight-
enment” in Moscow correctional institutions in 1925 demanded reform of
sanitary conditions and facilities of certain prisons, which were so atrocious
that all political-enlightenment work was out of the question. By contrast,
Lefortovskii and the Sokol′nicheskii correctional institution (Ispravdom),
both showcases for foreigners, were praised for their good sanitation and
educational initiatives. In these prisons, the report concluded, the principle
of turning tsarist prisons into genuine correctional institutions was gradually
coming to life. In the mid-1920s, it was still possible for someone acting within
the penal system to believe that Lefortovskii was a kind of prototype.48 In the
1930s, Moscow prisons, which were under the aegis of the Commissariat of
Justice, were shown less frequently, and the secret police’s colony at Bolshevo
came into its own as a prime destination for foreign guests.
Western visitors’ praise for Soviet prison and labor-colony conditions—
featuring enthusiastic reports about the prisoners’ humane rehabilitation,
freedom of movement, and well-being to the point that punitive relations had
practically withered away—has rightly been termed by Hollander as “one of
the most fascinating . . . thought-provoking and disturbing” features of Western
political pilgrimages. It is striking that Heeke’s recent study of more than 100
German travelogues, which highlighted far more critical and even hostile
stances among visitors than Hollander’s study, found that “all travelers” who
116 showcasing the great experiment
were shown Lefortovo and other prisons by VOKS left with a “positive impres-
sion” of Soviet penal practice. Heeke’s survey of the published record misses
some of the more critical stances recorded in the archival paper trail on what
foreigners did and said inside the Soviet Union, however. For example, VOKS
and Mezhrabpom delegations in 1927 were sent to Batumskaia prison because
“local comrades’” made “assurances” to the sponsoring organizations about
its good conditions, but the foreigners reported overcrowded cells, and this
time conversations with German- and French-speaking prisoners produced
complaints. Solonevich, like some of the foreigners, reported overcrowding
of cells even in Lefortovo and claimed that she had many conversations with
critical English and German Communists who saw conditions even at this
showcase institution as worse than ordinary prisons in their own countries.49
Communists, of course, were far more likely than many others to have seen
the inside of prisons, and it was a general phenomenon that many foreign intel-
lectuals publicly praised factories, prisons, and industrial sites that they had
rarely, if ever, seen elsewhere.
Even so, some intrepid foreigners unsuccessfully pushed for entry to the
secret police prison, the Lubianka, while the generally pro-Soviet Congress of
Friends delegates in 1927 created “tense situations” by demanding to see pris-
ons that were not on the planned itinerary. In the same year, Lavrentii Beriia,
then chief of the Georgian GPU, met with such delegates after they had toured
a Tbilisi correctional institution. The transcript shows how he responded to
questioning that was far from gullible or deferential. Beriia was asked about
prisoners who had told the guests they were being held for long periods with-
out being charged; one delegate asked whether Mensheviks would be arrested
if they spoke out at a meeting, while others inquired about the “bad hygienic
conditions” and rooms of ten square meters that held three to five prisoners.
Beriia flatly denied that there were any prisoners held without charges, but
when specific names were supplied, he promised to check into it. Any remain-
ing bad conditions, of course, were the “heritage” of tsarism. 50
Despite the exceptions, the case of prisons brings across just how successful
the approach at the heart of “cultural show”—to prompt foreigners to general-
ize from unrepresentative samples—could be. Ultimately, both the ambitions
behind political tourism and, even more, the generic features of intellectuals’
reports on the Soviet experiment that developed with the burst of publications
starting in the 1920s, meshed deeply with the Soviet methodology of present-
ing models. Western Europeans and Americans wanted, and were expected, to
report on the progress of the Soviet experiment; returning travelers tended to
crave grand and authoritative conclusions in order to heighten the importance
of their findings. To make the modest, positivistic confession that one did not
have the evidence to generalize would have undercut the whole enterprise in
T h e Po t e m k i n V i l l a g e D i l e m m a 117
which they were invested. It is not surprising, then, that Uhlig’s study of Swiss
travelogues, like Hollander before her, found numerous examples of foreigners
talking about Soviet social and political practice writ large based on one or two
sites they had visited.51 In his Moscow Diary of his two-month visit in 1926–27,
Walter Benjamin decried the “facile theorizing” and “abstractions” that came so
effortlessly to European visitors. Alternately tormented by his inability to com-
municate in Russian and break out of his psychological and cultural margin-
ality, on the one hand, and congratulating himself with the illusion of having
penetrated “more deeply into the Russian situation,” on the other, Benjamin’s
frustrated and often myopic musings represent a chronicle of ambivalence very
different from the canon of published pro-Soviet reportage—despite the fact
that he was toying with joining the Communist Party at the time.52
The internal-external nexus in Soviet development was a phenomenon far
broader than VOKS or Intourist. The most successful model sites intertwined
features of particular importance to Bolshevism and the Soviet order with
“achievements” that had the potential to appeal well beyond party-political
lines. Perhaps the weightiest example of this was Moscow itself, the model
socialist city. While plans for a “new Moscow” were launched shortly after the
Revolution, and the metro was originally a pre-war project, large-scale plan-
ning and intensive debates over the future “socialist city” began with the fi rst
Five-Year Plan—several years after Moscow had become the epicenter for for-
eign travel, visited by the overwhelming majority of foreign visitors. The fi rst
phase of the creation of model cities, including the start of Moscow’s recon-
struction, lasted from 1929 to 1931 and was in many ways an international
project involving scores of foreign architects, fi rms, and city-planning debates
in which modernism dominated. 53 Even in these years, when construction was
only just under way, foreigners were already being treated to a classic exercise
in futurology: tours of the “new socialist city.”54
Even the 1931–32 shift away from modernism and the foreign planners was
made with international considerations and foreign visitors in mind. For exam-
ple, when the idea was raised for a massive new Moscow University building,
as early as 1931–32, Commissar of Education Andrei Bubnov remarked upon
how it would impress foreign dignitaries who would use it to judge the state
of all Soviet universities. 55 The leading political figure in charge of Moscow’s
reconstruction, Lazar′ Kaganovich, spoke about the drive as a means of catch-
ing up with the “technically advanced cities of Europe.” The long-awaited
1935 “Master Plan” for the city’s reconstruction underscored the monumen-
tal dimensions of the project. It railed against Moscow’s “barbarous past”
and hailed the city’s supreme status—in front of Athens, Rome, and Paris.
Diagrams and statistics for the reconstruction themselves became a form of
propaganda. As Schlögel has pointed out, however, most foreigners would not
118 showcasing the great experiment
see the “other Moscow,” the sprawling conglomeration of sett lements outside
the city center. The two Moscows were the reality; the new socialist city was
the dream. As Bukharin put it, Moscow would become the “new Mecca” for
pilgrims “from all ends of the earth.”56
Investing Moscow with international significance as capital of the world prole-
tariat was key to the history of the capitol city’s symbolic and physical reconstruc-
tion. At the same time, the number of big urban and industrial areas given so-called
regime status, with privileged supplies and policing, shot up from the early to the
mid-1930s (from three—Moscow, Leningrad, and Khar′kov,—to seventeen),
prompting secret-police chief Genrikh Iagoda, in 1935, to speak of cleansing these
key locations of undesirable elements in order to produce “models of socialism.”57
The new Moscow-in-the-making—or, rather, its showcase center rather than its
undergoverned periphery—quickly became the primary socialist city on many
levels. Better provisioned by far with goods than anywhere else in the planned
economy, digging deep for its renowned metro and high for its skyscrapers, it was
a model not only for foreigners, but first and foremost for Soviet citizens. In the
cultural geography of Stalinism, the city itself served as a microcosm for the Soviet
state, and by the late Stalin period, Moscow was firmly enthroned as destination
No. 1 for domestic Soviet tourism, also serving as the model for republican cities
and socialist imperial core for all non-Russians in the multiethnic state.58 If “cul-
tural show” set the stage as a model-based methodology for illustrating the initial
achievements of Soviet power to outsiders, Stalinism made centralized showcases
into a dominant motor of “socialist construction” itself.
Important is not only what foreigners were shown, but, in the words
of one high Intourist official in 1936, “how we show our sites (ob″ekty).”59
“Providing service” (obsluzhivanie) was the standard term for organizing
visits and living conditions, guiding daily itineraries, and in general han-
dling foreign guests. Th is was the space in which the attempt to influence
foreigners’ apprehension of the Soviet system met cross-cultural encoun-
ters often far different from the aims of an evolving Soviet “methodology
of cultural show.” In practice, much depended on the individual guides and
translators and those in charge of receiving foreigners at individual sites. If
in the 1920s these often young and well-educated personnel were frequently
non-Communists, and even later came from intelligentsia families, in the
tense economic and ideological conditions of the 1930s they still needed
to be specially groomed to be presentable for foreign eyes—or, in Semper’s
sardonic words, to “completely change one’s habits, to change from a wild
beast into a European.” As she remembered it:
Orally they warned me: VOKS translators are not Intourist guides,
everyday services do not enter into their responsibilities, one has to
T h e Po t e m k i n V i l l a g e D i l e m m a 119
conduct oneself with dignity, to dress att ractively; do not get to know
foreigners, do not meet on the side and do not accept any gifts, except
for books, which must be shown to the censor.
of the 1930s. At the same time, Soviet fi les are fi lled with incidents in which
Soviets—including service personnel, hotel managers, and translators—com-
ing into contact with foreigners, especially those with complaints or requests,
rebuffed them rudely or treated them with hostility. Some Western travelogues
noted the cautiousness of Soviet citizens in meeting foreigners outside official
capacities, especially in the 1930s; but others, perhaps especially those travel-
ing off the beaten path, reported the great eagerness of locals to converse.66
Both extremes were possible and indeed reinforced by the very special posi-
tion foreigners occupied.
Both the security and ideological concerns associated with foreign contact
and the allure of access to the outside world intensified in the shift from the
1920s to the 1930s. The oral instructions the VOKS guide Semper reported in
the mid-1930s forbidding informal friendships with foreigners were in place
because relationships did form. Semper’s own foreign-language training in
the late 1920s is a notable example. Her English teacher at the higher courses
in modern languages at the second Moscow University, one of several places
where guide-translators learned languages, was Elsie Millman—a writer
and ethnographer who had previously worked and traveled in central Africa,
China, and Malaysia and who was one of those bohemian adventurers who
not infrequently found their way to the USSR in those years. Millman talked
frankly about such topics as Western sociology and Soviet problems, and
this unusual woman—independent, physically active, and unafraid—exerted
a life-altering influence on the young Semper. For her, Millman was the very
model of the “new woman”: “I became very interested in this free, unique per-
sonality and everything that she carried within herself.” It was her admira-
tion for Millman that motivated Semper to devote her career to work with
foreigners.67
The ways that foreigners were to be impressed and that Soviet subjects were
to be inspired were different, of course. There was, however, a distinct over-
lap in the development of approaches designed for each. One example is the
promotion of model sites for traveling Soviet citizens, which came to the fore
with the rise of the proletarian-tourism movement in the late 1920s. With the
creation of the Society of Proletarian Tourism (OPT) as a mass organization
in 1929, activists tried to promote travel around the Soviet Union as an edi-
fying and politicizing venture, as opposed to mere relaxation or adventure,
which “always left the scent of a poorly masked imperialism.” The point was
that travelers should observe, or better yet aid, socialist construction, rather
than see “remnants of the olden days.”68 Guide books credited with stimulat-
ing the development of tourism within the USSR for Soviet citizens included
such titles as Travel in Winter (To Industrial Centers, Sovkhozy, and Kolkhozy
Near Moscow).69
122 showcasing the great experiment
In similar fashion, a primary aim of VOKS’s All over the USSR (Ves′
SSSR)—a Soviet version of the “Baedeker” guide for travelers, published in
10,000 copies in German, English, and French as well as Russian starting in
the Five-Year Plan period—was to pay special attention to the landmarks of
the “new socialist economy.” 70 There were different rationales at play in the
promotion of the sites of socialism to Soviet workers and to foreign dignitaries,
however. The goal of proletarian tourism was not merely to generate sympa-
thy but also to enable full conversion into activists for the “general line” of the
Party. In theory, its practitioners would be fully mobilized to campaign for col-
lectivization, conduct literacy campaigns and collect loan pledges, and further
military preparedness. They were encouraged to assault the class enemy: in
1931, tourist-workers from Elektrozavod were recorded as boasting that they
had unmasked eight kulaks in Kosinskii raion. Perhaps most consistently, the
organizers of the proletarian-tourism movement hoped that showcasing the
great construction sites of the Five-Year Plan would improve work habits and
raise the cultural and political level of the masses—the old war on backward-
ness in yet another guise.71 But even at the height of this Great Break fervor,
journals mixed in grainy photographs of industrial landscapes with mountain
panoramas and the costumes and physiognomies of native Soviet peoples iden-
tified in the captions—presumably in order to signify the friendship of peoples
rather than a poorly masked imperialism, but exotic all the same. By the end
of the 1930s, along with the rehabilitation of recreational tourism, domestic
tourism guidebooks served the Stalin cult and Russian patriotism by opening
with places associated with the leader’s life and batt lefields of the fatherland
war of 1812.72
The very fact that the proletarian tourism movement during its heyday
turned to some of the same methods already in place for presenting Soviet
socialism to foreign visitors suggests how Soviet political culture generated
model sites as a prime way of shoehorning the projected transformation of
the entire society into present-day examples that could generate enthusiasm.
There was a distinct interaction or interpenetration—rather than a simple or
direct progression—between the means the architects of Soviet culture and
propaganda discovered to address visitors from the outside world and to reach
their own population.
A Congress of Friends
If the Soviet reception of foreign visitors was evolving throughout the decade
in reaction to the experience of handling larger numbers of visitors, in 1927 the
tenth anniversary celebrations of the October Revolution marked a milestone
T h e Po t e m k i n V i l l a g e D i l e m m a 123
in the process. The sheer scale of the event, which involved hosting 1,000 for-
eign delegates for visits punctuated by a “Congress of Friends,” was a test for
the methods of cultural show and prompted sustained Soviet reflection on
what did and did not work.
The Comintern’s Agitprop and Willi Münzenberg, VOKS, and the for-
eign commission of the trade unions (VTsSPS) were the major players in the
1927 visits. In keeping with standard strategy, Communists were mixed into
the composition of delegations in order to steer them and shape their resolu-
tions, but most of the guests were to be sympathetic outsiders whose commit-
ment would be strengthened by the experience. Thus, even the Comintern’s
Agitprop later criticized the inclusion of fi fteen communist writers in MORP’s
twenty-two-person delegation as an exceptional blunder. By contrast, it crowed
about major success in the case of a French anarchist intellectual who suppos-
edly arrived full of anti-Soviet prejudices and left believing that the Red Army
defended the workers of the world.73
Undertaken as a major opportunity to win international alliances, the
Congress marked one peak in the party-state’s optimistic strategy of engage-
ment. The types of foreigners included reveals much about the priorities and
strategies behind the event. A full 500 of the delegates were foreign workers
invited through the trade unions: 100 places were reserved for “peasants,” 50
for cooperators, 100 for delegates from “Eastern” countries, 200 for European
invitees of IAH, and 30 for, as it was put, leaders of national revolutions in
oppressed countries and colonies. VOKS was charged with inviting the “politi-
cally sympathetic intelligentsia from Europe and America” (eighty places)
and scholars “sympathetic to the societies of ‘friends of the New Russia’ ”
(sixty places). Among the workers, significant numbers of Social Democrats
and non-communist socialists were included (thirty-six of the seventy-eight
German workers were SDs), but no such non-Communist Party affi liations
were permitted for those who already had attained political “consciousness,”
i.e., the intellectuals.74
When the event was over, Comintern and Soviet analysts proceeded to
examine the foreigners’ public evaluations. It is striking how foreigners’
written words, perhaps intended as polite or encouraging, were taken by the
Soviets at face value as a sign of the outsiders’ political growth and enlight-
enment. In this additional layer of gauging political-cultural level, there are
distinct hints that the class, gender, and nationality of visitors could affect the
Soviet response and their frequent assumption of superiority. For example, one
report discussed the demanding personalities of foreign cultural and scientific
celebrities (respectfully referred to as those with “European-wide reputa-
tions”) complaining how they were not treated delicately enough or accorded
enough personal attention.75 Yet an entire women’s delegation—identified in
124 showcasing the great experiment
the document only as such, not by country of origin—was indicted for “jeal-
ousy” of other delegations. A female German tobacconist arrived in the USSR
“surprising everyone with her apolitical nature,” since “she was located at that
level of development where she was only interested in issues of the economic
struggle of the working class.” A month in the land of socialism “produced sig-
nificant leaps forward in her consciousness.” 76 One guide came to the remark-
able insight that not everyone from the capitalist West was alike: “Germans
have different traits than the English and look on things differently than, for
example, the French. The French will not sign anything that a German has
proposed, and the other way around.” 77 It proved practical to segregate visitors
by class and nationality.
In his speech to the assembled Congress, head of state Aleksei Rykov, whose
post had no direct connection to cultural diplomacy, demonstrated that he
was fully conversant with the core conventions of “cultural show.” The Soviet
Union should be judged not by present differences, for example, between the
Soviet and American states and standards of living; rather, the achievements
of Soviet power, in which he included the trajectory of the upcoming indus-
trialization drive, should be placed alongside tsarism. Rykov next anticipated
potential concern among the sympathizers by raising the issue of Soviet politi-
cal violence. “We are forced to employ repression for the defense of the dic-
tatorship of the working class,” Rykov said, claiming the mantle of restraint
while denying that terror was a principle of state rule. Finally, Rykov could
not miss the opportunity to hammer home for the foreign guests the reversal
of Russia’s place in the world hierarchy of advanced countries: with unprec-
edented speed, the new society had emerged from one of the most backward
states of Europe.78
Several foreign speakers at the Congress demonstrated in their own words
and languages that they were apt pupils of the lessons of cultural show, reiter-
ating Rykov’s point. Th is trope was combined with the traditional European
stress on Russia’s non-European nature. As the German delegate Schopmann
put it at the second session of the Congress, “It is above all things noteworthy
that we should not view Russian construction through West European glasses,”
since that would omit the great contrast between tsarism in Old Russia and the
direction of the new.79 Soviet efforts to teach foreigners to see, or rather to see
beyond what was in front of their eyes, had demonstrable effects.
At the same time, delegates’ recorded statements can also be read in terms of
what the Soviets could not control: Western assumptions of superiority crept
through even among the most ardent admirers. A number of European del-
egates could not help noticing antiquated factory equipment and technology.
One Belgian delegate commented that “the methods of work used in Russia
are not superior to those in western countries.”80 The American radical Scott
T h e Po t e m k i n V i l l a g e D i l e m m a 125
Nearing chided the Soviets for assuming he and his comrades needed bour-
geois comfort: “too much food and too soft!”81
When Lenin’s widow Krupskaia opened the Congress of Friends on
November 10, 1927, she lavished praise on the 947 delegates present as the
“best flower of everything progressive, everything revolutionary . . . the best
flower of the future civilization.” If anything more flattering was the remark
in German by Aleksandra Kollontai, then ambassador to Sweden, at a VOKS
reception: she hoped the delegates would learn something from their Moscow
visits, but “we see many friends from whom we ourselves have learned
something.”82 The evocative label of “friends of the Soviet Union” in 1927 fur-
ther entrenched an important category that had meaning for the Soviets as
well as for foreign guests. On the other hand, when their guests were not pres-
ent, the hosts of the foreign sympathizers made remarks that differed greatly
from the public praise. They were the objects of condescension, distancing, or
ideological condemnation. In each case, the implication was one of inferior-
ity, because of delegates’ status as members of the intelligentsia, or on certain
occasions their Eastern provenance, or even their status as simple workers. In
perhaps the earliest proposal for the anniversary events, Willi Münzenberg
made a routine reference to Krupskaia’s flower of the new civilization as “pett y-
bourgeois intellectual circles.”83
More fully articulated were the confidential opinions of keynote speaker
Rykov, who wrote a “highly conspiratorial” strategy paper on how to approach
the congress of friends’ fi nal resolution. There was no need, Rykov argued, for
them to ratify an essentially Bolshevik platform. That could not serve to unite
those diverse circles “in Western Europe” (he simply ignored the delegates
from the rest of the world) that the congress had brought together. Because
most delegates did not belong to any party, “It is useless to conceal the fact
that these circles represent in a political sense the most passive elements of the
Western European working class, and together with Social Democrats, anar-
chists, and in general members of the intelligentsia (intelligenty) who have a
range of preconceptions about the USSR, they represent the majority of the
entire conference.” The goal was to turn them into “our defenders in the capi-
talist world,” but for this purpose, full “rebirth” into Bolsheviks was not neces-
sary.84 Friends needed to be supporters, not comrades.
When the guests had gone home, the reports generated by the 1927 jubilee
proved so voluminous that the interagency commission, in a major self-eval-
uation of the “insufficiencies” in the system, announced the goal of creating
an archive for them in order to study them statistically. Many of the problems
noted were endemic to foreign visits throughout the interwar period: disorga-
nization, missed meetings, vanishing luggage, poor service in the hotels, and
badly prepared guides. Some VOKS minders requisitioned the best theater
126 showcasing the great experiment
members of the cultural friendship societies, these figures were already estab-
lished sympathizers and not necessarily of the stature the Soviets craved. Many
of the most prominent figures could not make it: Upton Sinclair, Jane Addams,
John Dewey, and eleven other Americans declined, as did Albert Einstein
and Frankfurt School director Carl Grünberg in Germany, and H.G. Wells,
John Maynard Keynes, and George Bernard Shaw in Britain (Dewey, Wells,
Keynes, and Shaw all did visit at different times). Dreiser’s knowledge of the
Soviet Union was virtually nil, but one thing he had heard about was Potemkin
villages. He aggressively used the leverage he had to extract promises that he
would not be shown “a pageant.” Instead, he demanded an extended journey
to “see the real, unofficial Russia—the famine district in the Volga, say.”90 He
seems to have never attended the Congress of Friends except for an appear-
ance at a VOKS reception for the delegates.
Instead, Dreiser embarked on a remarkable eleven-week journey that took
him not only to Moscow and Leningrad but Nizhnii Novgorod, Kiev, Khar′kov,
Rostov and South Russia, Transcaucasia, and the Crimea between November
4, 1927, and January 13, 1928. After he arrived in Moscow, when Kameneva
and VOKS took over the arrangements for the writer’s stay, he still had to
threaten a public relations fiasco in order to gain a degree of independence
while traveling. Kameneva was not at all pleased that Dreiser had chosen not to
rely solely on VOKS guides but had instead hired a personal secretary.
Th is was Ruth Epperson Kennell, a thirty-four-year-old American woman
who had been living in Moscow for five years working on literary affairs rang-
ing from the Gosizdat translations of Dreiser’s fiction to the library of the
Comintern. Kennell, although not a Communist, was a lifelong left ist who
at that point was far closer to orthodox communist positions than Dreiser.
Culturally, she was enamored of Russians far more unambiguously than
Dreiser; during the Cold War, she devoted her career to writing children’s
stories crafted to dispel cultural stereotypes about Russians.91 Kennell knew
the Russian language and Soviet life in a way few Americans did at the time,
and she began, in part under the corrosive influence of Dreiser’s skepticism, to
experience a crisis of belief that brought her out of the Soviet Union for good
soon after Dreiser’s own departure.
Kennell later described how Dreiser, in a “belligerent mood,” arrived by
sleigh at VOKS’s headquarters to argue with Kameneva. Their dispute cen-
tered on Dreiser’s plans to hire Kennell as his secretary for the long trip:
Dreiser got his way, but Kameneva, taking advantage of Dreiser’s age and
hypochondria, found a way to monitor his tour by commissioning Sofi ia
Davidovskaia, a physician and trained nurse, to accompany him when he left
Moscow. Kennell knew her as the politically trusted house doctor at the Hotel
Lux, famous as the Comintern residence, where Kennell also lived. “Davi,” as
Dreiser called her, incurred the writer’s wrath for so conscientiously monitor-
ing him but was judged a “kindly, dependable woman” by Kennell; at the end
of the journey, “She agreed to report nothing derogatory about me, and I prom-
ised to speak no ill of her.”93 In the long run, Kameneva’s gamble of conciliation
paid off handsomely as the renowned American traveler was transformed into
a leading fellow-traveler in the years after his Soviet visit.
Dreiser, both in his published writings and even more in his self-
confident—indeed, arrogant—defense of American superiority inside the
USSR, appears very far from the duped and sycophantic political pilgrim who
merely projected his alienation from American society onto everything he saw.
A self-professed individualist who frequently berated his Soviet handlers and
tartly held up the United States as an example, Dreiser held views of Russians
and Slavs that were shaped by longstanding stereotypes about national charac-
ter. Even so, his views of what he saw could be penetrating and highly critical.
It is remarkable, then, that Dreiser, who despised so much of the hard times he
spent in the squalid, conformist land of collectivism, emerged to censor him-
self and generate a windfall of favorable publicity for the Soviets.
The roads to Sovietophilia were many, including even Dreiser’s cantanker-
ous individualism. Dreiser was already fi ft y-eight years old when he embarked
130 showcasing the great experiment
for Moscow, and he was at the height of his critical and public acclaim as a
writer. His 1925 American Tragedy was a major popular and critical success.
Several features of his biography are particularly relevant for understanding
his encounter with the Soviets. Unlike many other intellectual friends of the
Soviet Union, Dreiser was not at all self-analytical, and he had a weak grasp of
philosophy (his only formal higher education was a year at Indiana University).
In fact, these qualities are what make his views on the Soviet Union so poten-
tially revealing: “Dreiser held ‘views’ that reflected his deepest prejudices,
many of which were not altogether conscious.”94 The son of German immi-
grants who grew up in dire poverty, he remained a lifelong champion of the
poor and disadvantaged, which is of course a major factor in what att racted
Soviet publishers and critics to his writing. In the early years of the twenti-
eth century, he broke with the rigid Catholic upbringing of his youth and ada-
mantly rejected organized religion, something that affected both his sympathy
with official Soviet atheism as well as his many comparisons of communism
with Catholic dogma.
Dreiser’s intellectual formation dates to the period 1890–1914. As a jour-
nalist in the 1890s, he imbibed the entrepreneurial creed of the self-made man
and was heavily influenced by the ubiquitous Social Darwinism of the period.
Later, when in his fiction he turned to grand cosmic (and in the 1920s, social)
forces to explain the human condition, he rejected the survival of the fittest as
a mythical explanation for wealth and success, but he reiterated the theme of
the “big mind”—the fi nancier or industrialist or, later, great artist dominating
the herd. In the 1910s, he lived in Greenwich Village as part of New York’s
growing bohemian milieu, and his rejection of American bourgeois morality
also became an influential part of his writings. His rejection of marriage and
his constant affairs were important in this respect.
Thus, in the 1910s and 1920s, there emerged what Mookerjee has called
the two Dreisers: one the champion of the poor and the oppressed, the other
the Darwinian admirer of the cult of success, the great individual, and the
superior artist not bound by convention. In fact, Dreiser’s peculiar mix of
Social Darwinism and progressive social conscience, determinism and rug-
ged individualism formed a layered melange that, as is often the case, was
neither fully “Left” or “Right” politically. When Soviet publishers began
printing translations of his works in the 1920s, they tended to see only the
“progressive” side of the two Dreisers. When the earnest young Marxist lit-
erary critic Sergei Dinamov, the Institute of Red Professors graduate who
later befriended Dreiser when he was in Moscow, entered into correspon-
dence with the American writer on December 10, 1926, Dinamov predictably
asked Dreiser whether he stood for socialism and what he thought of Soviet
communism, given the anti-capitalism of his works. Dreiser replied with his
T h e Po t e m k i n V i l l a g e D i l e m m a 131
typical folksy épatage, shocking his interlocutor: he had “no theories of life”
or solutions to political and economic problems, and, “We can do nothing in
the fi nal analysis.”95
In a letter to Stalin, Kameneva blamed Kennell for exerting “a bad influence”
on “the great American writer-realist,” thus attributing Dreiser’s criticisms to
a bourgeois source. It is not clear whether Kameneva knew or suspected that
Kennell had become Dreiser’s lover soon after they met. Certainly, the two
Americans often worked to evade or ignore their official VOKS guides. One
of these, the “flashily dressed” and “rather clever” Trivas, who accompanied
them on the Leningrad trip, had approached Kennell with a conspiratorial
wink: “Between us we ought to be able to manage the old man—right?”96 The
American suspected Trivas of making advances to Kennell, and his att itude
was tinged with anti-Semitism: Dreiser later called Trivas an opportunistic
Jew and a “grafter” who was no more a Communist than Dreiser himself.97
The world knew of Dreiser’s trip mainly through his 1928 book, Dreiser
Looks at Russia, a work Kennell helped to edit. Th is was for the most part a
hastily written, poorly organized account, based partly on VOKS materials
and highlighting political and social aspects of the Soviet system on which the
writer was poorly equipped to comment. Having returned to the United States
before he wrote this work, Dreiser pulled his punches and muted his criticisms
considerably for public consumption.
The diary, by contrast, is a remarkable text both in its provenance and in
its content. The bulk of it was, in fact, written in the evenings over the course
of their travels by Kennell herself; she was instructed by Dreiser to use the
fi rst person and write as him. Dreiser, upon his return to the United States,
then made some corrections to this text but mainly added and interspersed his
own notes throughout. Kennell, then, was writing in Dreiser’s voice, knowing
it would later be read by the much older man whose magnetic power, as she
later acknowledged in several love letters to the writer, she was feeling most
intensely. Although the voices and views of the two traveling companions are
intertwined in elaborate ways, Dreiser’s later additions at many points have the
function of “correcting” or modifying impressions left by Kennell. Yet another
complication is that Kennell, in an act of loyalty to the Soviet authorities she
was soon thereafter to abandon, transferred parts of the diary (including those
about Dreiser’s meeting with oppositionist Karl Radek in his hotel room) to
VOKS as she wrote them, without Dreiser’s knowledge.98 In the quotations
that follow, Dreiser’s later additions appear in italics and Kennell’s writing in
roman script.
Th roughout their two-and-a-half month period of intimacy during the
Soviet tour, Dreiser and Kennell engaged in an extended and heated argu-
ment over the drawbacks and benefits of the American and Soviet systems. In
132 showcasing the great experiment
Figure 3.1 Sergei Dinamov circa 1931. A graduate of the Institute of Red Professors
and an expert on American literature, Dinamov was one of Theodore Dreiser’s main
interlocutors in 1927–28 and later an official in the Foreign Commission of the Union
of Soviet Writers. He was arrested during the Great Terror in September 1938 and died
on November 20, 1939. Source: Theodore Dreiser Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library,
University of Pennsylvania.
the Hotel Grand, on November 24, the two met with Dinamov, and Kennell
recorded: “I got into an argument with Dinamov about individualism, or
rather, intellectual aristocracy, as opposed to mass rule.” Dreiser added: “The
little brain & the big brain came in for their customary share in the argument . . . As
opposed to Communism and its enforced equality I offered international, benevo-
lent capitalism as very likely to achieve the same results.”99
Dinamov, who played a major role in the translation of Dreiser’s works and
who in the 1930s became an important official in the Union of Writers Foreign
Commission, appears to be one of those Soviet mediators pulled at times pain-
fully between his personal admiration for his foreign charge and his defense of
Soviet ideological orthodoxies.
In Kennell’s words, Dinamov expected to derive great “pleasure” from his
interactions with the American writer he had studied so much from afar, but
Dreiser constantly made him struggle to fi nd the English to defend ideological
orthodoxies. “Under communism would Rockefeller or Gary be paid the same
T h e Po t e m k i n V i l l a g e D i l e m m a 133
as a swineherd? You want to bring every human being down to the same level,”
Dreiser accused. Kennell recorded their confrontation in her own secretly
kept diary that she later quoted in her book: “The poor fellow was completely
exhausted by the ordeal, but he (Sergey) staggered up time after time with a
fresh onslaught.” Th is time, Dinamov retorted: “You are advocate for intellec-
tual aristocracy versus mass rule. All you hear and see in Soviet Union teach
you nothing. I am ashamed for you, Drayzer.”100 Dinamov’s personal admira-
tion for the great writer was overwhelmed by the certainty that just seeing the
Soviet world would “teach” the foreigner.
Many of Dreiser’s observations were astute and critical. He discerned the
persistence of social and cultural hierarchies in Soviet society and state. He
doggedly compared Soviet education and ideology to the religious dogma
he knew, Catholicism, and deplored the nascent gray uniformity all around
that he att ributed to Soviet “enforced equality.” Pointedly, he advised a Soviet
journalist that the USSR should get the homeless waifs (besprizorniki) off the
streets before sending Soviet money for revolution abroad. “I figure the Lenin
Statue Population of Russia to be at least 80,000,000,” he added to Kennell’s
laconic note about Lenin Corners. To Bukharin, as well as many other major
and minor Soviet officials with whom Kameneva and VOKS arranged audi-
ences, Dreiser was defensive about the United States and confrontational in
style. He argued with Bukharin over how many millions of Soviet citizens
actually agreed with, or even understood, the ideological aims of the Soviet
state and whether in imposing communist ideology it was therefore different
from any other “intellectual despotism.”101 Dreiser modified Kennell’s entry
on his meeting with the director of the rubber factory “Red Triangle”: “[S]ince
he proceeded to attack America I answered at length about the unselfish work of
scientists in America and the achievements of American fi nanciers in building
up industry . . . [and] gifts of rich men to [the] country . . . ‘And perhaps the next
step’ I added ‘will be the Soviet system, and I believe if this system were put to
the masses in America, they would accept it.’ ”102 As these unexpected leaps of
logic suggest, Dreiser was able to envisage a kind of pro-Soviet “convergence
theory” based on a belief in the advanced nature of Soviet modernization blue-
prints, yet, in the next breath, he could lambaste the Russian national charac-
ter and Soviet society as Asian, backward, and hopelessly different.
Even as she began to look at the Soviet Union through Dreiser’s more
disparaging eyes, Kennell exerted much influence over her older friend and
employer, supplying Dreiser with many of the positive arguments about com-
munism that he later used in his 1928 book and even more so in the 1930s.103
At the same time, even in the midst of his journey, Dreiser laced his defenses
of his homeland with panegyrics to the social equality of the Soviet system.
Here, as opposed to America, there was no graft; party leaders gave themselves
134 showcasing the great experiment
selflessly for litt le pay, as opposed to “sly religionists” or corrupt police officials
preying on commoners; and “true station” was fi xed not by wealth but by “mind
or skill.” Later, Kennell recalled of their ongoing disputes, “I had the feeling he
was arguing with himself, not me.”104
Dreiser’s visit underscores more general features in the history of the inter-
war influx of foreign intellectuals to the Soviet Union that have remained less
explored than political sycophancy. These relate, fi rst and foremost, to the
overwhelming preponderance of the theme of national character and “Asiatic”
backwardness. While the Soviet state was taken as a potentially advanced
social experiment, “Russia” was backward, primitive, Asian, Eastern, dirty,
inherently collectivist, yet also, in many ways, exciting and exotic.
Dreiser’s own reasoning through the categories of national character and
race was an integral, if loosely linked, part of his pattern of arguments about
the strong individual and economic modernity. Still, en route in Germany, he
declared to an acquaintance, contra the notion that humanity can be molded,
“I have sometimes thought that some nations or races might have (as in the case of
the Jews & the Slavs) a giant capacity for misery.”105 Upon his border crossing into
the USSR, he gave way to one cliché after another about the feminine East:
“One senses a change at once. Something softer—more emotional, less iron.”106
Dreiser’s associations with Asiatic Russia can be clustered into three sepa-
rate categories. The fi rst was the exotic: upon arrival in Moscow, he referred
to “quaint oriental droshky” and “exotic looking” priests in “strange caps.”107
Th is sense of fascination, in part, allowed him to disassociate the Soviet Union
with aspects of American modernity he disliked; there is no better illustra-
tion of this than the issue of marriage and sexuality. In Dreiser Looks at Russia,
he wrote approvingly about Russian att itudes toward sex, deducing his con-
clusions half from Soviet policymaking and half from assumptions about the
authenticity of noble savages: “They just do not see sex the way we do. It is
normal and natural . . . If there is no rape or murder [as opposed to adultery]
there is no real crime . . . it is the only sane treatment of the sex question I have
ever encountered.”108
The second cluster of Asiatic imagery concerns the consideration of eco-
nomic backwardness, both in terms of his defense of American superiority
and the need for Soviet modernization. Viewing the “wretched collection of
autos” in front of the Moscow train station, he noted “the shabbiest Georgia
or Wyoming town would outclass them. And the people! Th is mixture of
Europeans & Asiatics! . . . One gets a sense of strangeness and dilapidation.”109
Insofar as the Soviet state was altering the “herd instinct” and primitive pov-
erty of old Russia, then, Dreiser could approve wholeheartedly. The commissar
of trade, Anastas Mikoian, apparently impressed Dreiser so much “as a coldly
practical, implacable Communist public servant,” Kennell later wrote, that “for
T h e Po t e m k i n V i l l a g e D i l e m m a 135
the fi rst time, and perhaps the last, in his interviews with Soviet officials, he did
not display his American sense of superiority, his assumption of the right to say
what he pleased and do what he pleased when a guest in a foreign land.”110
Asianness and Slavic sloth was connected in Dreiser’s mind with economic
and industrial backwardness. Dreiser explicitly and implicitly compared
everything he saw to the advanced industrial civilization of America, which he
tended to defend abroad but condemn at home. Indeed, it was because Soviet
communism appeared to be modernizing this age-old backwardness that
Dreiser was able to blend much praise into his pointed complaints about Soviet
conditions. In this admiration for the perceived benefits of Soviet moderniza-
tion, as distinct to communist ideology, Dreiser followed in a long line of non-
communist and sometimes well-informed American observers who shared a
“fervent belief ” in what the young diplomat George F. Kennan a few years later
called the “romance of economic development,” or the Soviet Union’s rapid,
if ruthless, push to “starve itself great.”111 Th is was one key strand of Dreiser’s
Sovietophilia that emerged and, indeed, overwhelmed all his derisive and
hard-hitt ing criticisms of 1927–28.
The third kind of association Dreiser made between Russia and the East
was a nationalist and even racist condemnation of the Slavic or Russian “tem-
perament.” He compared the “less developed state” of Russians to that of
“Negroes,” since “instead of having to accumulate & organize and execute in a
constructive way they prefer to dream & play & talk like children.” He clearly
connected this primitive childishness in his mind with Soviet utopian dreams
of creating an earthly paradise.112
Dreiser unselfconsciously linked the theme of the inferior Russian
national character to his ubiquitous discussion of everyday life and hygiene,
a subject that proved crucial in his encounter with the Soviets. He did not
necessarily see temperament as eternal: because Soviet leaders were intro-
ducing “modern equipment” into “slow, backward . . . resigned” Russia, he
implicitly held out the hope that Sovietization would in “15–25–35” years
transform the Russian character. In terms of the everyday conditions he
so deplored, it was Asiatic sloth that explained such things as the hous-
ing and the toilets, which he viewed with “honest American horror and
astonishment.”113
As in the case of so many visitors, poor cleanliness and sanitation, the
execrable quality of food and lodging, and the miserable appearance of Soviet
humanity are extraordinarily predominant themes in Dreiser’s diary. As the
conditions of his journey worsened outside the two capitals, Dreiser expressed
more and more antipathy for the masses he so often defended. Kennell even
wrote for him: “The huddled masses gave me a sense of nausea. Russia is per-
manently spoiled for me by the cold and dirt.”114 After his childhood poverty
136 showcasing the great experiment
and many years of struggling, the publication of American Tragedy had fi nally
made Dreiser fi nancially well off; by 1927–28 he resented the notion that what
he considered necessary comforts were to the Soviets unheard-of, bourgeois
luxuries. Kennell noted a distinct correlation between his mood swings and
the quality of the food and lodging.115 It was not implausible to relate those
moods to his equally fluctuating degree of optimism about the Soviet experi-
ment and his evaluations of communism. However, even a highly observant
foreigner such as the British liberal James Farson, who realized other visitors’
judgments could be clouded by poor material conditions, was led to ruminate
about dirt and civilization:
[Visitors have been] unable to clear their judgment from their own
personal discomfort. They attach, think the Communists, too much
importance to such material things. On the other hand, what is civi-
lization? It was strange, I reflected, trying to wash and dry my hands
and face at the communal tap—without lett ing my cake of soap touch
the appalling sink—that after eleven years of absolute freedom the
proletarian washing place behind me was infi nitely more fi lthy than
any cage in a zoo.116
Everyday squalor dehumanized the Soviet masses for both observers, but
Farson deployed class rather than national terms.
The intimate linkage between Dreiser’s view of Soviet communism and his
experience of Russian “dirt” was thus not at all unique. It was brought across to
VOKS in several ways. His guide in the south, Davidovskaia, bore the brunt of
his often resentful pickiness. By the bitter end of his journey, when he declared
“I’d rather die in the United States than live here,” he had irritably broken off
all relations with her.117
Yet, the most important way in which VOKS gained sustained insight into
Dreiser’s outlook was through his lengthy pronouncement on his impressions
that he dictated to Kennell on the eve of his departure, and which was con-
veyed to VOKS by Dinamov.118 For Soviet cultural officials, whose main tasks
revolved around influencing Western views of the Soviet Union and intellec-
tuals’ understanding of Soviet “achievements,” this could not but be taken as a
document of the highest significance.
All of the att itudes that have been unpacked at length above were compressed
into this one pronouncement, which was punctuated by Dreiser’s trademark
alternation between praise and deliberately crusty criticism. He was fulsome
in his “immense delight” over Soviet anti-religious policies, selfless and tal-
ented Soviet leaders, and the housing projects, new schools, and scientific
institutions dott ing the land. Yet, he declared all this to be the achievements
T h e Po t e m k i n V i l l a g e D i l e m m a 137
Figure 3.2 Theodore Dreiser (center) with Dr. Sofi ia Davidovskaia (second from left),
Ruth Epperson Kennell, a Latvian agronomist, and a local guide, Donetsk Basin, in
1928. Kennell, the American writer’s secretary and lover during his Soviet sojourn,
recorded most of his remarkable Russian Diary; Davidovskaia, the house physician at
the Comintern’s Hotel Lux, provoked Dreiser’s wrath for monitoring him on behalf
of VOKS. Source: Theodore Dreiser Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of
Pennsylvania.
of a “superior group of idealists” (i.e., the Bolshevik leadership) rather than the
rule of the “laborer,” and he took the opportunity to declare himself a lifelong
“individualist” who subscribed to the “individual dream of self-advancement.”
He then lectured his hosts on cleanliness, adding that “there are certain obvi-
ous defects in either the Russian temperament or the fulfi llment of [the Soviet]
program, or both.” Repeating the adjective “Russian” over and over almost as a
pejorative, he called hygiene not a matter of state imposition or prosperity but
of “the very essence of the individual himself.”
The Russian house, the Russian yard, the Russian street, the Russian
toilet, the Russian hotel, the individual Russian’s attitude toward his
personal appearance, are items which convey to the Westerner (and
particularly to a traveler from America), a sense of something which
is neither creditable nor wholesome and which cannot possibly be
excused on the ground of poverty . . . Your hotels, trains, railway stations
and restaurants are too dirty and too poorly equipped. You do not wash
138 showcasing the great experiment
your windows often enough . . . You live too many in one room and are
even lunatic enough to identify it with a communistic spirit.119
It was a sign of the importance Kameneva att ributed to Dreiser’s visit that
on November 25, 1927, she wrote two letters to the top two party leaders at the
time, Stalin and Bukharin. Despite his behavior, Dreiser had been received by
such intelligentsia greats as the theater director Konstantin Stanislavskii, the
poet Vladimir Maiakovskii, and the fi lmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. Kameneva
herself had already met with Dreiser on two occasions. She now asked the
duumvirate to receive Dreiser as part of her effort to dispel the “unhealthy
atmosphere” that had arisen from Dreiser’s angry outbursts. In other words,
arranging attention from top intelligentsia figures and Bolshevik leaders was
assumed to be a significant means of generating positive sentiments. It is also
revealing that, in this context as well, Kameneva developed her own evalu-
ation of the foreign visitor as a matter of course. “He [Dreiser] gave me the
impression of an informal, if not to say rude person. His questions gave evi-
dence of a complete incomprehension of all that is occurring in our coun-
try. Unquestionably, this is a person who is inclined toward skepticism and
irony and this, side by side with his clear talent, could produce unpleasant
results.” Like the most lowly of guides, she labeled her remarks a kharakter-
istika, an evaluative assessment.120 Her report was clearly designed to assess
what Dreiser might say to the world.
A more extensive, yet anonymous, VOKS evaluation of the American writer
may have been written by Trivas, the smooth-talking interpreter Kameneva
favored, or by an official from the VOKS Anglo-American sector. Unlike many
others, this report was, in its overall thrust, neither preponderantly positive
nor overwhelmingly negative. The reason for this was that it built directly
on Dreiser’s own farewell pronouncement to produce the mirror image of
the writer’s own mixed and ambivalent assessment about the Soviet Union.
Whereas Dreiser had begun with praise and ended with criticism, the VOKS
report reversed the order. Unsurprisingly, it accepted the American writer’s
self-description as an individualist: he was “a typical bourgeois writer, with
a specific pett y-bourgeois individualist ideology.” Too old and sick to subject
phenomena around him to “deep analysis,” he “understands absolutely nothing
in economics and very litt le about politics.” Yet the second half of the report,
in a neat reversal of Dreiser’s own composition, moved from harsh criticism to
growing praise. Singled out for approval was the writer’s understanding that
the Soviet order helped the working class, his praise for Soviet anti-religious
policies, and his appreciation of the selflessness of Soviet leaders. Now Dreiser
was said to represent a group of “radical litterateurs” who were driven more
and more to the Left because of the situation in capitalist countries.121
T h e Po t e m k i n V i l l a g e D i l e m m a 139
During the height of Western intellectual enthusiasm for the “new Russia” in
the interwar period, the Potemkin village legend began a new life. Th is latter-
day Western discourse of Potemkin villages implicitly linked old Russia to
a system of receiving foreigners that was in many ways distinctively Soviet.
Presentation of the Soviet system to foreigners, revolving around model sites,
involved more than highlighting a few showcases. Th rough the manner hun-
dreds of model sites of socialism were displayed, it attempted to facilitate a
mode of thinking, an intellectual leap from the exemplary to the systemic that
would furnish sympathizers with an optics of enthusiasm.
But there was also hardly a single model shown to outsiders that did not have
its own important role for insiders. It was as if Potemkin’s decorated villages
had been divertissements not for diplomatic elites but instead had been promul-
gated on a mass scale to inspire Russian peasants throughout the land. In the
original myth, however, Potemkin villages were not merely façades for foreign
visitors, but fi rst and foremost the means to dupe Catherine the Great; they
can thus be interpreted as a form of self-deception. There were Soviet practices
that did recall that sense of the term. The “Potemkin methods” that at least one
Western journalist and other eyewitnesses recorded of elaborate preparations
for particularly important visitors—cleaning up buildings and evacuating the
unsightly sick and homeless—are strikingly similar to the preparations made
for the visits of top Soviet leaders in the regions, most famously later in Soviet
history.
As the nature of Soviet model-building shifted and model sites became less
the blueprints of expectant hope and more like canonical proofs of the superi-
ority of the Soviet system, models acquired the status not merely of experimen-
tal or specially designated institutions but of a central means for shaping the
world view of the new Soviet person. As such, they became a primary vehicle of
the Soviet Union’s trumpeting of its own superiority to itself, internally. In this
sense, the model sites of socialism came full circle back to that original conno-
tation of Potemkin villages as a form of self-delusion—this time, not as farce
but as tragedy, involving not a handful of notables but an entire civilization.
4
Gorky’s Gulag
142
G o r k y ’s G u l a g 143
and often personally furthered by Stalin.10 Initially cautious toward the dicta-
tor, Gorky reached the height of his influence and personal interaction with
Stalin in 1931–32. Although it is impossible to establish a direct link between
the writer’s failure to write a biographical ode to Stalin and his falling out with
the leadership that followed, by 1933 he was restricted from foreign travel, and
in his last years he was living under virtual house arrest. By that time, however,
Gorky had made his mark not only as a broker and shaper of policy, but as the
single most important figure behind the emergence of Socialist Realism. In the
words of Spiridonova, “Of course Stalin often used Gorky in his interests, but
he succeeded only when those interests did not contradict the convictions of
the writer himself.”11
In the 1920s, it was in his Italian villa in Sorrento, his personal “window
on Europe,” that Gorky became familiar with the Soviet conventions for
conveying present-future “achievements” in comparison with an oppressive
past. The epistolary relationship that Gorky struck up with the pacifist and
high-minded man of letters Romain Rolland (whom he did not meet in per-
son until 1935, when the Russian writer helped bring Rolland to Moscow)
illustrates how Gorky himself became involved in the presentation of the
Soviet system to European intellectuals. In the aftermath of his departure
from Soviet Russia in 1921, Gorky felt free to express exasperation with the
Soviet regime over the persecution of the intelligentsia to the Frenchman. He
even enlisted Anatole France to support his protest over the 1922 show trial
of the Socialist Revolutionaries, a step that infuriated the Bolshevik leader-
ship. After the clashes of the early 1920s, the party leadership’s relations with
both the intelligentsia at home and Gorky in emigration stabilized. By 1925,
the dynamic of Gorky’s correspondence with Rolland had shifted. Gorky was
moving back into the good graces of the regime, and Rolland was moving
with him, from his 1920s admiration of Gandhi, to his 1930s fascination with
Stalin. During this shift, the fastidious grand écrivain would worriedly write
with one or another doubt or the latest charges about Soviet repudiations
of human rights in European debates; Gorky would hasten to explain them
away.12
When Rolland’s letters turned on specific questions and complaints, such as
those regarding Francesco Ghezzi, an Italian anarchist arrested in the Soviet
Union in 1929, Gorky forwarded Rolland’s correspondence to someone who
might take action—NKVD chief Genrikh Iagoda, a regular at Gorky’s mansions
in Malaia Nikitskaia in Moscow and in the town of Gor′kii between 1931–36.
To Iagoda, Gorky assumed a tone of utilitarian disdain when speaking about
his warm, respectful missives to his longtime literary colleague: the French
writer’s sympathy for the USSR was fi lled with philistinism (obyvatel′shchina),
but he might prove useful in influencing European public opinion.13
146 showcasing the great experiment
in Pravda, Gorky took an openly hostile position toward foreign visitors in his
celebratory paean to the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. At the
very moment when several thousand foreign sympathizers were being fêted
in Moscow with the goal of producing a wave of Western adulation, Gorky
found European visitors not only ignorant but anti-Soviet. To be sure, some
of his complaints were justified: “Having lived among Russians two or three
weeks, they return home and tell about what they saw,” he charged, observ-
ing that Europeans still reflexively emphasized Russian cultural backwardness
(nekul′turnost′). Far more tendentious was his accusation that European travel
reports noted only the “insufficiencies” of Soviet power. Gorky’s analysis of
this, att ributing it to bourgeois intellectuals’ “class psyche,” appeared as some-
thing of an afterthought. The primary explanation he offered was that “out-
moded disease of the Europeans—a grotesquely exaggerated and laughably
pompous consciousness of their superiority over Russians.”17
If Gorky saw European assertions of superiority as “outmoded,” it was
because Soviet achievements had rendered them obsolete. The successes
Gorky listed on this celebratory occasion—state support for science, electrifi-
cation, and the growth of culture—are clues to his thinking but are ultimately
less important than the notion of achievement itself. To him, the concept con-
noted feats, even miracles, carried out by heroes in order to bring an organic
unity of will and belief. Twenty years after the fact, he unabashedly recalled his
adherence to the condemned “godbuilding” heresy of leading Left Bolsheviks
after 1907. What he had earlier called the godbuilder, he said, was nothing
other than the new hero—the “superior, honest, this-worldly worker” (pre-
voskhodnyi, chestnyi rabotnik mira sego)—who, “within himself and on this
earth is creating and carrying out the ability to work miracles,” unified and
organized by the state.18
Literary scholars and cultural historians have invested much energy into
the search for the origins of Socialist Realism, and in almost all accounts, the
Soviet Union’s most powerful writer has figured prominently. The “interna-
tional” factor, the display of positive models of the future to foreigners, figures
in none of these discussions, however. Th is missing international link does not
preclude other explanations, but it calls attention to the enormous significance
foreign eyes held for the evolution of Soviet culture and reinforces the notion
that Socialist Realism needs to be conceived as, even more than an aesthetic
doctrine, a cultural-ideological mode for showing the Soviet system. Gorky
took the internationally propagated notion of Soviet “achievements” and
invested it with a powerful formula of his own: they would become the fruit
of the heroism of the new man in order to create the new culture and unity of
purpose of a secular religion. The interlocking place of heroes, the “reforging”
of man, and mythopoesis were at the crux of his contribution to Soviet culture.
148 showcasing the great experiment
Th rough his idea of the “Soviet hero,” as Hans Günther has discussed, Gorky
became instrumental in rehabilitating myth within the ostensibly materialist
Soviet ideology and aesthetics.19 By the 1930s, when he worked to add the ele-
ment of “revolutionary romanticism” to literary doctrine, he held that “true
realism” required adding “wishes and possibilities” to reality. Myth was thus
freed from the burden of reality and, under Stalinism, fact and fiction became
virtually indistinguishable.20
In a sense, Gorky was not so different from any famous foreigner: his deci-
sion to throw his support behind the Stalin Revolution, while of a different
order from that of foreign writers and intellectuals, was not based on ideologi-
cal or political calculations alone. Like some of the most prominent Western
fellow-travelers, it emerged out of an intricate web of convictions as well as
professional, aesthetic, and personal motivations. Gorky, who had from an
early age loathed peasant ignorance, heartily approved of the forced collec-
tivization drive; he reviled the conservative, religious, and anarchic nature of
peasant Russia. In a 1930 letter to Stalin, Gorky conveyed his hatred of the
peasantry along with a sense of awe at the Party’s “almost geological” transfor-
mation of the countryside: “a way of life that has existed for a thousand years is
being destroyed, an order that has created an incredibly ugly creature capable
of horrifying with its bestial conservatism . . . There are twenty million of such
people. The task of reeducating them in the shortest possible time is incred-
ibly difficult. But, however, it is practically being solved.”21 For Gorky, the
Stalin Revolution would not only transform those millions of less than fully
human philistines, but by doing so it would also decisively change the calcu-
lus between Russia and the West.22 On this he was in substantial accord with
Stalin’s own views. “Th ings here are not going badly,” Stalin wrote him at the
end of 1930, having taken the time throughout this period to court and con-
sult the writer with unusually long and substantive notes. “Both in the realm
of industry and agriculture there are indisputable successes. Let them whine
over there, in Europe . . . about the ‘collapse’ of the USSR. With this they will
not change our plans or our affairs by one iota . . . Holy Russia will be no more.
Of course! There will be a powerful and advanced Russia.” 23
Like other great intelligentsia patrons, Gorky surrounded himself with a large
household, at once a literary circle and an entourage of intimates, guests, and
lovers; “he did not want to moderate his appetites.”24 To return to the USSR
meant not only stupendous acclaim as the greatest proletarian writer—after all,
his literary stature in Europe was on the wane—but the chance to build a new
culture with an entrée into the inner circle of the top political leadership. The
courtship began in the mid-1920s and intensified in 1928, when Ivan Skvortsov-
Stepanov, an Old Bolshevik, was put in charge of a Politburo special commis-
sion to handle questions related to Gorky’s return. His “celebratory reception”
G o r k y ’s G u l a g 149
Figure 4.1 The far-north island fortress at Solovki in a shot from Marina
Goldovskaia’s documentary fi lm Vlast’ Solovetskaia. The fi fteenth-century monastery,
used by the Orthodox Church to imprison heretics, was designated the Solovetskii
Camp of Special Designation (SLON) in 1923. In the late 1920s, it became the
prototype for the nascent Gulag. Source: RIA Novosti Photo Library.
making forced labor economically profitable proceeded along with the orga-
nization of internment with few guards and the use of favored classes of pris-
oners to keep discipline. After the secret police emerged as the institutional
master of the explosively expanding camp system at the outset of the Stalin
period, Solovki’s “graduates” staffed camps throughout the nascent Gulag
archipelago. In 1929, which Stalin called the year of the Great Break, Solovki
was explicitly mentioned in decrees as the prototype for new concentration
camps that would place economic profit and sett lement of new areas at the
top of the agenda. 30
Solovki was therefore a path breaker in the shift from “isolating” political
prisoners to the search for profit and colonization of the far north. In 1924,
OGPU chief Feliks Dzerzhinskii expressly mentioned Solovki as a model for
the expansion of forced labor and exploitation of uninhabited areas, functions
he expressly distinguished from the rehabilitation of criminals so prominent
in early Soviet judicial theory. 31 One account att ributes the plan for the fi rst
concerted secret police attempts to derive economic profits from forced labor
to an entrepreneurial former NEPman who served time in Solovki. 32 In 1926,
the camp was given a contract to export timber for hard currency.
But at the very moment that the Solovki model was being replicated in the
Gulag and the number of camps and prisoners in the Solovki archipelago and
elsewhere shot up, its profitability had declined, after several years of intensive
logging. Typhus ran rampant and food rations dwindled; guards became even
more brutal and punishments and humiliations more intense. The result was
mass death from overwork and an epidemic of self-infl icted injuries as prison-
ers sought to avoid it. A Moscow commission sent to the Solovetskii camp in
1930 uncovered “chilling facts of mass violence against prisoners,” including
murder, beatings with sticks hardened by fi re, and multiple forms of torture,
including leaving recalcitrant prisoners out to mosquitoes in summer and
frostbite in winter. 33 Gorky’s visit coincided with this crisis and downturn in
camp conditions.
One sign of the international importance the secret police and the Party
invested into Gorky’s visit to Solovki was the almost contemporaneous fi lm-
ing of the widely distributed fi lm Solovki, a feature-length documentary com-
missioned by the OGPU. 34 Contrasting the harsh tsarist internment system
with the humane Soviet rehabilitation of prisoners, the fi lm was shot after a
sanitizing of conditions and staged presentation of prisoners similar to those
reserved for Gorky’s visit. “God, what an impudent and underhanded staging
of all views and scenes,” wrote one prisoner present during the fi lming, when
prisoners were fi lmed playing chess and reading newspapers. For Gorky’s visit,
an alley of trees was set up in front of the barracks, the grounds were land-
scaped, and buildings were painted and washed. On September 21, 1929, a
152 showcasing the great experiment
few months after Gorky’s visit in June of the same year, an item in Izvestiia
appeared about the secret-police fi lm, screened widely throughout the USSR:
“The fi lm wonderfully explains the methods of correction and destroys all the
idiotic things made up about the ‘horrors of the GPU’ . . . It needs to be shown
abroad.” Or, as a worker identified as a political emigre from Latvia declared in
the Dzerzhinskii Club for foreign technical specialists, “There exist two terrible
words abroad: ‘GPU’ and ‘Solovki.’ Th is picture ‘Solovki’ dispels the legends
about the Bolshevik inquisition, it is unlikely to be permitted abroad.” Gorky,
of course, had the power to reach an international audience, however. After
the moment when the honored guest, on the conclusion of his visit, signed his
name to the camp’s “control journal” in an entry that endorsed camp condi-
tions as “excellent,” camp officials fi red off a special telegram directly to Stalin
to announce the news. 35
Playing the role of the famous foreigner, Gorky forged his pact with the
Stalin Revolution. But he did it his way, highlighting his particular cultural-
ideological concerns and viewing himself as a builder of the new culture rather
than as a servile toady. What Gorky emphasized was human transformation:
refuting Lombroso and the theory of the born criminal, he declared that “The
Solovetskii Camp of Special Detention is not Dostoevsky’s ‘house of the dead,’
because there one is being taught life, literacy, and labor.”36 The re-education of
criminals showed the success of the entire project of transforming people into
communists. The Chekisty could, thus, be accredited with a cultural achieve-
ment, a pedagogical miracle that, if properly understood by the Soviet masses,
would create unity of purpose. In sum, Gorky was not describing Solovki as
it was, but as it should be. His “around the union” cycle can be considered an
early prototype of Socialist Realism. 37
Gorky’s Solovki and the “union” cycle more broadly replicated the principal
features current in writing about Soviet achievements for foreigners developed
in the 1920s, redirecting them toward a mass Soviet audience. The fi rst fea-
ture was the constant contrast between the tsarist past and the Soviet present
(Dostoevsky’s “house of the dead”). The device for achieving this contrast in
the “around the union” cycle was Gorky’s personal recollections as a witness
to the transformation. His visit to Baku’s oil industry, for example, began with
his memories of the nightmarish hell he had seen in 1892 and 1897, then fast-
forwarded to the workers’ sense of collective unity and pride, the “fantastic
miracles” (fantastiki) he witnessed today. 38 A second feature of writing for for-
eigners was the concern for reading the present in light of the future, to value
present achievement more highly for what it was about to become. Thus, he
peppered the cycle with such phrases as “the will and reason of the laboring
people is transforming the figure and face of the earth”—focusing heavily on
children and youth as the new people of the future. 39
G o r k y ’s G u l a g 153
it was, he was shelving the rebellious persona of the bosiak and assuming the
mantle of a creator of the great proletarian writer, which virtually became his
honorific in the years to come.
When Gorky described Solovki as a place of re-education, he was ignor-
ing or not investigating many things: mass deaths from overwork, attempts
to extract maximum profit from forced labor, hard-labor punishments like
carrying water up and down stairs until some started to look like living
corpses. One former prisoner present at the time charged in his memoirs
that Gorky had “morally justified the extermination of millions of people
in the camps.” By deceiving world public opinion, Gorky lost the chance to
become a Voltaire, Zola, or Chekhov and became that which he despised
most, the most ordinary of philistines. 50 Th is moral condemnation concen-
trates on replacing truth with lies. But Gorky did more than deceive; he
created a system for self-deception on a mass scale. Gorky did not invent
re-education and “cultural-enlightenment” work at Solovki: he magni-
fied an unrepresentative sample that actually existed into a redefi nition of
reality that recalled the way foreigners were supposed to read the sites of
communism.
“Far from everything was limited to suffering, humiliation, and fear,” wrote
one of the camp’s most famous prisoners, the future academician Dmitrii
Likhachev, who was arrested as a young philologist and linguist. Likhachev
observed the camp from his own office, where he was charged by the authori-
ties with compiling a dictionary of criminal slang. “In the terrible conditions
of camps and prisons to a certain measure the life of the mind was preserved.”
Prisoners took full advantage of the opening offered by officially sanctioned
“cultural-enlightenment work”; the resulting contrast between the camp’s pun-
ishing standard of living and Solovki’s thriving intellectual life was extraordi-
nary. The camp had a museum, a lecture hall, and a theater that was considered
one of the best in the country outside the capital cities; these were run by the
“labor-enlightenment department” of the secret-police camp administration.
One inmate counted the camp journal and newspaper among the freest pub-
lications in the USSR. Likhachev himself survived through a sinecure in the
criminological laboratory headed by a former tsarist procurator in which some
prisoner-scholars, one with a doctorate from the Sorbonne, conducted socio-
logical research.
One former prisoner speculated that these activities were fi rst launched
not to parade in front of international public opinion but because they were
noted by the upper levels of the Party. In other words, this prisoner believed
they allowed Old Bolsheviks to believe humanistic rehabilitation was actu-
ally taking place. Perhaps. It comes as no surprise, however, as one camp
official openly complained in the camp journal, that most prisoners returned
156 showcasing the great experiment
Figure 4.2 Pages from the Gulag album of academician Dmitrii Likhachev, from a
stand at a 1989 exhibition on the Solovki Camp. The captions for the photographs are
made in his own hand and commemorate his imprisonment from 1926 to 1930.
Source: RIA Novosti Photo Library.
from the day’s work so exhausted that cultural activities were out of the
question. 51
From the earliest years of the revolution, the notion that crime was environ-
mentally determined and could be corrected through re-education and labor
was offset by classification of unredeemable enemies. Numerous historians
have seen a hardening of essentialism in social, political, and, by the 1930s,
ethnic categories that decisively weakened the rehabilitative strand in early
Soviet penal policy. Even so, through the early 1930s, according to Khlevniuk,
the Gulag had not yet “acquired the extreme brutality” of the late 1930s and
a certain “punitive idealism” of the revolutionary period remained. 52 In some
G o r k y ’s G u l a g 157
Bolshevo. The big red banners plastered around Solovki, which at fi rst riveted
prisoners’ eyes but soon became an unnoticed part of the landscape, embod-
ied the conflation between physical labor and human transformation. “Chtoby
drugim ty snova stal, tebia trudlag perekoval!” (In order to change, you need to
be reforged by the labor camp!), announced one slogan on the former monas-
tery. A banner far more common throughout the Gulag system represented
what could be read as a cruder exhortation to work harder: “Cherez trud—k
osvobozhedeniiu” (Th rough labor—to emancipation!). 57 The Nazis, hanging
“Arbeit macht frei” on the entrance to Auschwitz, came by a different route
to almost the same exact slogan. It is precisely the lack of planned, systematic
extermination—the possibility of redemption—that remained a key differ-
ence between the Gulag and Auschwitz.
In its way, Gorky’s cultural-ideological program was as phantasmagorical
as the violent fantasies of Eikhmans and Iagoda. Understanding Gorky’s role
as whitewashing or fabrication is to minimize his innovation. Gorky sought
nothing less than a redefi nition of truth, made explicit in his contemporaneous
theory of “two truths”—one belonging to the past, the other to the society-
in-the-making. At Solovki, he took an increasingly abortive part of what went
on in the labor colony and called it a truth representative of the future society,
recapitulating the move inherent in the presentation of model institutions to
foreigners. As Dariusz Tolczyk has shown, Gorky’s writing on Solovki became
the widely imitated, seminal Soviet text marking the shift from a 1920s “revo-
lutionary discourse of terror, vengeance, and class-cleansing” to a “pedagogical
discourse of re-education and resocialization through compulsory labor.” The
camps that became the Gulag were no longer justified; they were redefi ned,
or, like terror, no longer openly discussed. 58 In fact, Gorky’s innovation went
beyond the camps. He helped elevate a strategy for universalizing models for
the future to the level of doctrine. The writer’s opportunity to do so, conferred
by his reconciliation with the regime, made it into perhaps his chief contribu-
tion to Stalinist culture.
the early years of the revolution, harsh measures one day were justified in
terms of the bright future. What, however, were the reasons prompting “Iron
Feliks” Dzerzhinskii, founder and fi rst head of the Cheka, to attach himself
to the cause of homeless children? Why did Dzerzhinskii, Iagoda, and other
Chekisty play such a big role in founding the OGPU’s Bolshevo children’s col-
ony near Moscow, which became a world-famous institution several years
after it was launched in August 1924? In 1921, Dzerhzhinskii was the pri-
mary figure behind the Central Executive Committee (TsIK) Commission
for the Improvement of Children’s Life, which was primarily concerned with
addressing the catastrophic growth in the early 1920s of up to seven million
homeless waifs (besprizorniki). Th is cause addressed not merely a pressing
domestic problem but an international public relations disaster. No other issue
so shocked visitors from Europe and the United States as child homelessness.
Juvenile crime in the early 1920s became a major problem in Moscow, where
almost all foreigners were concentrated.
It is not hard to come up with self-serving explanations: the commune
served to humanize the dreaded secret police, garnering large amounts of good
publicity; and it did so internationally, as the colony, conveniently located in
the countryside twenty-seven kilometers outside Moscow, became a showcase
for propagating the virtues of rehabilitation in the Soviet penal system. There
are also ideological reasons: in Bolshevo, an intense revolutionary focus on
youth as the future of the new order was wedded to the principle of the envi-
ronment shaping the new man. The commune was a successful form of social-
ism writ small, the miniature obverse of gargantuan, grandiose monuments
to the new order. It is clear, however, that Bolshevo was dear to Dzerzhinskii’s
heart well before the institution became a showcase, which in fact occurred
after his death in 1926. It was one of his “few diversions” to visit the com-
mune; he once told the commissar of justice that “these dirty faces are my
best friends. Among them I can fi nd rest. How much talent would have been
lost if we had not picked them up!”59 While Dzerzhinskii has been known for
his steely fanaticism, he has more recently been depicted as a “growing force
of moderation” within the secret police and party leadership between 1921
and 1926, as he moved uneasily toward reassessing the “balance between ter-
ror and consent.”60 Could it be that his role as savior of the street children of
Bolshevo allowed him on some level to justify the role he played in repressing
the unredeemable enemies of the revolution?
According to some secret-police defectors, graduates of OGPU labor com-
munes provided substantial cadres for the secret police.61 Perhaps more impor-
tant, the secret police had lost the batt le for control over camps and prisons
during the turn to NEP in 1921–22, when its chief rivals, the Commissariats of
Justice and the Interior, had promoted themselves as champions of re-education
160 showcasing the great experiment
and economic self-sufficiency, respectively.62 Bolshevo and the two other high-
profi le children’s communes, in Liubertsy and Khar′kov, gave the secret police
credentials in both these areas. Gorky and high-profi le foreign visitors alike
helped call attention to the secret police’s “achievements.”
The secret-police founder of the Bolshevo commune was Matvei Samoilovich
Pogrebinskii, born in 1895 in a Poltava shtetl to a family of nine. He fought in
World War I and joined the Red Army in 1919, joining the OGPU only months
before he opened the commune in 1924. Without any pedagogical experience,
studying literature on child homelessness “day and night,” Pogrebinskii also
launched a successful career as a secret-police administrator and NKVD chief
of the Gor′kii oblast′. Not mentioned in official versions of the commune’s his-
tory, however, was that the Bolshevo commune was formed out of the Rosa
Luxemburg Children’s Labor Commune, founded in February 1924 by the
energetic and experienced pedagogue Fedor Melikhov, whose successes had
att racted Pogrebinskii’s interest. A central feature of waifdom in this period
was the roving bands of homeless children, led by so-called vozhaki, group
leaders who established often brutal command over the others. Melikhov had
developed a successful set of methods to curtail the influence of the vozhak
and the temptations of the street by giving the children a sense of belonging
through self-governance and employment in a boot workshop. Pogrebinskii
selected the Luxemburg Commune to transfer to the secret police’s sovkhoz
in Bolshevo, and on August 18, 1924, in an order signed by Iagoda, Melikhov
was subordinated to Pogrebinskii “in all respects.” The pedagogue Melikhov
continued to labor in obscurity; the Chekist Pogrebinskii became famous as
Bolshevo’s founding father.63
An extraordinary fact about Bolshevo was that its path to fame was cleared
not by the OGPU, not by VOKS, and not even by the Soviet press—but by
the left-liberal U.S. magazine The Nation, which carried a wide-eyed arti-
cle by William Reswick in the November 11, 1925 issue. Boris Svirskii, the
VOKS representative in Washington, started receiving inquiries from curious
Americans about the “Russian farm colony for boy criminals.” Svirskii sent a
request to Moscow for more information, rightly sensing the triple appeal of
social rehabilitation, penal reform, and humanism. In response to Svirskii’s
inquiry, though, VOKS official Tsetsiliia Rabinovich mistakenly directed an
inquiry to a collective farm in “Bolyshevo,” not Bolshevo, suggesting at very
least that she did not know where it was located.64 Thus did The Nation bring
the news about Bolshevo to VOKS. Only after foreign interest began stirring in
1925 did the Soviet central press start to publicize the Bolshevo commune in a
growing number of articles in 1926.65 The conclusion is inescapable: Bolshevo
was not founded as a showcase for foreigners; rather, the process by which it
became a showcase was launched only in response to international acclaim.
G o r k y ’s G u l a g 161
Reswick became the fi rst person ever to sign the Bolshevo visitors’ book, which
soon fi lled up with scrawls of praise from luminaries from around the world.66
Foreign interest bolstered its status within the Soviet Union. The commune
thus rose to fame abroad and at home simultaneously, and its rise and fall was
determined by a remarkable interplay of international and domestic develop-
ments. Th roughout, Gorky’s role runs like a red thread. As it became one of the
prime destinations for the most important foreign guests and delegations start-
ing in the late 1920s, Bolshevo was far more than just a showcase for foreigners.
Its “graduates” left a mark in Soviet society; in Soviet culture, its celebration
as a locus for the rehabilitation of criminals took off just as that principle was
increasingly subsumed in practice by counter-principles of irredeemable guilt
and exploitation of the labor of those arrested.
Productive labor and the making of new proletarians, the most specifically
Bolshevik and Soviet features of Bolshevo, were not what fi rst impressed The
Nation’s Reswick and other Western guests. They were interested in the place’s
relevance for progressive penal and social reform as they affected juvenile
delinquents and the criminal poor. Quite typically, Bolshevik and Soviet prin-
ciples combined with a broader appeal to progressive foreigners of many politi-
cal hues. Also typical was the fact that programs furthered by the revolution
had emerged out of social reform movements of late imperial Russia.67 Reswick
highlighted features of Dzerzhinskii’s “experiment in penal reform” that later
continually impressed other foreigners: freedom of movement for the com-
munards, lack of fences and guards, and the seemingly astounding ability of a
“change of environment” to transform even the most hardened criminals. The
goal was to turn “some of the worst juvenile criminals in Russia into decent
human beings . . . Most of them appeared well fed, ruddy, and broad-chested,
their eyes sparkled with health and vigor. It was difficult to believe that only
a year or two ago these boys were murderers and ruffians.” The article, as no
doubt hoped when the American journalist was given access to Bolshevo, rep-
resented a windfall of favorable publicity for Dzerzhinskii, depicted not as the
“living terror of the Revolution” but as the humanitarian patron of his “ ‘baby’
farm.”68
In terms of conditions and resources, Bolshevo and the other OGPU com-
munes were virtually unique even among those orphanages and penal colonies
designated as models or well-run institutions. There existed vast variations
among children’s homes, as in other Soviet welfare institutions, but the norm
for juveniles under state care was frequently harsh punishments and material
conditions ranging from poor to horrific.69 Even so, Bolshevo’s “achievements”
were genuine and deserve scrutiny, for foreigners were not impressed without
reason. Part of what struck visitors, of course, was what made it exceptional:
excellent facilities in an idyllic location on a former estate, with a fi ne chef and
162 showcasing the great experiment
courts for tennis, an expensive and elite sport in the West. Yet, none of this
would have mattered without a remarkable transformation of street children,
drug addicts, and criminals that Bolshevo took in increasingly large num-
bers—32 in 1925, 96 in 1927, 197 in 1929, 655 in 1930, and after a mass influx,
1,200 in 1931 and 2,200 in 1933—who were rapidly “brought to order” (to use
Gorky’s expression about Solovki), educated, and turned into highly skilled
craftsmen. They shared in the profits of a highly successful sporting goods
equipment and clothing enterprise. In 1932, the Dzerzhinskii Commune in
Khar′kov produced the fi rst FED cameras, the exceptionally successful Soviet
version of the Leica named with Dzerzhinskii’s initials. Many former com-
munards continued to work in the enterprises after they “graduated” from the
commune; many other former delinquents went on to become talented ath-
letes, actors, and musicians. Certain opportunities afforded to them, moreover,
were undoubtedly greater than those of even the most elite boarding schools of
the West. In part because its fame had spread abroad starting in the late 1920s,
well-known scholars, writers, and party intellectuals regularly made appear-
ances at the commune; the satirists Il’f and Petrov wandered the grounds, and
Bukharin gave a lecture in 1935. The music program, which boasted a talented
choir and orchestra, was headed by the conservatory pianist A. G. Dreirin.70
It was the children who impressed visitors the most. One of Bolshevo’s sis-
ter institutions, the Dzerzhinskii commune near Khar′kov, was visited by the
no-nonsense American engineer Zara Witkin in 1932, who found “the best
modern machinery” and premises “noticeably in better condition than many of
the adult factories we had already seen.” But it was spirit of the children, play-
ing Russian martial songs in their band, that really “thrilled us. With flushed,
happy faces, after the impromptu program, the boys and girls crowded around
us, asking innumerable questions.” 71 One of the most lasting successes was not
even apparent while the commune still existed: a striking number of “gradu-
ates” went on to occupy prominent positions as educators, chief engineers,
factory directors, and writers, and as this suggests, some went on to higher
education. There were, as the foreigners’ guides never tired of repeating, no
fences or guards. Among the wide array of Soviet orphanages and “new model
nurseries” in the 1920s there were, Catriona Kelly has found, those that pro-
moted “genuine self-governance.” 72 Was it really the freedom and trust granted
by the secret police that produced what Gorky called a miracle?
Only recently has it become possible to compare the publicized version of
Bolshevo’s success to its internal history. A treasure trove of archival docu-
ments and recollections was gathered by museum officials and local historians,
who in turn collaborated with a handful of former communards who strove
for decades to preserve materials on the institution’s history in the late Soviet
years.73 The materials make clear that the commune’s directors worked out a
G o r k y ’s G u l a g 163
Gorky’s involvement with the Bolshevo commune was, like his interven-
tion at Solovki, decisive. It influenced the course of Soviet pedagogy, marking
another shift from the 1920s to the 1930s—the demise of the experimental
NEP-era enthusiasm for domesticating American progressive pedagogy and
the rise of an overtly discipline-centered orthodoxy centered on the teachings
of Anton Makarenko. It was with Gorky’s close involvement that Makarenko
began his upward rise from the obscure founder of the “Children’s Home for
Morally Defective Children No. 7” in Poltava in 1920—the next year renamed
the Gorky Commune and in 1926 moved to a location near Khar′kov. The com-
mune’s early years were later immortalized in Makarenko’s 1933 Pedagogical
Poem, published in Gorky’s journal with the writer’s aid, encouragement, and
fi nancial assistance. Th is patronage was crucial as Makarenko pursued his tra-
jectory from obscure outsider to the dominant pedagogue of the Stalin period.
A correspondence began between Gorky and Makarenko’s child colonists in
1925, and Gorky eagerly assumed the role of Makarenko’s patron. Returning
to the USSR with a wave of triumphal publicity, the great proletarian writer
toured the colony named after him with Makarenko in July 1928.
Figure 4.3 Maxim Gorky (fi rst row, seated) and Anton Makarenko (standing) at
the Gorky Commune for homeless children. The July 1928 visit, part of Gorky’s
highly publicized Soviet tour marking his return from abroad to support the Stalin
Revolution, was a key moment in the writer’s patronage of the rising pedagogue.
Source: RIA Novosti Photo Library.
G o r k y ’s G u l a g 167
of new technologies in one sense only served to reinforce the message of its
didactic prologue, dramatically read by actor Vasilii Ivanovich Kachalov: the
humane and trusting methods of the labor commune were the Soviet solution
to child homelessness and the re-education of juvenile delinquents in general.
Th is, of course, followed precisely the same principle by which the sites of
socialism were presented to foreign guests.
Bolshevo proved a great asset for the Soviets, but not all visitors were uni-
formly impressed. Foreign visitors’ reactions to Bolshevo follow the patterns
of other sites of communism. As guide reports indicate, fulsome praise and
readiness to generalize were common. George Bernard Shaw, writing in 1932,
had also been taken to Soviet children on a collective farm; he found them “so
appallingly civilized that my fi rst impulse was to denounce them as a parcel of
insufferable litt le Marxian prigs.” Yet, he expressed no doubts that Bolshevo
proved the problem of Russia’s “famous wild children” had been solved and,
with remarkable credulity, claimed that all Soviet penal institutions had
become virtually indistinguishable from farms and factories. As elsewhere,
however, a number of visitors were skeptical or hostile. In the fi rst category,
Gabrielle Duchêne, an anti-fascist member of the French society of friends, had
her suspicions aroused when she “accidentally” met a French-speaking young
communard in exactly the kind of incident reported in showcase prisons.
André Gide, after being regaled by communards about their former crimes,
conversions, and the “excellence of the new regime,” was “oddly” reminded
of the crude and psychologically unsatisfying public testimonials of religious
converts: “I was a sinner; I was unhappy; I did evil; but now I understand; I am
saved; I am happy.”90 Just as preconceptions facilitated pro-Soviet conclusions,
pre-existing suspicions fueled skepticism. One American visitor produced a
“highly unpleasant impression” on his guide when he expressed doubts that
an English-speaking boy was really a member of the commune and that eight-
hour workdays were the norm. Two Australian journalists were described as
“reserved” in their conduct, a sure sign of doubts when compared to the enthu-
siasm expressed by more pro-Soviet visitors.91
Between the early and the mid-1930s, as Bolshevo reached the height of its
international fame for humane rehabilitationism, the flood of favorable foreign
commentary was mobilized for internal Soviet audiences as proof positive of
great, even miraculous leaps forward. Interested questions about Bolshevo
from a high U.S. prison official, forwarded to Soviet Procuror Vyshinskii by the
American Embassy in 1935, suggest just how far Bolshevo’s favorable reputa-
tion had spread.92 Yet, this was precisely the time when a hardening of att itudes
toward juvenile delinquency transformed the relatively lenient Soviet justice
system of the 1920s. Repressive measures against juveniles deemed difficult
to rehabilitate were implemented after the era of forced collectivization and
170 showcasing the great experiment
Colony) and sadly known in connection with Maxim Gorky’s visit to Solovki.”
Likhachev recalled this as a place where children were “saved” in clean, privi-
leged, and highly anomalous conditions.96 In fact, it was during Gorky’s fi rst
visit to Bolshevo, in the company of Iagoda on June 8, 1928, that the idea of the
returning writer’s trip to Solovki appears to have been born. Pogrebinskii, who
became close to Gorky, was one of the Chekisty in Gorky’s entourage when he
traveled to the far north, and one of the purposes of the trip was to select 300
youngsters (and at least one prisoner) for transfer from Solovki to Bolshevo in
1929.97 Thus did Bolshevo sanitize Solovki.
Gorky’s writings on Bolshevo, like his essay on Solovki, hinged on trump-
ing the civilizational norms of the advanced West. In a 1928 newspaper article
on the commune, he wrote that the much-vaunted humanism of the advanced
West had led to such barbarisms as the castration of criminals in the United
States; Lombroso’s theory of the born criminal denied humanity and ulti-
mately justified a kind of class-based genocide by concluding that criminals
needed to be destroyed. By contrast, true humanism (podlinnyi gumanizm) was
to be found in the USSR, in places like Bolshevo. As Daniel Beer has shown,
however, the early Soviet emphasis on criminology and other human sciences
of rehabilitation and the primacy of environment concealed a conflation of
sociological and biological categories. In 1928 and again in Gorky’s notorious
1934 celebration of the marvels of rehabilitation at the forced labor project of
the Belomor Canal, “Gor′kii’s language betrayed the tendency, consolidated
over the previous half century, to read social experience through a biologi-
cal lens. Although they could, and did, repudiate the existence of Lombroso’s
born criminal, early Soviet criminologists in effect saw class consciousness
and class instincts as something that could be . . . transmitted from parents to
offspring.”98 Th is explains why Gorky turned so readily to a dehumanizing
physical description of the Bolshevo communards, replete with the same lan-
guage of eugenics that he condemned in the U.S. context: the children there
were healthy, well-formed (khorosho postroennye), with very few sickly, degen-
erate (degenrativnye) or imbecilic (tupye) faces. By the time of his introduction
to the 1936 Bolshevtsy, a collectively authored, 549-page fictionalized account
of the history of “reforging” of children at the commune, Gorky had turned his
anti-Western sentiment into a total dehumanization of “bourgeois Europe,”
claiming that it was becoming “animalized” and losing even “the remnants of
human nature.”99
It was in the context of children’s labor colonies in his “Around the
Union” cycle that Gorky explicitly justified the practice of building show-
cases. Significantly, he did so as he signaled to his readers that he was
indeed no “famous foreigner” and understood very well that such places
were hardly representative: the Dzerzhinskii commune, sparkling with
172 showcasing the great experiment
cleanliness and fitted with the newest machinery, was “done like a model”
(obraztsovo), “for show” (na pokaz), and its children, brimming with health,
were selected “as if for show” (kak budto na pokaz). Gorky, however, went
on to explain why showcasing was useful, even obligatory: “At this colony
builders of such institutions can learn much.” More than that, “it clearly
was founded in order to show the ideal of what a children’s labor colony
for ‘criminals’ and the ‘socially dangerous’ should be.”100 In other words,
the showcase would play the very same instructive role, bringing life as
it should be closer to reality, that Gorky came to invest in literature and
Soviet cultural production.
In writing his screenplay Criminals, Gorky solicited comments on the text
both from former homeless waifs and from Iagoda. On September 13, 1932,
Izvestiia published a notice that the prominent director Abram Room would
make the fi lm. It was never made.101 However, a different and more obscure
historical trace did result from Gorky’s unrealized script. During prepara-
tory work for the fi lm, Room visited Bolshevo for three days in September
1931, and his team of assistants stayed for seven days. One of Room’s young
assistants—sixteen-year-old Iurii Solonevich, who in 1934 escaped across the
Soviet-Finnish border and published a 1938 memoir in Sofia—talked with
Bolshevo youths and understood their slang.102
Warned by Room to be careful because Bolshevo was “litt le a piece of the
GPU,” Solonevich found a theater in which some of the best groups in the
USSR went on tour, food that was like “heavenly manna,” and goods pur-
chased by the youthful laborers that were only available elsewhere in hard-
currency Torgsin stores frequented by foreigners. Occasionally, Solonevich
wrote with sarcasm, groups with Kodak cameras and binoculars would
appear, observing everything as if they were in a zoo: these were the foreign
notables (znatnye inostrantsy). Solonevich, then only a youth himself, recalled
his conversations with a group of boy communards late at night. In guarded,
Aesopian slang they let him know they had come from a Kostroma isola-
tor for delinquents where conditions and beatings were harsh. The Bolshevo
authorities held the threat of return to those places over their heads: “They
told us: become honest laborers—and you will stay.” Another reforged com-
munard chimed in with his ultimate explanation for his good behavior, also
the ultimate of ironies: “Here we have a kind of Europe” (U nas tut takaia
Evropa).103
Gorky’s death in 1936 and canonization as the most prominent Soviet cul-
tural icon coincided roughly with the demise of Bolshevo and the decline of
the once-experimental concentration camp of Solovki. If the model of the
rehabilitative children’s labor commune was initially used in propaganda
G o r k y ’s G u l a g 173
to justify the hard-labor concentration camp, the vast new upsurge in child
homelessness and criminality in the era of collectivization increasingly led to
a merger of the two forms in the mid-1930s. As a result of a high-level meet-
ing on child waifdom in the Kremlin on June 3, 1934, at which Iagoda pre-
sided, the Gulag OGPU and the Main Administration of the Militia was given
a prominent role in fighting child homelessness. In 1935, in an ironic twist
on Iagoda’s dream a decade earlier that secret-police communes would end
juvenile crime—and the same year that Iagoda trumpeted Bolshevo-style
rehabilitationism as an all-union model during Bolshevo’s tenth-anniversary
jubilee—the secret policeman lobbied Stalin to expand the network of “closed
NKVD institutions for sentenced juvenile delinquents.” He was successful: all
juvenile labor colonies and temporary detention centers were transferred to
the NKVD in that year, putt ing it in charge of a large population of juvenile
offenders—85,000, in Iagoda’s estimate of June 1935. On Iagoda’s orders, in
an action reminiscent of the human catastrophes that came out of the depor-
tation of kulaks as special sett lers, 5,000 homeless children from Moscow
and other cities were transported to Western Siberia outside Tomsk and left
at an empty spot, with only tents for housing, from where, as in the special
sett lements, they engaged in “mass fl ight.” Gladysh has discussed how the
two types of institutions, children’s labor commune and forced-labor camp,
became “mixed up” by 1934–35, years before the camp principle triumphed
during the Great Purges. It was emblematic of this conflation that one solution
to stabilize the Tomsk catastrophe was to send in graduates of Bolshevo.104 In
a move also symbolic of this conflation, in 1935, Makarenko, now decked out
in the uniform of an NKVD division chief, took the post of senior inspector
for education and upbringing in the NKVD department of labor colonies.105 In
a stroke of supreme irony, or cynicism, Bolshevo’s international fame reached
its apogee in the mid-1930s by propagating the notion that virtually any child
could be rehabilitated at the very moment when Soviet policy became most
fi rmly anchored on the assumption that anti-socialist criminality was driven
by those impervious to rehabilitation.
By the time Bolshevo’s secret-police personnel themselves fell victim to the
Great Terror of 1937–38, it became impossible to show any leniency to child
criminals by sending them to the secret-police children’s communes, partic-
ularly Bolshevo, which had been named after Iagoda in 1935 and was widely
seen as the creation of Iagoda’s associate Pogrebinskii. With Pogrebinskii’s
suicide following the arrest of Iagoda, Bolshevo’s fate was sealed. In a mere
three days in 1937, more than 400 people were arrested in the commune,
many of whom were shot. In the course of 1937–38, all the secret-police
labor communes for children were liquidated as educational institutions; the
174 showcasing the great experiment
Bolshevo Commune was turned into a “Plant for the Production of Sporting
Goods Inventory.”106 Around the same time, the Solovki camp lost its status
as a special kind of innovative model. In the late 1930s, the weak and infi rm
were removed from Solovki to other sites of forced labor, many dying in tran-
sit, and Solovki was folded into a vast network of other camps.107 Gorky’s most
lasting contributions turned out to be not institutional, but ideological.
5
The years of Stalin’s Great Break (velikii perelom), 1928–31, were denoted
by the height of two all-out drives that deeply marked the enterprise of
cultural diplomacy. Industrialization required a coercive-utopian mobiliza-
tion to overfulfi ll the plan; a frenzy of ideological infighting that went under
the watchwords of “Bolshevization” and “proletarianization” turned the most
radical and militant fringes of the cultural revolution of the 1920s into the new
mainstream. The two upheavals were sometimes in tension, and affected the
reception of foreigners in different ways. The new prominence of economic
considerations in the service of state building led to the rise of Intourist, which
became the dominant foreign-tourism organization privileging foreigners as a
source of hard currency. At the same time, VOKS struggled to escape from the
stigmas of focusing on bourgeois intellectuals and the realm of culture, fi nding
partial refuge in a campaign mode of militant, sloganeering cultural propa-
ganda defi ned around short-term political goals. VOKS and Intourist became
bitter rivals. But in their differing Great Break approaches, they both displayed
a novel urgency and utilitarianism: the former now emphasized mobilizing the
intelligentsia at home and abroad, the latter extracting resources for the state’s
drive to build socialism.
Th is imperative to harness contacts with foreigners to immediate, short-
term goals was often ineffective, but it reached its height during the Great Break
because of the intense political pressures of the age. The opening phase of the
Stalin era is thus one of the clearest examples of how the crucible of internal
upheaval, and by extension any period of internal, militant turmoil, directly
altered international practices—the reversal of the previous chapter’s boomer-
angs from abroad into domestic sett ings. The insistent need to show results
was closely connected to a shift in the levels of hostility and competition with
the outside world, especially with the bourgeois West, that went hand in hand
with the Stalin leadership’s new restrictions on travel abroad.1 The batt le over
175
176 showcasing the great experiment
priorities played itself out not only in the VOKS-Intourist confl ict, a revealing
yet contained clash, but across the workplaces and construction sites around
the country as tens of thousands of foreign technical specialists and workers
entered Soviet industry during the Five-Year Plan.
At the same time, internal turmoil shaped external agendas only in part.
The Great Break sharpened a new dissonance: the gap drastically widened
in the regime’s continuing courtship of the “Western” intelligentsia, as it was
sometimes called, and the persecution of the domestic non-party intelligentsia
within the USSR.2 As an open assault on the class enemy and political oppo-
nents was the order of the day at home, organizations like VOKS continued to
woo foreigners far more “bourgeois” than surrogate domestic “aliens”—per-
secuted non-party scholars and professionals. Privileging and honoring for-
eign “bourgeois” and intellectual sympathizers remained a protected Soviet
mission.
Figure 5.1 “See USSR,” an undated Intourist poster from circa 1930. The poster
juxtaposes images suggesting Soviet power, the red flag over the Kremlin and the
rising sun, alongside those evoking expanse and exoticism: a reindeer-pulled sled
with a fur-clad driver, along with two camels led by a figure in Central Asian dress,
a Muslim prayer tower, and a palm tree. Source: Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford
University.
180 showcasing the great experiment
Figure 5.2 The back cover of the English-language edition of the VOKS Bulletin
in 1933, advertising subscriptions to the VOKS publication and Intourist “Tours to
Soviet Industrial Centres.” Source: VOKS, no. 3 (1933).
Hard- Cur rency Foreig ners and the Campaig n Mode 181
While criticisms were also translated, among them complaints about high
costs, poor facilities, and restrictions on the movements of tourists, they were
summarily dismissed with the comment: “There are also evaluations by a dif-
ferent category of tourist, which in their content and criticisms represent only
hostile attacks against the USSR. These indictments are so unfounded and
often so rude and false that tourists who have been in the USSR fi nd it nece-
ssary to refute them in foreign newspapers.”15 Intourist employees were thus
encouraged to att ribute foreign clients’ complaints to ideological enmity. Only
criticism from on high, notably the 1936 Central Committee resolution on the
organization’s poor standards of service, could prompt a scramble to engage in
“Bolshevik self-criticism.”16
All the more poignant, then, were the missives of those sympathetic foreign
tourists who wrote Soviet leaders and Intourist’s top brass with constructive
criticisms and helpful hints in order to prevent seemingly minor matters of liv-
ing conditions from interfering with international appreciation of the Soviet
experiment. The American Hermann H. Field, an organizer of a short-lived
summer school for American students in Moscow, wrote in 1934 from “vio-
lently reactionary” Switzerland about issues raised by countless visitors of all
stripes—the effects of the much-despised official exchange rate in preventing
tourists from making the most simple purchases outside of Intourist and hard-
currency Torgsin stores. “Likewise [the tourist] can’t use street cars . . . He is
bound to Intourist and organized group sight seeing . . . Obviously one can’t
get a convincing and accurate idea of a country and people from the seat of a
sight-seeing bus or even from going through factories and museums.” Another
friendly American, in 1934, explained how the “isolation” and “endless irrita-
tion” of visitors was due not to Soviet secrecy but to the prohibitively high cost
of rubles and the inability to fi nd cheap transportation. “One and all foreign-
ers feel a certain . . . sterility in the language used . . . It isn’t sufficient for guides
to dwell upon the ‘Lenin-Marxist ideology,’ words which mean litt le or noth-
ing to the average foreign visitor.” On Savoy Hotel stationery, another tourist,
identified only as B. Jenkins, wrote to the chairman of Intourist about how his
desire to inspect workers’ living conditions remained unfulfi lled: “Most of the
things I desired most to see and acquire information upon have been barred
to me. I wanted to know how the worker was living—did he get enough to eat,
was he adequately clothed.” Jenkins’ concern for the Soviet working class was
matched only by his obsession with Soviet fi lth. He called for a “cleanliness
campaign at once” and helpfully shared his expertise in lavatory fitt ings: “It
would be better to use a pan in which the faeces dropped straight into fair deep
water, thus being hidden and all effluvium being trapped.” The biting conclu-
sion to his fourteen-page letter read, “Intourist . . . exhibits the usual features of
capitalist trading systems.”17 All these letterwriters professed hope that their
Hard- Cur rency Foreig ners and the Campaig n Mode 183
criticisms would help the Soviets win friends abroad; the thrust of each was
to deny the rumors of Potemkin villages current in the West. If tourists were
limited in what they could see, it was due to the system set up by an acquisi-
tive Intourist, not to political concerns. They failed to grasp how, in the his-
tory of Intourist, the economic and the political were less incompatible than
intertwined.
residents were virtually identical to those arranged for valued short-term visi-
tors. For example, foreign workers and specialists selected as shock workers
for their contributions to industry in 1933–34 were rewarded with cost-free
Volga steamboat tours. Th ree trips included a total of 613 foreigners and their
families. Although the places they visited were confronting the aftermath of a
severe famine, the cities along the way were prepared with a special “clean-up
campaign,” and the honored guests were greeted by orchestras. Top local
trade-union officials and unnamed “special people” (likely secret-police cad-
res) were sent to prepare the soil in places such as the city of Engels, where the
“class enemy” was the strongest and might affect interactions with the foreign
shockworkers. Since the foreigners already worked in Soviet industry, they
were to avoid factories and focus on “cultural-everyday achievements” such as
kindergartens, schools, and pioneer camps. However, there were some impor-
tant differences between this tour and the short-term foreign visits. The hon-
ored foreign residents were expected to have an impact on their local Soviet
counterparts by raising the prestige of shock work and furthering the “interna-
tional upbringing” of Soviet workers.28
By 1932, after the height of the influx of foreign specialists had passed, sig-
nificant tensions were readily apparent in official stances toward the Western
experts. On the one hand, the organization of political-enlightenment work
among the foreigners became more efficient only after this point. In the fi rst
all-union conference of foreign specialists in 1932, convened by the External
Relations Commission of the trade unions, an “honored place” was accorded
“foreign comrades” in the construction of socialism. Officials went to great
lengths to speak the language of pure internationalism: “We do not look on
foreign workers and specialists as foreigners.” On the other hand, in an omi-
nous note, the gathered crowd was told that among them in the audience were
foreigners who planned to discredit the Soviets and who had arrived “with the
goal of becoming agents of the world bourgeoisie.”29
At this 1932 conference, the work of the Office of Supply to Foreigners,
Insnab, was cited as evidence of the special commitment to the specialists by
the Party and the state. Indeed, a concerted effort was made to secure privi-
leged living conditions for the foreign specialists, although in the catastrophic
chaos of the time the foreigners also faced shortages. Despite Insnab’s origi-
nal intentions, however, the Torgsin (“trade with foreigners”) stores stock-
ing hard-to-get foodstuffs and luxury items until the end of rationing in 1936
spread on a large scale only after they were opened to Soviet citizens in 1931. In
the midst of famine and acute shortages, citizens who sold valuables or spent
hard currency sent from abroad created assets for the state on a scale so great,
according to Osokina, that it offset the cost of importing foreign equipment for
most of the industrial “giants” of the decade. A measure invented for foreigners
188 showcasing the great experiment
was difficult to maintain. The bulletin, like the materials generated for foreign
publications, covered a wide range of topics within a basic formula of putt ing
both Soviet cultural output and the social-political system in tandem favorable
light. Precisely because the medium was not agitational in form, the tempta-
tion grew to exploit its greater potential to convince. The VOKS press section
increasingly turned to the bulletin for purposes of counter-propaganda.38 The
stakes were raised as VOKS’s external operations increased in size in the late
1920s—its bulletin, distributed in sixty-three countries in English, French,
and German, had a circulation of more than 100,000 by 1929. Counter-
propaganda was supplemented by an emphasis on shrill mobilization, reflect-
ing just how severely the Great Break had destroyed boundaries across the
realms of publishing and education between the conventions of agitprop and
more rarified genres in which restricted or elite audiences could be targeted in
less exhortative forms. 39 Now, the highest priority became attached to mobi-
lizing international contacts for specific campaigns. Approaches and claims
common to propagandistic genres now spread to those previously separated
as elite and “high.” The campaign mode went further than the 1920s counter-
campaigns against émigré and foreign critics, because it barraged all foreign
audiences with publications and letters repeating a limited number of high-
priority themes.
Chief among these was the alarm about hostile capitalist encirclement and
military intervention against the USSR. The 1930 “Industrial Party” show
trial of leading engineers, in which the formerly protected “bourgeois special-
ists” were accused of “wrecking” with the goal of staging a coup d’etat, was
a major inspiration for this anti-interventionist theme. Stalin, taking great
interest in the transcripts of the forced confession of one of the defendants
in the trial concerning a counter-revolutionary conspiracy to aid an invading
Franco-Polish-Romanian army, ordered the material to be made available to
Comintern and to mount a public campaign against military intervention.40
At VOKS, the campaign assumed the highest priority and was extensively pur-
sued through the VOKS bulletin, circular letters, and the societies of friends.
Its goal was to “show foreign public opinion that the danger of intervention
has turned into a direct threat to . . . the very existence of the USSR.”41 In 1931,
this was prioritized as a “shock-work” (udarnaia) campaign, and a special tour
of Moscow was even designed to show foreigners the losses that would accrue
from the upcoming invasion. A tone of shrill exhortation, termed “militant and
politically sharp,” was explicitly advocated for all publications, while a “nar-
rowly informational character” would be shunned.42
The campaign mode, which reached its height in 1930–31, achieved notable
results—though not necessarily among the influential cultural and intellectual
opinion makers abroad whom VOKS aspired to reach, as they were now
Hard- Cur rency Foreig ners and the Campaig n Mode 191
asked to believe that their own countries were on the verge of declaring war on
the Soviet Union. Indeed, the campaign involved an implicit trade-off: it rallied
non-Communists abroad to spring into a full-throated defense of the socialist
homeland in favor of the attempt to bring them gradually closer through the
cultural or professional interests that so often propelled them toward Soviet
contacts. Perhaps the greatest impact of the anti-interventionist campaign
lay in its boomerang effect, for it set important precedents for the conduct of
Soviet cultural diplomacy. First, an inextricable connection between internal
wreckers and capitalist interventionists was being asserted, not only in the
show trial itself, but in propaganda aimed around the world. Th is internation-
alization of the enemy altered the precarious balance between suspicion and
opportunity already present in terms of the place foreigners occupied in Soviet
political culture. Second, defense of the socialist homeland explicitly put the
interests of the Soviet Union above all other considerations, for, as one of the
campaign’s talking points put it, intervention spelled “destruction not just for
the USSR but the future of all humanity.”43
In this supreme value placed on defense of the USSR, one can discern the
direct roots of a Stalinist superiority complex, which had its analogue in the
further reorientation of international communism around Soviet state inter-
ests. By necessity, mobilizing sympathetic foreigners for defense of the USSR
implied recognition of Soviet precedence, but VOKS strategists inspired
by the industrialization drive claimed more. As a 1930 report put it, “Every
foreigner who visits, must inevitably . . . recognize” that economic crisis in
Western Europe and the United States was leading to the imminent “collapse
of bourgeois culture and civilization.”44 The desired effects of these campaigns
as expressed internally in numerous documents at the time were thoroughly
statist: to prompt a segment of public opinion in the West to oppose military
action against the USSR and thus neutralize it in the event of a serious clash.
The coincidence of the “crisis of capitalism” and the drive to construct
socialism emboldened such claims, but if there was still one area in which the
Soviet Union could seemingly compete only in the future tense, it was living
standards and infrastructure. Collectivization led to dire urban food shortages
immediately noticeable to foreign residents and visitors, and to widespread
rumors of rural famine. The end of the NEP’s private trade and the chaotic early
stages of centralized distribution of goods, combined with the priority given
to defense and heavy industries, produced rationing and a severe decrease in
real wages. The manifestations of this severe economic dislocation and radical
drop in standards of living, even if minimized to outside eyes, simply could not
be concealed.45
In this light, the denial of forced-labor charges made by the Trade Unions’
Commission on External Relations in 1931 to foreigners who had visited the
192 showcasing the great experiment
plans. Now that the intelligentsia and leading authorities of NEP were under
assault, these disciplinary sections suddenly withered away, greatly changing
the nature of the organization. 50 In their stead appeared a new willingness to
aggressively mobilize Soviet scholars and cultural figures for constant inter-
national campaigns. Two days before the start of the Industrial Party show
trial, on November 23, 1930, VOKS convened scientists, writers, and artists to
pressure them to sign statements condemning the wreckers (whose guilt was a
foregone conclusion) for use in publicity about the trial abroad. The organizers
of this campaign made scarcely concealed threats to force non-party figures
to sign: “[The Industrial Party trial] gives Soviet scholars and artists another
opportunity to reveal their stance toward Soviet power, on the one hand, and
its enemies, on the other.”51 With the decline of its intelligentsia “sections,”
VOKS was left without a fig leaf for its claim to the status of a non-governmental
organization.
The loud words of the campaign mode concealed much internal disarray.
Officials at VOKS still talked about achieving hegemony for their agency in
the realm of foreign cultural relations, but the stature of the organization was
in decline. While Kameneva had on a regular basis wielded her personal access
to the top leadership, there were complaints that her successor, Petrov, was
overburdened with work on the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. He worked at VOKS
for only two to three hours a day, mostly receiving visiting foreign dignitar-
ies. Important posts remained vacant. To the chagrin of VOKS representatives
abroad, materials were sent from Moscow in an even more haphazard fashion
than before, with litt le regard to the differences among the receiving coun-
tries. The rise of Intourist, as discussed earlier, undercut VOKS’s importance
and quickly put it in a dependent position in terms of translators, guides, and
hotels, so much so that in 1931, the VOKS representative in Leningrad pro-
posed a merger with its bitter rival in his city. To the alarm and outrage of the
VOKS “shock workers” planning their Industrial Party campaign, their agency
was denied tickets to attend the show trial, a rejection they rightly took as a
sign of the institution’s diminished authority.52
The combination of chaos and diminished stature for the cultural relations
society in the new era made it an easier target for ominous accusations about
security breaches as suspiciousness about ties with the outside world became
a distinctly more prominent strand of the political culture. New measures
attempted to limit interactions with foreign visitors. In 1931, the staff was
charged with “uncritical, overtly friendly socializing” with foreigners and for
lax handling of packages from abroad. Both behaviors were depicted as aid-
ing hostile intelligence organs, charges that would resurface during the Great
Terror. It was around this time, as well, that both official and less scripted
statements began to advertise protection from pernicious capitalist intrusions
194 showcasing the great experiment
(rather than import of the most useful parts of advanced countries’ science
and culture) as the main part of the organization’s mission. VOKS would be an
“organ fi ltering and controlling” all “alien cultural influences” emanating from
abroad. 53 The Great Break heightened the dangers attached to work with for-
eigners—even if during this period the contagion was defi ned in class terms,
as proximity not to foreigners per se but to the Western intelligentsia and the
bourgeoisie.
At the same time, three momentous developments—the Great Depression,
the rise of fascism, and the Five-Year Plan’s drive to build socialism—ushered
in a new age of Western fascination with the Soviet experiment. Leading
fellow-travelers, such as Romain Rolland and André Gide, who had earlier
remained aloof, now sealed their friendship with the Soviet Union, and the
practice of lavishly receiving and celebrating foreign friends such as Bernard
Shaw commenced. A constituent part of the post-iconoclastic phase of Soviet
culture after 1931, as Katerina Clark’s work suggests, was the party intellec-
tuals’ dream to make Moscow into the symbolic and organizational cultural
center on an international scale. At a time when Soviet culture under the sign
of Socialist Realism paradoxically sought to defi ne itself as the culmination of
a great global or European tradition, these figures were thus poised to make
the shift from traveling to far-off construction sites and industrial giants dur-
ing the Plan years to fl itt ing around European capitals during the era of anti-
fascist culture. 54 From the outset, Stalinism incorporated variations of two
competing and well-entrenched ideological codes: one playing up the dangers
and hostility of the West and, more broadly the outside world, and the other
seeking out and seizing the opportunities raised by international perceptions
of the revolution’s success. The agenda set during the Great Break to “catch up
and overtake” implied not only repudiation but also an embrace.
At the same time, the ubiquitous watchword of “catching up and overtaking”
the capitalist West led directly to more crudely adversarial and competitive
understandings of cultural exchange. The productionist mode of the Five-Year
Plan deeply affected the language and practices of Soviet culture in this period.
An applied and utilitarian calculus was applied to education, scholarship, and
cultural fields; in addition to quotas and planning, brigades, shock-work, and
the “intensification of class struggle” permeated the cultural front. The organs
of international cultural relations, fully enmeshed in the pressure-cooker of
the Soviet system, discussed and formulated their goals within the framework
of Great Break culture. A scant two weeks after Kameneva left VOKS, on July
17, 1929, the new director, Fedor Petrov, revealed his balance-sheet approach
to the “interaction of cultures.” Time and again, he pushed a defensive Levit-
Liven, his analyst (referent) on Central Europe, to admit not only weak Soviet
influence but also scientific and cultural dependency on Germany:
Hard- Cur rency Foreig ners and the Campaig n Mode 195
Striking here is not Levit’s defensive listing of Soviet areas of strength but
the way he accepted Petrov’s premise that cultural exchange was a struggle for
hegemony between “us” and “them” that could be quantified, like the balance of
imports and exports and the possession of assets such as Piscator.56 Despite the
implication behind Petrov’s leading line of questioning, it was unlikely that any-
thing VOKS did could greatly alter the balance of cultural-scientific power he
perceived. The strategy session at VOKS suggests the extent to which the Great
Break drive to “overtake” capitalist competitors could be interpreted as no less a
zero-sum cultural competition than a drive to overfulfill industrial outputs.
Even so, while Great Break wrecked one after another of the NEP era’s frag-
ile compromises, Lenin’s old assumption that the advanced and cultured West
had much to teach the land of socialism remained prominent. As Petrov’s lead-
ing questions suggest, party leaders and intellectuals often still took Western
superiority for granted in areas beyond the most easily acknowledged realms
of technology, industrial efficiency, and (to a lesser degree) science. To give one
example, a short-lived VOKS program to promote foreign-language study was
described as part of a mission of “informing workers of the cultural achieve-
ments of the West.” Other programmatic statements in the same era reiterated
the Leninist nostrum of adopting everything “useful” from “West-European
scientific-cultural thought.”57 The ideological relationship with the West
remained profoundly contradictory. Soviet avant-gardists and party intel-
lectuals in this period eagerly cooperated along transnational networks—or
196 showcasing the great experiment
became trendsetters for Western writers and artists transfi xed by Soviet cul-
ture in Berlin, Paris, Prague, and elsewhere—even as condemnations of cos-
mopolitans and “formalists” fi rst appeared around 1930. 58
Less than a decade before the Great Terror and two before the anti-cos-
mopolitanism of the Zhdanov period, the identification of foreignness with
domestic counter-revolution remained far from complete. Nonetheless, the
political logic that came to the fore during the Stalin era—to tie any and all
opposition in the crusade to achieve socialism to a unified conspiracy of exter-
nal and internal foes—was embedded in these landmark events of the Stalin
period’s incipient phase.
Figure 5.3 A 1932 cover from the English-language edition of the VOKS Bulletin
showing Maxim Gorky arriving in Moscow. Note the error in the English caption.
Source: VOKS, no. 3–4 (1932).
much more on providing analysis of cultural and intellectual life in key coun-
tries abroad. Th is newly important endeavor formed part of a new politics on
international information that took shape in the 1920s and shifted signifi-
cantly after the onset of the Stalin period. VOKS took part in a much larger
system of secret information on international affairs that helped shape the
Hard- Cur rency Foreig ners and the Campaig n Mode 201
worldview of the top Soviet elites and was different in form and content from
the triumphal pomposity of the press. The shape and tone of the new system of
information on the outside world were fi rmed up starting in the mid-1920s by
Stalin’s secret chancellery, the Central Committee’s Information Bureau, and,
after 1932, Karl Radek’s Bureau of International Information. Secret reports
and access to information on the outside world were rationed according to a
hierarchical, need-to-know basis and surrounded by a special degree of con-
spiracy; this was tightly linked to operational practice, as special reports and
channels of information were born amid the antagonisms of the “dual policy”
separating the Comintern’s world revolution and the conventional diplomacy
of Foreign Affairs.69
However, in spite of all the secrecy and centralization that surrounded the
conveyance of privileged information—or rather, in part because of it—the
international reports gave a distorted picture of the outside world. VOKS took
its place in the broader system with its brief to report on cultural developments
abroad, expanding its referentura, or network of country analysts. The refer-
ent, or analyst, was defi ned in 1929 as a “responsible director” (otvetstvennyi
rukovoditel’) charged with following the cultural life of an assigned country,
searching for individuals and organizations to become “transmission belts” of
Soviet cultural influence. In 1931, the number of analysts was increased from
six to eight for the Central European sector, from four to seven for the Anglo-
American sector, and from three to six in the Romance sector, for a total of
twenty-one referenty.70 The sectors produced reports, biweekly in 1933, with
overviews of the foreign press. The rubrics are revealing of the way analysts
meshed their surveys with VOKS’s institutional goals: they usually summa-
rized the overall position of the “intelligentsia” or “intelligentsia groups” for
each country, tracked visitors or figures with Soviet ties for statements about
the USSR in the press, monitored the friendship societies and their publica-
tions; and, most important, highlighted “campaigns for and against the USSR,”
as though the Western press was dominated, like the Soviet, by “campaigns.”
Clearly, the purpose behind these practices was operational: to help sort
friends from enemies and track those with whom VOKS and other Soviet insti-
tutions previously had or potentially would have dealings. One result, however,
was to convey a black-and-white world in which all anti-Soviet statements were
lies and all praise was the objective truth. At the height of starvation in rural
parts of the country in late winter 1932, one summary referred to reports of
famine as the favorite invention of right-wing intellectual circles.71 Potentially
even more important than the proliferation of taboo topics, however, was
that intellectual and cultural life in the countries under examination was not
explored for its own dynamics within a national context but picked over for
the statements it produced for and against the Soviet system. Unwitt ingly, the
202 showcasing the great experiment
narrowly utilitarian brief of the analysts helped create a mirage, a world focused
solely on the question of whether to greet or condemn Soviet communism.
Diagrams at an Exhibition
Nothing demonstrates more clearly how plans for Soviet participation in cul-
tural events abroad were tied up in an explicit calculation of political rewards
than exhibitions and musical, theatrical, and other artistic tours. Because these
demanded more planning and hard currency than other forms of travel, they
generated concrete strategizing about the contents and results. Within the
Soviet system, utilitarian political justification was king, even if the reason-
ing was sometimes far-fetched. When Soviet participation in an international
musical exhibition in Frankfurt was pitched to Molotov in 1927, it was noted
that the city was located not far from the zone that had experienced occupa-
tion by the Entente. Hence, a demonstration of peaceful Soviet cultural work
would become a “vivid counterpoint to the forms of influence of the Entente.”
Only 14,000 rubles were needed. On many occasions, state economic and
foreign-policy goals served as primary justifications, but for events with the
potential to att ract large audiences (such as exhibitions) the political benefits
of touting the achievements of Soviet socialism were never far behind. When
Leonid Krasin, commissar of foreign trade, and Kameneva advocated to the
Politburo a significant outlay of at least 500,000 rubles for a Soviet pavilion
in the Philadelphia World’s Fair of 1926, it was called a way of putt ing on an
exhibit “worthy of a ‘great power,’ ” as well as a means of pursuing the “excep-
tional importance which we att ribute to the development of our economic
relations with the USA.” Upstaging or countering the “White emigration,” a
major theme of the early 1920s, was still effective as late as 1936, when VOKS
director Arosev argued for approving Soviet participation in a staging of
Eugene Onegin at the National Theater in Prague in order to prevent émigré
participation.72
Exhibitions presented Soviet organizers and artists with the dilemma of
balancing exhibits with didactic texts and frequently mountainous statistics.
At the Soviet press pavilion in Cologne in 1928, VOKS supplied the materi-
als, and El Lissitzky headed a team of sixty artists in implementing the design.
The results, which had so impressed Gorky, were strengthened by the deci-
sion to subordinate text to the visual components.73 Yet even the Soviet pavil-
ion at the World Fair in Paris in 1937, which had the benefit of lavish funding
and a “dynamic unity” between the architectural design of Boris Iofan and
the sculptures of Vera Mukhina, was nonetheless marked by the same didactic
urge to barrage the viewer with texts, facts, and figures that dominated the
Hard- Cur rency Foreig ners and the Campaig n Mode 203
far more common, low-cost exhibits sent abroad. “Too many diagrams, tables,
and photographs,” Soviet ambassador to London Ivan Maiskii recorded in his
diary after visiting the Paris pavillion, “and too few striking and convincing
objects.” 74
International fairs and competitions, which involved architectural compo-
nents and major expenditures, were a rarity in comparison to the small-form
Soviet exhibition that VOKS and others helped develop for export in the
1920s. Sometimes called the “portable” (portativnyi) exhibit, this was an inex-
pensive combination of objects, images, and texts with either a specific cul-
tural-political focus or highlighting a combination of artifacts and features of
the Soviet Union. Posters, models, arts, and crafts were frequently combined
with a montage of written texts, photographs, statistics, and diagrams. In these
portable presentations, which VOKS regularly sent to the friendship societies,
exhibited objects (eksponaty) ran the gamut from china, textiles, Palekh boxes,
and handsomely published books, to theatrical posters, children’s drawings,
and various kinds of art, but they were often few in number and overwhelmed
by text.
After all, text was cheap—and could easily be altered to reflect current cam-
paigns. The dual requirement of political and fi nancial authorization wreaked
havoc with advance preparation. For example, the extensive celebrations of
the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution were marked by wide dis-
semination of exhibitions dominated by diagrams, posters, and photographs
for consumption in four foreign languages. These were prepared with frenetic
storming when funding was approved by the Central Committee only two
months in advance. Hasty preparation and missed deadlines were the norm
rather than the exception given the hierarchical system of political and fi nan-
cial control over international events. As in other areas, the levels of political
approval became even more stringent and numerous in the 1930s, often seri-
ously impeding preparations. In the 1920s, exhibitions followed the standard
formula of contrasting the Soviet present with the “oppressive heritage of tsar-
ist Russia,” in the words of one exhibit of books for the blind that touted the
advantages of being sightless in the USSR. In a significant shift, this orthodoxy
was reversed in Pushkin jubilee exhibitions of 1936–37, which paired Russian
and Soviet achievements together.75
Tilting the balance toward didactic texts, as opposed to exhibited objects,
saved money and was easier to organize, but it was also an attempt to overde-
termine audience response. The result, judging by reports, could be deadening
and, even so, viewers’ reactions were sometimes diametrically opposed to the
intent. Polovtsevaia, the VOKS representative in London, reported in 1925
with obvious pride on the success of a Soviet poster exhibition at the Society
for Cultural Relations: “Directly in front of the entrance, on a bright blue
204 showcasing the great experiment
background, the red color of our symbols stood in sharp relief.” She described
the posters as focusing on Lenin, cooperatives, labor, and health, but the hos-
tile review in the Westminster Gazette sent to Moscow with other clippings sin-
gled out the “pathetic” hygiene posters, which only proved that Russians were
“often ignorant of the elementary laws of hygiene.” 76 In 1928, a Soviet diplomat
stationed in the United States wrote a pointed critique to VOKS on no less
than thirty exhibits VOKS had sent to the United States involving achieve-
ments in various areas of industry, science, and art. His catalogue of grievances
was a long one: items sent to be put on exhibit were often not the best exam-
ples available in the USSR, they were eclectically thrown together, and they
played second fiddle to diagrams, statistics, maps, and other written materials.
The texts were, as elsewhere, spoiled by poor translations into English; boxes
stamped only with the Russian word “ostorozhno” (handle with care) had no
translation at all and arrived with broken contents. Achievements were touted
in the texts but not demonstrated in the objects, since top-quality Soviet edi-
tions of books and other Soviet cultural products capable of competing with
the best of the West were in short supply. “Please do not get angry at me, com-
rades,” the diplomat wrote back apologetically to VOKS after his criticisms,
“for my evaluation of the items you have sent for exhibit.”77
The most ambitious predictions about influencing audiences were reserved
for large international events, because impressive results were a sine qua non
in the game of securing high-level approval. In the case of Fascist Italy, major
international competitions, such as the exhibitions in Venice and Monza
(Milan) in 1930, were invested with even more significance since, as VOKS
director Petrov in 1930 assured A.I. Ugarov at the OGPU, they were among
the only possible demonstration of Soviet achievements VOKS could organize
in that country. Explicit political themes were intertwined with cultural exhi-
bitions in the four halls in Monza, later sent to Amsterdam, including one on
the Five-Year Plan and collectivization of agriculture, one on cultural life, a
kino-gorod devoted to fi lm, and, winner of a grand prix, an exposition of graphic
arts and the Soviet book. Soviet organizers tended to be more than optimistic
about audience response. The Seventeenth Venice Exhibition of fi ne arts of the
USSR, for which Petrov requested from the director of the Tret´iakov Gallery
ten paintings of high quality that would demonstrate contemporary Soviet
“reality,” is a good example. Petrov expressed confidence that the intended
messages would be received, for in keeping with all such events at which Soviet
representatives were allowed to be present, great emphasis was placed on the
possibility of directly explaining meaning to the viewing public to assure, as he
put it, the correct political and cultural-enlightenment effect. In this case, the
sole figure deemed suitable and available was the art historian Viktor Lazarev,
a non-communist yet trusted museum official who knew Italian well. Soviet
Hard- Cur rency Foreig ners and the Campaig n Mode 205
participation and Lazarev’s travel were fully supported by all the relevant party-
state authorities, Petrov reported, since the leadership believed this to be of
“great political significance.” 78
Even this incautious optimism could not make the political goals predicted
for exhibitions more coherent, however. Although top-level political approval
for the Italian exhibitions of 1930 was eased by the upturn in Italo-Soviet rela-
tions of the same year, organizers continued to make sweeping and openly
contradictory promises about their effects on Italian viewers. At one point,
Petrov predicted that a walk through the Soviet hallways would do nothing
less than immunize Italian public opinion (obshchestvennost´) from “many of
the attacks of the fascists” on the Soviet Union. Simultaneously, a top-level
VOKS planning document justifiably noted an “indubitable interest” on the
part of Fascist leaders themselves for the Soviet system, “in spite of the deep
and insurmountable contradictions [of Fascism] with the proletarian dictator-
ship.” Furthermore, the VOKS representative in Italy noted that no less than
half of the Italian intellectual world was opposed to Fascism (nastroen anti-
fashistski), leading Petrov at another point to predict that the Soviets could
stoke the fi res of dissent.79 In other words, the same exhibitions were at once
intended to seduce Fascist ideologues attracted to the Soviet Union, stimulate
intellectual opposition to Fascism, and convince the Italian public to reject
Fascist criticisms of communism. All the while, specifics on how the presenta-
tion would target different foreign audiences were utterly lacking.
The Soviet conventions for justifying and planning exhibitions could never
acknowledge that the messages foreign audiences took away could defy all
expectations. Among the reviews translated into Russian and sent to Moscow
was a favorable, even gushing assessment from Il Popolo di Roma. It is unlikely
that this particular piece was intended as a diplomatic-political signal to the
Soviets, since it expressed gratified surprise to discover the vast influence of
“our” Fascist iconography on the Soviet system. Th is was evident in images
of marching rows of youngsters with raised hands, Lenin amid a great crowd
just like “our Duce,” and pictures of leaders similar to Fascists in every respect
except for the color red and the hammer and sickle. “One must marvel,” it con-
cluded, “at the wisdom with which the ideals and practical activity of the Red
Republic are displayed.”80
In exhibitions, as in printed material sent abroad, the articulation and pursuit
of conspiratorial strategies and political results was matched by cultural mis-
understandings, spott y knowledge of specific national contexts, and bureau-
cratic bungling that reached new heights in the midst of the Great Break. The
“achievements” of a well-honed conspiratorial instrumentalism—the practice
of judging everything in terms of a pro- or anti-Soviet bottom line—led to an
acute myopia in analyzing and influencing Western public opinion.
206 showcasing the great experiment
207
208 showcasing the great experiment
overcame that inherent dichotomy, they were all the more fascinated by the
Bolshevik revolutionary intelligentsia and Stalin as a kind of intellectual in
power.
The term fellow-traveler was not what the Soviets called sympathetic for-
eign intellectuals, nor was it a term the intellectuals applied to themselves. It
was a translation of the Russian poputchik, an old Russian Social Democratic
term that Trotsky applied pejoratively in 1923 to non-proletarian, non-party
literary figures who cooperated with the Soviet regime.2 The term the Soviets
used at the time for the leading foreign intellectual sympathizers was “friends
of the Soviet Union,” a label derived from the friendship societies and the 1927
Congress of Friends. Th is was a standard term applied in the Soviet press, in
publications about foreign intellectuals, and in public receptions of sympa-
thetic figures. Like Trotsky’s poputchiki, almost all of the most celebrated for-
eign “friends” were literary figures, which can be att ributed to their perceived
influence as makers of public opinion—a view itself connected to the suprem-
acy of the written word in Stalinist ideology and the paradigmatic nature of
literature in Stalinist culture. It is significant that the same discourse of friend-
ship used in public to trumpet foreign admiration was also standard fare in
internal party-state discussions of foreign figures, especially when it came to
allocation of resources and organized hospitality. 3
The support provided to foreign “friends”—in return for loyalty—was
simultaneously becoming part of the party-state’s modus operandi for treat-
ing its own domestic intelligentsia, which, as Soviet history progressed, gained
increasingly lavish material conditions. In a social-economic system in which
patron-client relations were often put in personalistic language, arguments
over providing Soviet funds and favors for foreign figures were made in terms
of their status as friends. The status that foreign sympathizers assumed was,
in this sense, an extension of the Soviet way of treating its own most valued
intellectuals.
There is ample evidence, moreover, that foreign intellectuals internalized
the concept of “friends of the Soviet Union” themselves. Fellow-travelers had
to be willful or blind not to be aware of the increasingly formalized rules of the
game that the Soviets set for friendship: public defense and praise of the Soviet
Union. Some reservations and criticisms had to be allowed, because even the
most pro-Soviet commentators would lack credibility otherwise. Perhaps
the most distinguished European intellectual friend to consistently defend
Stalinism in public—and remain silent during the Purges—was Romain
Rolland. Th is frail, high-minded idealist displayed full understanding of the
terms of friendship, pledging loyalty and public support in return for the sta-
tus. In such cases, friendship was virtually a contractual relationship that both
sides understood.
S t a l i n a n d t h e F e l l o w -Tra v e l e r s R e v i s i t e d 209
What, then, did fellow-travelers hope to gain from this kind of relationship?
First, as case studies of the visits and Soviet connections of prominent foreign
friends show, admiration for Bolshevik theoreticians as “men of action” was
tied to many of the greatest friends’ own illusory aspirations for influence over
the Soviet experiment. Second, most developed crucial, personal relationships
with those Soviet mediators—party intellectuals with significant international
experience, who in this chapter are referred to by the deliberately paradoxical
name Stalinist Westernizers—who courted, handled, pressured, and, yet, also
frequently admired the Western intellectuals as cultural giants. Th ird, com-
munism was a flexible myth, and cultural diplomacy pushed on many sides of
it, so that no single feature att racted intellectual sympathizers uniformly or
exclusively; at the same time, each figure often had a main or most cherished
hope invested in the Soviet system. Finally, the ideas and beliefs that allowed
admirers to justify odious features of the Stalin system assumed meaning in a
context defi ned by a concrete, quasi-official friendship, proffered and accepted
during visits and maintained by personal relationships. Many of the leading
twentieth-century intellectuals who became fellow-travelers publicly heaped
praise on Soviet socialism as a superior society in part because they harbored
the fantasy that through those connections they could claim a measure of
power over it.
Stalinist Fabians
Perhaps no test case is as illuminating for interpreting the multiplicity of att rac-
tions of Stalinism for Western intellectuals than the leading Fabian socialists
in Britain. In the European country with the strongest liberal tradition and the
weakest Communist Party, the Fabians had elaborated a version of socialism
that was gradualist, eschewed violent revolution, and enshrined the virtues
of civil liberties and parliamentary democracy. Its leaders were hardly alien-
ated from their own society, contra theories of Sovietophilia as the outlet of
alienated intellectuals; rationalist and pragmatic, rather than quasi-religious
believers, they were all establishment figures who exerted great influence on
the Labour Party. How was it then that the former “Fabian Triumvirate” of
George Bernard Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, leading members of the
Fabian Society since its founding in 1884, found their place among the most
prominent intellectual supporters of Stalin and Stalinism in the 1930s?
The Great Depression, mixing the proximity of bread lines with the far-off
images of Soviet success in the fi rst Five-Year Plan, certainly made them more
pro-Soviet; in this sense, the Depression was for them like the other two great
“push” factors propelling intellectuals toward the Soviet Union in the 1930s,
210 showcasing the great experiment
the rise of fascism and the Popular Front. Other prominent intellectuals who
had exhibited litt le interest in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, such as Gide and
Rolland, became “friends” of the Soviet Union during precisely this period.
Shaw and the Webbs, who fi rst visited the Soviet Union in 1931 and 1932, were
also party to the “pull” factors of Soviet outreach, including the efforts of key
intermediaries in recruiting each of them as eminent foreign visitors. They
were, however, individually influenced by features of the Soviet system that
appealed to their differing intellectual make-ups. Shaw, who also expressed
sympathy for fascism, was particularly drawn by the cult of the leader; Sidney
Webb, the consummate civil servant, lauded the interventionist machinery of
the Soviet party-state; Beatrice Webb, the old cooperative-movement theorist,
longed for equality and justice. The myth of communism was flexible indeed;
among the Fabians alone, motivations drawing them toward friendship were
multiple and varied. At the same time, there were commonalities: all were
inclined toward elitism and social engineering, which helped Shaw and the
Webbs to set aside other Fabian principles when they looked East. They were
fascinated by Bolshevik men of action and strangely preoccupied with their
imagined influence over the revolutionary in the Kremlin.
The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, the world-renowned contrar-
ian with the rapier wit, was the propagandist and performer of Fabianism,
while Beatrice Webb was the scholar and Sidney the draft sman of political
programs. As Shaw himself put it in a tone of “comic mock-modesty,” the
Webbs were the brains, he was the megaphone. While it is often noted that
he was enamored of fascism and eugenics and praised Stalin-era communism
to the skies, Shaw has also been dismissed as being merely an exuberant pro-
vocateur, out to shock the bourgeoisie. Yet, shock was his preferred method
of political discourse; after all, he was one of the most “famous and prolific”
political intellectuals of the age.4 Few would take the words spoken by charac-
ters in Shaw’s plays literally as his own views, but they can certainly be inter-
preted to delineate his primary concerns; the same is true for his performative
political pronouncements.
Before he was a Fabian, Shaw was a revolutionary Marxist; he read the fi rst
volume of Kapital in the British Museum in 1882, when it was available only in
French, and, he recalled, had “a complete conversion.” It was as a young social-
ist orator that he originated his trademark method of provocation through
“shock tactics.” The publicist of parliamentary socialism thus began a lifelong
conversation with Marx that periodically “awakened in him un-Fabian revolu-
tionary tendencies that persisted to the end of his life.”5 After 1917, these inter-
nal struggles and periodic fl irtations with violent revolution were transposed
from Marx to Lenin and then to the Stalinist “revolution from above.” He rec-
onciled his own political credo with the Soviet order in two basic ways. First,
S t a l i n a n d t h e F e l l o w -Tra v e l e r s R e v i s i t e d 211
With the “human material” they had to work with, the Soviets could
hardly go wrong; Shaw’s ten-day visit to the Soviet Union in 1931 has to be
considered one of the greatest of many success stories in the history of the
Soviet reception of foreign intellectuals. Indeed, the triumph began before
the trip even started, when the Soviets lured the world-famous writer to
celebrate his seventy-fi ft h birthday in Moscow in the great hall of columns
in the House of Trade Unions, the old nobles’ club that was later the site
of the show trials. One source credits Ivy Litvinov, the English wife of the
commissar of foreign affairs, as a prime mover in persuading Shaw to visit,
but members of VOKS’s Society of Friends had also been pursuing Shaw as
the centerpiece of their efforts to send sympathetic visitors for more than a
year before the fi nal arrangements were made.11 While Shaw had expressed
a preference for informal meetings rather than a guided tour, the carefully
fi xed itinerary—a visit to the Bolshevo commune led by Litvinov himself,
a showing of Elektrozavod, appearances at a workers’ literary circle and
the theater, and audiences with Gorky, Stanislavskii, and Krupskaia, not to
mention Stalin—went off without a hitch.12
It was a classic case of superficial experiences confi rming a visitor’s predis-
positions, themselves forged in direct anticipation of ideological batt les to be
fought back home.
Figure 6.1 George Bernard Shaw (second from left) at a luncheon in a garden at the
Lenin Children’s Commune, Kirsanovskii district, Tambov region, August 15, 1931.
Making light of the notion that there was hunger or starvation in the Soviet Union, the
world-renowned playwright started to refer to himself as a Fabian communist after his
visit. Source: RIA Novosti Photo Library.
S t a l i n a n d t h e F e l l o w -Tra v e l e r s R e v i s i t e d 213
The most the Soviets had to fear was Shaw’s acerbic wit, although his irrev-
erent patter of jokes was sometimes incomprehensible to his audience. His
choice of an aristocratic entourage, including his outspoken confidante, the
Conservative Member of Parliament Lady Nancy Astor, can almost certainly
be understood as one expression of this impishness, although Lady Astor’s sup-
port for town planning, a massive housing program, and state health care, and
Waldorf Astor’s enthusiasm for social engineering, demonstrated that there
were bridges across their political divide. “Never in my life have I enjoyed a
journey so much,” Shaw wrote on August 13, 1931, eleven days after his return,
in a personal letter to a friend, Molly Tompkins. “You would have been dis-
gusted at my reception as a Grand Old Man of Socialism, my smilings and
wavings . . . but it made things very smooth for us all.” Indeed, many of Shaw’s
letters about the USSR from the period of his visit were primarily concerned
with creature comforts.13
One time that Shaw did appear genuinely moved was at the Lenin mau-
soleum, where he asked to be taken immediately after his arrival in Moscow.
According to the account of a traveling companion, “Perhaps no foreigner ever
lingered so long looking at the figure of the dead Lenin.” An argument flared
up between Lady Astor, who tried to discredit Lenin by calling him an “aris-
tocrat,” and Shaw, who insisted that he was a “pure intellectual type.”14 Shaw’s
most emotional episode of the visit was prompted by identification of the cre-
ator of the Soviet system as an intellectual like himself.
To his Soviet hosts, Shaw was concerned precisely with establishing him-
self as the grand old man of socialism who had always been a defender of the
Bolshevik Revolution and who had known and corresponded with Lenin. The
transcript of Shaw’s speech on June 26, 1931, suggests a visitor eager to give his
hosts more than they could have hoped. Shaw himself loudly asserted Soviet
superiority: “The English people ought to be ashamed of themselves” for not
having made a great revolution; “all the Western nations should feel that feel-
ing of shame . . . [it is] imperative for the Western countries to follow your foot-
steps.” In a time of impending famine and mass hardship, Shaw mocked his
“weeping relatives” back home who “brought large baskets of food, imploring
us not to risk our life, etc.”15
The VOKS-sponsored birthday celebration at which Shaw made this
speech was one of the fi rst big Stalin-era public celebrations of a Western intel-
lectual in the USSR, and, as such, had the function not merely of cementing
Shaw’s friendship but also of introducing Shaw to Soviet audiences. Featuring
an extensive musical program ranging from a peasant choir to artists from
the Bolshoi, the evening was punctuated by tributes to Shaw as “friend.”
Lunacharskii, the keynote speaker, accentuated Shaw’s literary greatness
with comparisons to Jonathan Swift and Saltykov-Shchedrin but took care
214 showcasing the great experiment
to call “the great Irishman” to “our side of the barricades.” At the same time,
Lunacharskii had the delicate task of criticizing Shaw’s Fabian socialism—
“slow, comfortable . . . peaceful . . . very cultured and very subtle, but nonetheless
pett y-bourgeois.” In an implicit assertion of superiority over the sympathetic
foreigner, Lunacharskii called European writers to embark upon the proletar-
ian trail forged by Soviet culture.16
Shaw accepted Lunacharskii’s call with great fanfare, as indeed he had
already decided to do. He was not one of those many visitors who said one
thing inside the country and another at home; in his case, there was no need
for self-censorship. Substantively, his remarks to Soviets during his visit were
identical to the high-profi le press and radio appearances upon his return:
assertions of Western backwardness vis-à-vis the USSR, along with rebut-
tals to international charges of famine, forced labor, Potemkin villages, and
lack of Soviet democracy, which were then publicized to Soviet audiences in
Pravda on October 6, 1931. From Prague, Arosev wrote Stalin, “The visit to
us by Bernard Shaw literally shook the minds of the miserable intelligentsia
here. Their best . . . representative turned out to be the messenger of the USSR’s
Figure 6.2 Gala ceremony to mark the seventy-fi ft h birthday of George Bernard Shaw
at the Hall of Columns in the House of Unions in Moscow, July 26, 1931. The VOKS-
sponsored gathering was one of the fi rst big Stalin-era public celebrations of a Western
“friend of the Soviet Union,” an important component of Stalinist culture. Source: RIA
Novosti Photo Library.
S t a l i n a n d t h e F e l l o w -Tra v e l e r s R e v i s i t e d 215
wishes.”17 The sense of triumph and mastery was clearly something Arosev
thought Stalin wanted to hear.
Shaw had met and even exceeded the conditions for becoming a great Soviet
“friend.” His visit marked a “significant shift in Shaw’s att itude toward the
Russian Revolution,” for in the early 1930s, the playwright pursued his theme
of Fabian Stalinism and his most explicit justifications of Soviet political vio-
lence. For Soviet cultural diplomats, Shaw’s visit served for years afterward
as one of the best examples of how a visit to the land of socialist construc-
tion favorably worked on a famous Western intellectual. The literary critic
Sergei Dinamov, writing in 1933, put Shaw in a pantheon including Dreiser
and Rolland, repeating the dualistic script—great praise laced with muted
criticism for not being completely communist—that Lunacharskii had already
fashioned. Predictably, Dinamov emphasized that Shaw was still “attempting
to understand” the USSR and “still has much to overcome.” An official eval-
uation in a 1933 translation of Shaw’s works referred to the “great break” in
Shaw’s consciousness after his visit, which allowed him to put aside his intel-
ligentsia waverings and join the best—the most pro-Soviet—representatives
of the Left intelligentsia of the West. Although he spoke with greater erudition
than his successors, Lunacharskii, at the time of the visit, had articulated the
basic ideological framework in which Shaw and other non-communist friends
were presented in the Soviet Union for years to come.18
The two other most important figures in the Fabian Society, Sidney and
Beatrice Webb, were joint authors of one of the most monumental and notori-
ously uncritical descriptions of Stalin’s Soviet Union ever penned, their two-
volume 1935 Soviet Communism: A New Civilization. These two intellectuals
from the same country, the same political trend, and even the same family
were motivated quite differently in their sympathies for the Stalinist USSR,
and they thus reacted differently, if one judges from Beatrice Webb’s remark-
able diary, as they observed the tumultuous events of the 1930s. Sidney, the
social engineer, was fascinated by the top-down machinery of state in the
service of socialism; he was won over by the blueprints of the Soviet planned
economy. As VOKS’s fi le on Sidney noted in 1934, the draft of the Webbs’ book
was originally called “The Constitution of Soviet Communism”—a title that
recalled their 1920 piece of imaginative social engineering, A Constitution for
the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain. While Shaw loudly christened
Stalin a Fabian, the Webbs, far more discreetly but in no less personal a fash-
ion, portrayed the Soviet system as the fulfi llment in practice of their own
earlier conception of a democratic, cooperative society. Only this can explain
their 1935 book’s emphasis on Stalinism as the apogee of consumer coopera-
tion and “community consumption.” Even the term “civilization,” which they
fi nally sett led on in the subtitle of Soviet Communism: A New Civilization,
216 showcasing the great experiment
inverted the usage of their 1923 tract against inequality and poverty, The Decay
of Capitalist Civilization.19 Like Shaw, then, the Webbs came to see in Soviet
communism the fulfi llment of the causes they had championed their whole
lives. Beatrice, who shared with Sidney the influences of positivism, utilitari-
anism, and evolutionary sociology (as the young Beatrice Potter, she had been
personally mentored by Herbert Spencer), differed in her att raction to the
Soviet order.20 In her heart, she was pulled most of all by notions of justice,
comradely collectivism, and equality.
Whereas Shaw redirected his failure as a politician toward a glorification of
dictatorial men of action, Beatrice Webb held up the Fabian intellectuals to the
Bolsheviks and found the Russians’ daring dedication a reproach to her set’s
establishment privileges. The comparison made the Webbs’ well-known fru-
gality and ascetic rejection of aristocratic luxury seem tame indeed. “Starting
to really work on Soviet Communism,” she wrote in her diary on May 11, 1933,
noting she had read Lenin’s works and Krupskaia’s biography:
Stalinist Westernizers
Perhaps no less contradictory a phenomenon than Fabian Stalinists were their
Soviet counterparts: the Stalinist Westernizers. These intellectuals and cul-
tural figures were the Soviet mediators at the forefront of Soviet cultural diplo-
macy, and they were invested in interactions above all with European countries
and cultivated meaningful relationships with foreign intellectuals. These fig-
ures influenced, even dominated, the fellow-travelers’ points of contact with
Soviet civilization in the 1930s. With the increasing restrictions on travel
abroad and the import of foreign publications, Soviet intermediaries became
increasingly privileged and increasingly important, for it was they who shaped
Soviet coverage of the outside world. After the late 1920s, cosmopolitan Old
Bolshevik intellectuals like Lunacharskii and Kameneva were swept aside.
The new Stalinist leadership and the rapidly promoted “1930s generation” of
cadres were mostly ignorant of foreign languages and in possession of, at best,
limited international experience. While they faced many constraints and pres-
sures, there remained a significant opening for those Westward-looking cos-
mopolitans who remained prominent. The Stalinist leadership, Soviet foreign
policy, and the Comintern all remained focused to a large degree on Western
Europe and the United States, and influencing Western opinion remained a
potent aspiration.
Like the fellow-travelers themselves, the Westernizers were a motley group.
They included some of the leading figures of the party-state with international
pedigrees, such as Karl Radek, the ex-Trotskyist who became Stalin’s top
international advisor in the early 1930s; former “Right deviationist” Nikolai
Bukharin, who launched a second career as international emissary and publicist
220 showcasing the great experiment
though the mid-1930s; and Gorky, who personally knew and received high-
priority foreign guests such as H.G. Wells. These Bolshevik giants, immersed
in Soviet relations with the West, all had problematic pasts or unique arrange-
ments with the Stalin leadership.
In a different category were prominent officials and ideologists, such as the
influential journalist Mikhail Kol´tsov—head of the Foreign Commission of
the Union of Writers, a member of the editorial board of Pravda, and a fig-
ure closely connected to the Comintern and secret police. Kol´tsov was one of
the most authoritative Soviet commentators on international topics. He pub-
lished more than 2,000 newspaper articles in his career, most notably as a cor-
respondent, emissary, and combatant in the Spanish Civil War. 33 He covered
Western political and cultural developments in his feuilletons and actively
published and promoted foreign writers as effective head of a network of pub-
lishing houses employing more than a quarter of a million people. Kol´tsov,
who had joined forces with the Stalin faction as early as 1924, was entrusted
as a key organizer informing Moscow about the landmark meeting in Paris
in 1935, the International Congress for the Defense of Culture. Among the
French, Kol´tsov socialized comfortably with André Malraux, Antoine de
Saint-Exupéry, and Louis Aragon; he was closely connected to the German
intellectual diaspora in Paris and Moscow through his German common-law
wife, Maria Osten. 34
With the increasing mobilization of scientific and cultural figures, the line
between Soviet cultural officials and Soviet intellectuals involved in the cul-
tural-propaganda organs of the state became blurred. In 1936, for example,
Kol´tsov’s foreign commission of the Union of Writers included not only the
polished former VOKS official Mikhail Apletin and the literary critic Sergei
Dinamov, the old admirer of Dreiser in the 1920s, but two literary figures not
often associated with the back rooms of the apparat: Boris Pasternak and Boris
Pil´niak. 35 Many cultural officials were also cultural figures in their own right,
such as Sergei Tret´iakov, a leading figure of the avant-garde and theorist of
revolutionary culture. In the 1930s, Tret´iakov was fl itt ing around Europe on
behalf of Comintern and then Union of Writers international literary orga-
nizations, but he maintained his identity as a revolutionary artist working in
theater, literature, and fi lm until his arrest for espionage in July 1937. 36
Moscow in the 1930s was the Comintern capital in which international
émigrés mixed with Bolshevik re-immigrants, and, by virtue of nationality
or biography, many members of the multinational communist elite were not
only linguistic, but also cultural, amphibians. Perhaps the most remarkable
case was that of Ilya Ehrenburg—who began a decades-long residence in Paris
as a young Bolshevik Party member in the pre-war period and had a nasty fall-
ing out with Lenin but remained a close personal friend of Bukharin even as
S t a l i n a n d t h e F e l l o w -Tra v e l e r s R e v i s i t e d 221
the Red Army or the Comintern, diplomats functioned openly in the Soviet
embassies in European capitals that were both outposts of Soviet life and a
crossroads where politicians, journalists, and intellectuals met. Before 1933,
by far the most important Soviet embassy on the continent was the one on
Unter den Linden 7 in Berlin, which Karl Schlögel memorably described as a
portal to the “USSR in miniature” and the center of the entire “German-Soviet
scene.”40 The history of the Soviet embassy in Paris on the Rue de Grenelle as
a landmark space in Soviet-European cultural relations remains to be written.
But Sabine Dullin has tracked visitors to the embassy that, after 1933, turned
into the primary “Sovietophilic milieu” in Europe and whose most habitual
visitors were friendly journalists and radical intellectuals.41 When Aleksandr
Arosev was ambassador to Prague in 1929–32, he mixed with left ist intellec-
tuals and cultural figures perhaps more than any other leading diplomat; his
residence at Villa Tereza became a kind of cultural and political salon where
the Soviet colony fraternized with Czechoslovak artists and intellectuals. In
the evenings, Arosev recited the poetry of Blok and Briusov and declaimed the
prose of Zoshchenko.42
The political and cultural landscape in Britain was less conducive to mak-
ing the London embassy into a pro-Soviet intellectual and cultural center, but
even so, among the prominent and talented Soviet diplomatic figures who
became important for the intellectual friends of communism was the diplomat
and former Menshevik, Ivan Maiskii. Like Arosev and other revolutionaries
of his generation, Maiskii had had early and sustained experiences in Western
Europe, learning English and French during his emigration after 1908. He
forged close ties to Kameneva’s cultural diplomacy in the 1920s and became
ambassador to London from 1932–43.43
Maiskii’s preoccupation with the world of the Foreign Office and the
political establishment was accentuated by the weakness of the Communist
Party and the radical Left in Britain. A protégé of commissar of foreign affairs
M. M. Litvinov, Maiskii was sent to London in 1932—the same moment (as
we shall see in the next chapter) as the Soviet pursuit of the extreme nation-
alist Right in Germany—with a mission to improve relations with British
Conservatives.44 The 1930s, however, were also the years when, arguably for
the fi rst time, a sizeable radical intelligentsia appeared in Britain, and with the
efforts of figures like John Strachey, Harold J. Laski, and the Webbs, Soviet
communism for the fi rst time became “respectable.” Among an elite in which
“the bonds of family, school, university, profession and club” often trumped
political divisions, Sidney and Beatrice Webb became Maiskii’s most impor-
tant bridge between the high politics of the Foreign Office and the public opin-
ion of the intellectuals.45 After one of his many weekends at Passfield Corner,
the Webbs’ country house, Maiskii wrote in his dairy about his love for the
S t a l i n a n d t h e F e l l o w -Tra v e l e r s R e v i s i t e d 223
quiet intellectual enclave, where books and manuscripts took precedence over
any display of luxury.46
The att raction mixed with reverence that Maiskii felt for the Webbs did
not prevent him from using his visits shrewdly to shape their outlook on the
USSR as they were preparing their two-volume work on Soviet communism.
During the height of Beatrice Webb’s doubts about famine and violence of col-
lectivization in 1933, she wrote that Maiskii’s weekend at Passfield “comforted
us about the food shortage . . . Already in the spring sowing, good results were
appearing.” On the eve of publication of Soviet Communism, in March 1935,
Maiskii spent another weekend with the couple, poring over the proofs, “he
giving us corrections and additions to our statements or criticizing our conclu-
sions.” After publication, Maiskii hosted a celebratory lunch for forty admirers
of the Webbs at the embassy.47 In his well-known memoirs, Maiskii recorded
with pride all the ways in which he had influenced the Webbs: their book rep-
resented a “great ideological victory.”48 Not only was it prestigious for media-
tors to rub shoulders with prominent foreign intellectuals, but winning them
over as friends of the Soviet Union was a brilliant career boost.
What was absent in Maiskii’s recollections, but not from his unpublished
diary, despite the caution he took in his personal notes, was acknowledge-
ment of what the Soviet diplomat received from his relationship with the
Webbs. Sidney and Beatrice may have been in a state of learned ignorance
when it came to the Soviet system, but they were acute observers of the per-
sonalities and trends of British politics and foreign relations. Over the course
of their weekends together, Maiskii sought their advice and recorded their
opinions in his diary at length. In particular, he found confi rmation for his
view that British “Conservatives can allow themselves the luxury of greater
courage in relations with the USSR.” After a weekend at Passfield in 1935,
Maiskii recorded in his diary that the Webbs were the “cream of the world
intelligentsia.”49
Arosev, director of VOKS from 1932 to his death in the Great Purges, dis-
played of all the Stalinist Westernizers perhaps the most intense admiration
of prominent intellectual friends of the Soviet Union. Internally tormented
and pulled sharply between his political ambitions and a cultural orienta-
tion towards the West, Arosev in 1935 accompanied his Czechoslovak wife,
Gertrude Freund, on one of her trips abroad as far as the Polish-Soviet border.
There he penned a diary entry while stuck on the border station of Negoreloe
on the westernmost fringe of the USSR, expressing a sentimental Westernism
that might be considered shocking for a Stalin-era official: “For a long time
I walked in the direction in which the train disappeared. Like a Scythian or
a Mongol, I harbor inside me a great longing (toska) for the West and noth-
ing acts on me like the evening sky or the sett ing sun . . . I adore the West and
224 showcasing the great experiment
would like to follow the sun.”50 Th is emotional affi nity colored his relations
with European intellectuals, especially in the era of the Popular Front, and
fostered hopes that the best of European and Soviet culture could be, if not
ultimately merged, brought into a mutually supportive alliance.
It was not merely Arosev’s European side that clashed with Soviet politi-
cal realities; it was his identity as a writer, a man of culture, and a member
of the intelligentsia. Indeed, Arosev was preoccupied with the same relation-
ships between power and culture, intellectuals and politics that were central
to the fellow-traveling of many of the Western intellectuals. He fi ltered this
through a special preoccupation in the revolutionary movement—the raging
debate about the relationship between workers and the intelligentsia. 51 Arosev
pursued his political ambitions in voluminous letters to Stalin; he lamented his
failure as a cultural creator to his diary. “Akh, my diary!” he wrote on March 6,
1935. “I write it as my terrible evaluation of myself and for nobody. I write in
the evenings . . . I don’t have time to write a diary . . . I need to write because I am
a hard luck story, a failure, and lonely.”52
The diary and the letters to Stalin converged on one topic: Russia and the
West. In 1933, Arosev wrote in his diary about an economic crisis in Europe
that coincided with a Soviet “crisis of culture,” a heretical thought in light of
official Soviet triumphalism. In an encounter in a Crimean sanatorium with
Lev Mekhlis, the Institute of Red Professors graduate who was rising to great
heights as editor of Pravda and one of Stalin’s closest assistants, Arosev judged
the ideologist severely as a representative of the new generation of cadres: “He
displayed an ignorance that is characteristic of almost all our current cultural
workers.” Seeing events through the eyes of “European enthusiasts” such as
Aragon, he was ashamed of the “lies and stupidities” of Soviet writers who met
with the French in Paris in December 1935. He quoted the poet Esenin, “I am
as a foreigner in my own land” (V svoei zemle ia slovno inostranets). On Stalin,
he often exclaimed, “What an Asiatic!” (Okh, aziat, aziat!). 53
Arosev’s language and orientation appeared drastically different in his
letters to Stalin. Pleading again and again for a more important diplomatic
posting, he emphasized above all the danger of foreign enemies, rising Soviet
strength and influence, and capitalist encirclement. In 1929, he openly used
the imagery of masculine strength in an association with the vozhd´: goaded
by Stalin’s barbed comment to him that his time in Europe had made him as
polite as a bourgeois, Arosev equated his own approach to the “complex psy-
chology of the leader of state and revolution”—that is, to Stalin’s own—while
blasting abroad to the “bureaucratic” inclinations of cautious, diplomatic “old
maids” (starykh dev). In 1931, writing from Prague, he talked as if he were on
the front lines in a war, working from inside the “most important nests of the
enemies of the USSR.” In this formulation, not only the bourgeoisie, but the
S t a l i n a n d t h e F e l l o w -Tra v e l e r s R e v i s i t e d 225
West as a whole, was a despicable enemy: “Ah, if you could only see with what
gigantic steps that old prostitute Europe is being destroyed.”54
While it may be tempting to interpret Arosev’s divergent depictions of
Europe as simple hypocrisy, this is not the most convincing explanation.
Although Arosev moved in differing directions in the midst of his tormented
confl icts, he managed to reconcile Soviet loyalties and Western admirations.
He wrote in his diary to explore his discontent; he wrote to Stalin to over-
come it. Arosev also swelled with pride in describing Soviet achievements in
his diary; his “testament” to his children, written over the course of six months
in 1935, instructed them to “trust the collective” and “continue the revolution-
ary family line.”55 What Arosev admired most about the West were the cul-
tural and intellectual figures who were friends of the Soviet Union, the great
contributors to culture who also saw their future with the Soviets. They, too,
wanted to link the best of Soviet and European culture; they, too, took risks in
standing up against the Soviet Union’s capitalist foes. If the old prostitute was
destroyed, they would help create the new Europe.
For Arosev, then, the fellow-travelers were nothing less than a steadying fac-
tor in the longstanding balancing act between his Western orientation and his
revolutionary and Stalinist commitments. In terms similar to Maiskii’s praise
of the Webbs, Arosev expressed a powerful sense of admiration for the Western
intellectuals whom he met, especially during his multiple trips to Europe
in 1934–36. The fellow-traveler to whom Arosev was closest, and whom he
admired the most, was the French writer Romain Rolland. On January 7, 1935,
he was inspired to the point of euphoria at Rolland’s Swiss villa:
In the villa the smell of books and the garden. I slept well. And the
conversations with this great man moved me completely. Everything
changed from its place. One wants to work as the bird sings, that is, as
he does. Simple. No, I have never breathed in the atmosphere of the
work of thought and literature as here, at his place. 56
The language of praise was less personal and eff usive to the writers’ organiza-
tion, but there was still a large dose of hero worship. Arosev likened Gide’s
apartment to a “laboratory of thought,” the very phrase he used about his ref-
uge from the bureaucracy, his own diary. 57
The difference was that Arosev organized his public talk around the class
analysis of the intelligentsia—in Marxist-Leninist terms, a wavering stra-
tum caught between the great poles of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat,
a nostrum that Arosev adapted and interpreted through the prism of his
observations about the differences between European and Soviet culture and
psychology. Thus, all Soviet writers, great and small (the latter presumably
including himself), were made significant by their participation in a unified
ideology and culture: “Th is is what distinguishes us from the West European
intelligentsia.” In this light, even the greatest minds of Europe, including
Rolland and Gide, understood Soviet culture insufficiently: “[Gide] under-
stands the character of the USSR rather well, but he is nonetheless French,
a person of West European culture, he is an individualist.” While it is sig-
nificant that Arosev altered the thrust of his messages about the West very
differently depending on his audience, there are hints in his diary that Arosev
was fundamentally sincere when he described the lack of a unifying ideology
as the great difference between Western and Soviet intellectuals. 58 Except, in
his diary, he added about the European intellectuals: “And they cannot not
see in all of us the mark of functionaries, a certain pallor and woodenness
in our faces.” He regretted Stalin-era suspiciousness of even these outsiders:
“And we give litt le to them. We are even obliged, it seems, to be a litt le afraid
of them.”59 Arosev was fully capable of imagining himself and other Soviets
through foreign eyes.
To a mass Soviet audience, Arosev’s depiction of the Western intellectuals
shifted yet again. In his pamphlet, Conversations and Meetings with our Friends
in Europe, published in a 1935 edition of 50,000 copies, Arosev popularized
his admiration for pro-Soviet European intellectuals. Rolland was the person-
ification of the “entire past of European culture”: “Both of them—Leonardo
da Vinci and Romain Rolland—share such strikingly identical eyes!” Here,
however, Western figures’ positive traits consist almost entirely of their rec-
ognition of the great socialist homeland as a superior system to be emulated.
When he conveys his conversations, Arosev’s Soviet views are contrasted with
the Europeans’ lack of understanding. The analysis of intelligentsia wavering
is now split down a strict Western/Soviet divide, as European intellectuals
are guilty of “Hamletism.”60 In terms of its crude political message, Arosev’s
propagandistic pamphlet for the Soviet masses most resembled the obvious
subtext of his confidential reports to Stalin: Western admiration for Soviet
socialism was proof of Soviet superiority and Stalin’s own greatness.
S t a l i n a n d t h e F e l l o w -Tra v e l e r s R e v i s i t e d 227
For all the vast differences between the political and cultural contexts
in which they operated, Western intellectual friends of communism and
Soviet mediators had a number of traits in common. Sometimes, the Soviet
Westernizers were motivated in their political service by considerations simi-
lar to those prompting Western intellectuals to assume the status of friends—
most notably, anti-fascism. More frequently, a powerful cultural romance
pulled them either to Soviet Russia or to the West. As intellectuals in politics,
both groups eagerly mobilized themselves to crisscross the divide between
culture and power. Above all, they had one other to admire. Surely it made a
difference to the fellow-travelers that their Soviet “handlers” were among the
most brilliant and accomplished figures in Soviet culture. Even as the Stalinist
Westernizers carried out officially prescribed functions frequently requiring
pressure and manipulation, they often harbored an intense respect and admi-
ration for their European friends and the culture for which they stood.
among other things, for the creation of his cult at home.62 Despite the lines
that were already being drawn between Stalin and the Europeanized Old
Bolsheviks, the moustachioed dictator was in his way eminently qualified to
be taken for something of an intellectual in power: among foreign literary fig-
ures who were not Marxist theoreticians, he assumed authority on Marxist-
Leninist theory, and he had a more than decent knowledge of Russian and
European literary classics. Stalin also had a “superb memory” and prepared
intensively with briefi ngs on the “views, tastes, and preferences” of his famous
guests.63 As he set about craft ing his own and the Soviet Union’s image abroad,
the stage was set for the intellectuals to diverge over whether he was a humble
man of the people or a philosopher-king.
With the possible exception of the 1931 meeting with Shaw, the records of
which have not been found, the conversations with Stalin in the early part of
the decade served raison d’etat and the nascent Stalin cult simultaneously, in
the sense that Stalin’s own image abroad was closely connected to Western
opinion about the Soviet experiment. Stalin’s choice of an interview with the
writer and journalist Emil Ludwig, whom he received on December 31, 1931,
was clearly connected to the international dimensions of the cult: Ludwig had
published biographical-fictional works about Bismarck and Napoleon, among
other great historical figures.
The didactic and instructional purposes behind the general secretary’s
foray into international image making are suggested by the uniform structure
of Stalin’s responses to Ludwig’s questions. The standard practice for Soviet
publication of such interviews in the 1930s was to fi rst allow both parties to
correct them and to include consideration by members of the Politburo before
they were edited to eliminate anything deemed unsuitable for a mass audience.
In the published version, all of Stalin’s comments to Ludwig were directed at
denying, correcting, and instructing. For example, Stalin repudiated any com-
parison between his own modernization program and the Westernization of
Peter the Great, denying that power in the USSR was in the hands of one per-
son. The text of the conversation was given a mass domestic audience, as it was
published in Soviet newspapers, in an oft-reprinted 1932 brochure, and in the
party theoretical journal Bol´shevik on April 30, 1932 (it was also included in
Stalin’s collected works).64
Stalin’s attempt to deflect another of Ludwig’s queries, by contrast, was strik-
ingly ambivalent: the question of Stalin’s knowledge of Europe and the outside
world, closely connected to Stalin’s history as an underground party worker
rather than an émigré party theoretician. Tactfully yet directly, Ludwig asked
him to contrast Lenin’s long European emigration with his own limited time
abroad. Stalin’s response was a wonderful reflection of the tensions within the
1930s Soviet order as a whole. On the one hand, he att ributed great importance
S t a l i n a n d t h e F e l l o w -Tra v e l e r s R e v i s i t e d 229
the same time, perhaps as a result, he was still treated not so much as a foreign
Communist but in the same category of non-party Western friends by VOKS,
which was usually very careful to stay away from public links to international
communism.69
In line with the goals of Soviet agencies like VOKS (and the Comintern-
sponsored Münzenberg) Barbusse wanted to use his journal Monde after 1928
to att ract a broad coalition of left ist and pro-Soviet, yet non-party intellectuals;
like many of the Western friends, he hoped to have an influence on the Soviet
order. In 1928, Barbusse even floated a project by which control over Western
works translated into Russian would be made by a committee at his journal.70
Barbusse formed his allegiance to Stalin before the general secretary’s con-
solidation of sole power at the end of the 1920s and before the fi rst inklings of
Figure 6.3 Henri Barbusse at a Moscow factory, November 28, 1930. The only
prominent Western intellectual who met with Stalin in the 1920s as well as the 1930s,
Barbusse played a key role in the creation of the Stalin cult. Source: RIA Novosti Photo
Library.
S t a l i n a n d t h e F e l l o w -Tra v e l e r s R e v i s i t e d 231
the Stalin cult. He was the only intellectual to meet with Stalin in the 1920s
as well as in the 1930s. Of great interest is Barbusse’s two-and-a-half-hour
conversation with Stalin from 1927, for clearly it is not the case, as Medvedev
suggests, that Shaw, in 1931, was the fi rst European writer to meet Stalin.71 In
1927, Barbusse spoke to Stalin on the eve of a visit to Georgia and the South
Caucasus. Barbusse approached Stalin with a concrete problem: he needed
to distinguish Soviet political violence, including the integration of indepen-
dent Georgia in 1920, from the fascist violence he was mobilizing intellec-
tuals against in Europe. How should he explain to Europeans the difference
between fascist (“white”) and Red Terror? Stalin said that after 1918 there
was no such thing as Red Terror; the “shootings did not repeat themselves.”
If it weren’t for the ruthlessness and strength of the capitalists, moreover, the
Soviet Union might have been able to abolish the death penalty. “Of course,”
Stalin continued, “the death penalty is an unpleasant thing. Who fi nds it pleas-
ant to kill people?” Who indeed? At this moment, Barbusse clearly signaled his
acceptance: “Th is is absolutely correct. In current conditions eliminating the
death penalty would be suicide for Soviet power.” 72 Here was someone upon
whom Stalin could rely. Quite unlike the intellectual games of the unpredict-
able Shaw or the earnest declarations of the didactic Rolland, Barbusse had
approached Stalin for his “directive” and conveyed his receipt of the message.
The benefits of Soviet travel could work both ways; the goodwill Barbusse built
up in Moscow in 1927, including with Stalin, may have allowed him to resist
the attacks that ensued with the Comintern’s “Left turn” of the late 1920s.73
Barbusse’s 1928 book on the Caucasus—part travelogue playing on the
exotic locale, part semi-fictional interviews with natives, and part political
tract—was aimed especially at countering émigré charges of “red imperial-
ism” connected to the end of Menshevik-led independent Georgia in 1920. The
work was structured around the canonical “yesterday and today” dichotomy
favored in VOKS and Comintern propaganda. It mentioned Stalin only once.
Here, in embryonic form, is the modest, simple people’s leader of Barbusse’s
1935 Staline.74
The att ractiveness of Barbusse to Stalin as a trustworthy biographer must
have been heightened by the working relationship they developed over anti-
fascist front organizations in the early 1930s.75 Stalin’s support for Barbusse
included his editing of translations of Barbusse’s articles for Pravda, and when
Mekhlis was concerned with the French writer’s unorthodox statements on
the independence of literature from political movements, Stalin ordered: “It is
necessary to publish without changes. The author of the article is responsible
for mistakes in the article, for it is a signed piece. Stalin.” 76 In the wake of his
meeting with Stalin in late 1932, Barbusse, who was in close contact with Willi
Münzenberg over the peace movement launched in Amsterdam, announced
232 showcasing the great experiment
There was also an ample connection to the burgeoning cult in the decision
of Lenin’s heir to receive H. G. Wells in the Kremlin on July 23, 1934. For
in 1920, the pioneering science fiction writer had famously visited Lenin and
hailed the “dreamer in the Kremlin.”
Having discussed plans for electrification in Moscow, Wells had, to Lenin’s
delight, returned home to lobby the British Foreign Office to improve rela-
tions with the new Russia. Stalin’s proxy, Maiskii, cleverly reminded Wells of
Lenin’s parting invitation to return a decade later. In 1934, there were imme-
diate tactical reasons to arrange such a meeting with Wells—as, indeed, there
appear to have been for several other of Stalin’s invitations. In particular, Wells
was president of the International PEN club at a time when preparations were
being made for the Congress of Soviet Writers; similarly, Rolland was received
in 1935 on the heels of the Franco-Soviet mutual assistance treaty. At the same
time, Wells had a greater international stature than either Ludwig or Barbusse.
He had been invited to the White House by four U.S. presidents, and it is
noteworthy that he arrived in Moscow on the heels of the last of those meet-
ings, with Franklin D. Roosevelt. Wells wrote not only science fiction but also
Figure 6.4 Vladimir Lenin conversing with H. G. Wells in his Kremlin study,
January 10, 1920. To entice Wells to meet Stalin in 1934, Soviet diplomat Ivan Maiskii
reminded him of Lenin’s parting invitation to return and see Soviet progress after a
decade had passed. Source: RIA Novosti Photo Library.
236 showcasing the great experiment
was a Stalinist triumph: on return, Wells publicly declared that “I never met a
man more candid, fair and honest.”88
Soviet leaders, however, were not inclined to think in terms of partial suc-
cess. Wells’ critical comments about Stalin in his Autobiography, sent by Radek
to Stalin in Russian translation on November 9, 1934, inclined top Soviet offi-
cials such as Radek and Litvinov to discuss damage control. As Radek wryly
remarked to Stalin, this time “we didn’t manage to seduce the girl.”89
Th ree rounds of high-level Soviet political activity surrounding the Wells
visit can be seen as typical for these sorts of visits. First was a round of monitor-
ing, prediction, and jockeying for influence among the officials managing the
writer’s stay on Soviet soil.90 Second came the flurry of discussions concerning
the publication of the text of Wells’ conversation with Stalin. Stalin and Wells
both edited the text, which was then reviewed by the high-level diplomat who
translated for Stalin, Konstantin Umanskii; by Maiskii, who had played the
key role in arranging the visit; and by all the members of the Politburo. Finally,
the appearance of Wells’ autobiography set off a round of discussion about a
Soviet response: Litvinov favored a reply, while Radek was unsure and turned
to Stalin for his decision. Radek’s advice is revealing. He suggested “mocking”
Wells rather than berating or attacking (rugatiia). Rather than ad hominem
mockery, moreover, Radek advised class analysis of Wells as reflecting the
“bourgeois prejudices of the intelligentsia.” When Radek discovered Shaw’s
response to Wells in the New Statesman and Nation, however, he found a better
solution: to let Shaw do the mockery for him. Shaw’s remarks were translated
for the Soviet press—minus the maverick playwright’s offhand references to
Stalin as a nationalist and opportunist.91
Stalin’s conversation with Wells, as with the meeting with Barbusse, sug-
gests the extent to which Stalin was prompted by a mixture of international
and domestic goals in his conversations with Western intellectuals. The pre-
dominance of British and French figures among those Stalin met in the 1930s
itself speaks to the goal of influencing Western public opinion in countries key
to Soviet foreign policy. At the same time, the care that Stalin and his entou-
rage put into editing the conversations with foreigners and the broad dissemi-
nation of the talks with Wells and others in Russian suggest that they were
deeply preoccupied with the domestic Soviet consumption of the transcripts.
The meetings with Ludwig, Wells, and Barbusse were integrally connected to
the early stages of the Stalin cult, suggesting how cultivating Stalin’s image
abroad was a priority in furthering the cult at home.
Romain Rolland—who conversed with Stalin with his bilingual Russian
wife, Kudasheva, and his admirer Arosev as translators on June 28, 1935—
was the fellow-traveler who was perhaps Soviet cultural diplomacy’s
most illustrious asset. A Nobel Prize winner who was a writer, dramatist,
238 showcasing the great experiment
musicologist, and popular biographer, Rolland came with the authority and
reputation of the grand écrivain, routinely referred to as maître by the Soviet
intellectual mediators who addressed him. He was a man of causes: one of
the most prominent pacifi sts in World War I, during which he was vilified
for his stance, he was also a prominent spokesman for German-French cul-
tural reconciliation and later a leading champion of anti-fascist culture and
East-West dialogue. Very different from the fl amboyant Shaw, or, for that
matter, the non-conformist Gide, Rolland reminded many observers of a
clergyman: thin, frail, earnest, and puritanical, he was a didactic and com-
pulsive correspondent. Rolland’s sympathy for Stalinism was neither simple
nor fragile; sturdy enough to be battered but not destroyed by purge and
pact, it was nourished by a startlingly wide array of sources. Some were ideo-
logical and cultural—his longstanding socialism and expertise in the French
Revolution, his anti-fascism, his enthusiasm for popular enlightenment.
Others were personal: his status as friend; the role of mediators, not least his
wife, Kudasheva; his longstanding correspondent, Gorky; and the worriedly
attentive Arosev. Perhaps the most striking and the most disturbing factor
was the fact that Rolland was an “inveterate hero-worshiper.”92The year 1935
marked the moment when he transferred his longstanding hero-worship of
great historical figures to Stalin.
In the unedited, Russian text of Rolland’s talk with Stalin, Rolland hailed
Stalin as the fi rst representative and source of the new humanism. In an open-
ing statement, he spoke of how millions in the West looked to the USSR to
solve the current economic and moral crisis. One must do more than repeat
the words of Beethoven, “Ô homme, aide-toi toi même! Rather, one must aid
them and give them advice.93 Beethoven was the life on which Rolland had
based his most famous work, the monumental Bildungsroman Jean-Christophe
(1903–12); Rolland’s popular 1903 biography of Beethoven was the prototype
for his series of Lives of Illustrious Men. In later years, Rolland began his habit
of turning East to fi nding great personalities to mythologize: Tolstoy and
Gandhi. They were also role models, however, for Rolland aspired to become
the European Tolstoy. In all these works, written for a mass audience in an
accessible yet serious style of haute vulgarisation, Rolland explored the heroic
nature of geniuses who overcame hardship in order to devote themselves to
humanity. In his 1920s infatuation with Gandhi, pacifism and pan-European
reconciliation were supplanted by anti-imperialism and a grander East-West
reconciliation. Rolland kept his doubts about Gandhi’s nationalism private,
even when the mahatma visited Fascist Italy in 1931, much as he agonized only
in private about Stalin and the Soviet Union later in the decade. Since Rolland’s
pacifism worried the Soviets, Rolland made a point in 1935 of assuring Stalin
that as a Soviet sympathizer he would not oppose war in all circumstances.94
S t a l i n a n d t h e F e l l o w -Tra v e l e r s R e v i s i t e d 239
With this renunciation of his previous views, he cemented his friendship and
replaced Gandhi with Stalin as mankind’s heroic humanist.
Rolland’s earlier heroes had radiated strength, but they were all artists
and intellectuals. For Rolland, as for the Fabians, the Bolsheviks represented
a potential merger of the intellectual and the man of action. He indicated as
much when talking about the “new humanism” to Stalin, referring to Marx
and Lenin as founders of la parti intellectuelle. Th is merger was revealed even
more clearly in Rolland’s 1935 book Compagnons de route, in which chapters
about his literary “companions” Shakespeare and Goethe were supplemented
by a chapter on Lenin as a potential synthesis of the Russian revolutionary
tradition with European culture. “Two maxims, which complete each other:
‘We must dream,’ says the man of action [Lenin]. And the man of the dream
[Goethe]: ‘We must act!’ ”95 At Villaneuve, Arosev found Rolland on the eve
of his Soviet journey regretful over his own quiet life and eager to hear sto-
ries about Stalin and the revolutionary underground. In a personal letter sent
from Moscow during his 1935 visit, Rolland wrote about Hamlet—Arosev’s
own favorite metaphor for the wavering intellectual—and compared him
to Shakespeare’s warrior Fortinbras, whose name in French means “strong-
in-arm.” Rolland talked about how he could not be like Fortinbras—he had
too much compassion and too much horror in his heart. “But as opposed to
me, Fortinbras is right.”96After his meeting with Stalin, Arosev crowed to the
general secretary, Rolland was so euphoric he was ready to kiss him: Rolland
viewed their meeting as the great deed of his life.97
At the forefront of Rolland’s concerns raised directly with Stalin was
the status of “the truest friends of the USSR,” by which Rolland, of course,
meant himself. All the concrete policy questions Rolland raised—about the
exiled Trotsky supporter Victor Serge, who had become a cause célèbre in
Europe, and about the distinctly non-humanistic Soviet decree of April 7,
1935, establishing criminal responsibility for juveniles over age twelve—
were framed in terms of his own desire and ability to help explain Soviet
aff airs to Europe. “I am completely sure that he [Serge] deserved his pun-
ishment . . . but it was necessary to explain this fact to the mass of friends of
the USSR.” Rolland called for a “campaign of explanation” for sympathiz-
ers, and privileged information for himself, perhaps through the organiza-
tion of VOKS. Indeed, Rolland had complained to Gorky throughout the
early 1930s that he did not have the information to assuage doubts and rebut
accusations against the Soviet Union. For his part, Stalin allowed that the
Soviets did not sufficiently “inform and arm our friends,” but he professed
that the reason was simple respect for the autonomy of people living in a
completely different place: “To direct these people from Moscow would be
from our part too bold.”98 Such passages lend support to the recollection
240 showcasing the great experiment
of his wartime translator: “Stalin loved and knew how to throw dust in the
eyes of foreigners.”99 The draconian 1935 shift on juvenile delinquency was
merely a decree broadcast for pedagogical purposes, Stalin explained, to
scare dangerous hooligans and bandits. For obvious reasons, this fact could
not be publicized. “Th is is true, this is true,” Rolland answered, and in his
diary he reflected on how Westerners forgot about “the old barbarous Russia”
Bolshevik leaders were forced to confront.100 Stalin’s explanations may have
convinced Rolland, but Soviet audiences might have found them ridiculous.
Perhaps this is why the Rolland-Stalin transcript, unlike several others, was
never published.
In 1935, Rolland evinced a keen awareness of his status as “friend.” In his
obligatory parting letter to the vozhd’ on June 20, 1935, for example, he pledged
that as long as he lived he would never retreat from the obligation of defend-
ing the heroic construction of the new world. Even after the Purges, he upheld
his end of the bargain by not publicly criticizing the Soviets.101 Stalin did finally
decide to give something to Rolland in return. At the January 1935 International
Writers’ Congress for Defense of Culture in Paris, a number of speakers
sympathetic to Trotsky had taken up the cause of the imprisoned Serge. In a
gesture that appeared at once the height of reasonableness, or, from another
point of view, a magnanimous autocratic amnesty, Stalin announced to Rolland
that there was no reason Serge could not be released. Indeed, Soviet leaders were
used to such requests from their own intellectuals; Stalin was treating Rolland
much like he treated that patron extraordinaire, Gorky. In fact, the Serge affair
showed just how crucial Rolland’s relationship with Gorky was to his status as
friend. After Stalin made his statement, Rolland followed up with Gorky, who
wrote his friend Iagoda. Serge soon appeared in Paris.102
To the Soviets, however, true friendship meant following the Soviet line,
whatever it might be and wherever it might lead, not providing the kind of
privileged information Rolland craved on Soviet intentions and policies.
Rolland appeared genuinely anguished that European public opinion on the
USSR was suffering; but he also presented himself to Stalin as someone who
knew Europe and how to handle European debates far better than the Soviets
did. If he could have cited insider information, of course, it would have raised
his stature among intellectuals and artists preoccupied with the debate over
the Soviet Union. But Rolland could not even get an answer on publishing the
transcript of his talk with Stalin, or excerpts from it, to use in his European
discussions. Numerous petitions to Stalin were of no avail. Rolland even tried
to enlist Bukharin, whom he met for the fi rst of three times on June 25, 1935,
at a VOKS reception. On the eve of the Purge trials, Bukharin desperately
tried to take credit for Rolland’s loyalty to the Soviet cause, telling Molotov
on December 1, 1936: “I hope that I talked so convincingly that here as well is
S t a l i n a n d t h e F e l l o w -Tra v e l e r s R e v i s i t e d 241
a drop of my honey, when R[omain] R[olland] does not conduct himself like
A[ndré] Gide.”103
Rolland’s marriage made it possible for him to meet with Kudasheva’s
relatives during his 1935 visit, and in particular her son, Sergei Kudashev,
then a student at Moscow University. Sergei met with Rolland in intimate
sett ings to talk about Soviet conditions, ideological conformity, and the ter-
ror in Leningrad following the Kirov assassination.104 Rolland’s apologia for
Stalinism was not predicated on a complete lack of information.
The decision to uphold his status as loyal friend cannot be explained only
by hero worship. There was also a cultural logic that conditioned his uncritical
response. Just as German Left intellectuals had experienced a strong synergy
with Soviet culture starting in the 1920s, the Popular Front brought to French
intellectuals their own houses of culture, Agitprop theater, and workers’ uni-
versities; popular enlightenment against the fascist danger was one of Rolland’s
most beloved causes. As early as the turn of the twentieth century, Rolland had
been the prime mover in the people’s-theater movement, and his writings had
influenced the Soviet theorists of mass spectacle. He became enamored, above
Figure 6.5 Romain Rolland (sitt ing); Mariia Kudasheva, his wife and translator;
and Aleksandr Arosev, the director of VOKS, on the reviewing stand of the Lenin
Mausoleum on June 30, 1935. After viewing a physical-culture parade with Stalin,
Rolland recorded in his diary: “A festival of the People—magnificent!” Source: Rossiiskii
gosudarstvennyi arkhiv kinofotodokumentov (RGAKFD).
242 showcasing the great experiment
all, with the notions of a “new man” and the “new world” that would regenerate
the ailing West. During his visit, Rolland, like so many others, was inspired by
the robust, joyous crowds he saw on Red Square. In his case he sat near Stalin
atop the Lenin Mausoleum, reviewing the parade of physical-culture enthusi-
asts (fizkul´turniki) of June 30, 1935. “A festival of the People—magnificent!”
he exclaimed.105
Rolland, like so many other French intellectuals and scholars, had a strong
tendency to view the Russian Revolution through the prism of the French.
French views of revolutionary progress in spite of the Terror could lead to
“historical” excuses for the Soviets.106 As this suggests, anti-fascism, and the
international anti-fascist cultural movement, had its own valence in different
national political cultures.
Finally, the monumentalism of Stalinist culture and of Socialist Realism
was not repugnant to Rolland. Some of the components of Rolland’s intel-
lectual makeup—notably, Wagner and Nietzsche—were also currents run-
ning through Bolshevik culture, from pre-war “godbuilding” to Gorkian
“Revolutionary romanticism.” Nor did he fi nd the Soviet repudiation of the
avant-garde of the mid-late 1930s troubling, as did Gide and Feuchtwanger.
For these reasons, a number of the shifts enacted within Soviet culture of
the Stalinist 1930s—the logocentric primacy of didactic, mass literature;
the popular glorification of enlightenment and the new artistic and scientific
establishment; the embrace of nineteenth-century high culture; the values of
“culturedness”—appealed to Rolland’s outlook. In this light, the grand cel-
ebration of Rolland himself in official Stalinist culture was not merely flattery,
nor was the ascetic Rolland at all concerned, unlike some others, with Soviet
material largesse. He donated Soviet royalties from his collected works to “the
educational work of the new Russia.”107 Rather, the Soviet glorification of the
writer seemed to confi rm his own importance in the creation of that new world
toward which anti-fascist culture strove.
For all these reasons, Rolland believed intuitively that he knew and under-
stood Soviet culture, which, as he saw it, was internationalist and universal in
its reach.108 But it was what the French call a faux ami—a “false friend,” recog-
nized as familiar but in reality not. It was precisely the time when Soviet cul-
ture exerted its most universalistic attraction to enthusiasts like Rolland—in
the 1930s—when Stalinism, with its ideological codes and Bolshevik language
disseminated on a mass scale, its drives for autarky and isolation, was creat-
ing a world increasingly difficult for outsiders to penetrate. Rolland believed
that both anti-fascist and Soviet culture stood for humanism; yet for most of
the early Soviet period, and even in the mid-1930s for the militant cultural
Left, gumanizm was a bourgeois myth, the opposite of the ruthless logic
of Bolshevism. Indeed, in a 1934 Union of Writers’ Foreign Commission
S t a l i n a n d t h e F e l l o w -Tra v e l e r s R e v i s i t e d 243
produced for the occasion.113 While the Foreign Commission sent Rolland an
album of 400 Soviet newspaper clippings, the goal of such an event had to be
more than to flatter and impress a single Western intellectual. The core politi-
cal message that Apletin and his co-organizers conceived of as the organiz-
ing principle of the jubilee—“R. Rolland’s path to revolution”—was implicitly
centered around Soviet uniqueness and superiority.114 Rolland’s life became a
teleological progression toward higher consciousness, culminating in its end-
point, his embrace of the Soviet order and of Stalin.
Inevitably less grandiose and more inclusive was the message behind the
soirée d’hommage in Paris, held in the main hall of the Palais de la Mutualité
and marked by an appearance by Léon Blum, the Socialist Prime Minister
of the Popular Front government. Only partly orchestrated by the French
Communist Party, this event was structured around a different script; it
was a celebration of unity on the Left and of anti-fascism, in which Rolland
was lauded as a great humanist and “symbolic grandfather of the Popular
Front.”115 Friendship with the USSR had brought Rolland to the height of
adulation in Moscow and in Paris, but the different ceremonies marked
those very disjunctures between Stalinist and European anti-fascist culture
that Rolland himself did not grasp.
Although Stalin’s meetings with visiting Western intellectuals were cut off
with the onset of the Purge era, they played a notable role in Stalin’s own emer-
gence as an international politician. Many of Stalin’s guests had yearned for
or imagined having an influence over the revolutionary experiment, in what
François Hourmant has called a “fantasy of shared power.”116 In one unex-
pected sense, they succeeded: because of them, Stalin became much better
prepared for the barrage of meetings with Western diplomats and heads of
state during the grand alliance of World War II.
in 1950, involved the abandonment of reason: “One does not fall in love with a
woman, or enter the womb of a church, as a result of logical persuasion.”118 In
recent years, the movement to interpret totalitarianism as a political religion
has further eased the tendency to explain Western sympathy for communism
as a secular faith.119 Blaming the god that failed, however, downplays the ways
in which intellectuals were able quite rationally to justify the Stalin order and
all the concrete benefits and decisions that intellectuals’ status as friends of the
Soviet Union entailed.
As an explanatory framework, moreover, the secular-faith argument
directly collides with another major dimension of Western admiration for
communism at the center of David Caute’s classic The Fellow-Travellers. For
Caute, the portrayal of Stalinism as an “experiment” was more than a meta-
phor; it was emblematic of the intellectuals’ championship of the rationality
of science and planning and the number of scientists and scholars who sympa-
thized. No ideology presented itself as more scientific, rational, and forward-
looking than communism.120 As Mark Lilla has pointed out, not only do the
historians’ respective indictments of faith and reason as the cause of philo-
Sovietism openly contradict one another; they also suggest the inadequacy of
explanations focusing on ideas in isolation.121
A third interpretive framework, which might be called the sociological
explanation, revolves around the role and nature of intellectuals themselves.
Paul Hollander’s thesis in Political Pilgrims about the roots of “utopia-seeking”
in intellectuals’ longstanding alienation and estrangement from their own
societies is only the best known of a range of indictments of intellectuals that,
in general, prompted them toward ideological blindness, utopianism, or even
“treason.”122 Since Hollander’s cause of causes was the pre-disposition of intel-
lectuals themselves, he was able to flag the important topic of projection—in
which aspects of communism are misconstrued in light of observers’ critiques
of their own societies. As we have already seen, however, negative views among
visitors were legion. Recent scholarship has made it increasingly clear that far
from all intellectual observers sought or found utopia. Eva Oberloskamp’s
exhaustive study of fi ft y French and German “left ist intellectuals” who left
travel accounts found numerous critical judgments that challenge the received
wisdom. Far from unifying intellectuals as an entity, approaches to the Soviet
experiment were highly differentiated and shaped by political orientation,
national political cultures, and reactions to numerous specific features of
Soviet state, culture, and society. By the same token, far from all foreign admir-
ers of Soviet communism were intellectuals.123 The temptation exemplified
by the sociological explanation to judge all intellectuals (except oneself and
like-minded thinkers) is ironically similar to communist “class analysis” of the
intelligentsia as a stratum of society.
246 showcasing the great experiment
For foreign intellectuals, friendship with the Soviets was a status to be upheld
and perhaps negotiated. For the Soviets, it was part of a broader communist
friend-enemy divide that assumed great importance for their ideology and
practices. Much effort has been devoted to understanding the way Bolshevism
and Stalinism defi ned enemies, for this reveals much about the nature of the
regime and how it compares to others.1 It is also crucial in the context of for-
eign visitors, for the link between internal and external enemies was always
live in early Soviet political culture and became a central, even determinative,
feature of the Great Terror. But the converse—how the regime determined
and treated its friends—has never been perceived as equally revealing. The
two deserve to be taken together. Friends as well as enemies provide one of
the keys to Soviet history, and they were closely related. Perhaps it is fitting to
observe that Carl Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction, the best known political
theory in this context, was created by the radical statism and collectivism of a
“prophet of extremity” in the same interwar conjuncture. 2
Even as the Soviets divided the world into black and white, the categories
of friend and enemy as applied to foreigners could be strikingly contingent.
Friends were almost always treated as potential opponents, but some extreme
right-wing and fascist opponents were treated as possible friends. Like the per-
secution and annihilation of enemies, official friendship assumed monumen-
tal proportions. The greatest Western intellectual sympathizers, having been
transformed into icons in Soviet culture, were translated, censored, domesti-
cated, and controlled to the point at which, on occasion, they could not inter-
fere with their own legends. The classification of friends and enemies was also
an important dimension of the interwar superiority-inferiority calculus, for
friends were guided by the Soviets, and a precondition of true friendship was
the recognition of the superiority of Soviet socialism. Western friends were
embraced with an enthusiasm and even longing that testified to their special
place in the Soviet imagination, yet they could be transformed into enemies
overnight if they publicly repudiated the idea of Soviet superiority. Much can
247
248 showcasing the great experiment
be learned from how civilizations, like individuals, treat their enemies and
friends.
In 1932, a book entitled Through the Eyes of Foreigners translated excerpts
of foreign writings about the USSR to a mass audience of Soviet readers. The
compilation was introduced under a striking title: “Friends and Enemies on
the USSR.”3 The division between friend and foe was pictured, unsurprisingly,
in black-and-white terms. In the practices of Soviet cultural diplomacy, how-
ever, there were in fact many shades of grey. The ambiguities underlying the
ostensibly binary Soviet friend-enemy divide assumed great import for visitors
traveling east. For one thing, Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy treated the intelli-
gentsia as a stratum wavering between the poles of proletariat and bourgeoisie,
so those intellectuals caught in between classes could theoretically gravitate
to the side of the working class. Soviet cultural diplomats exploited this ide-
ological opening. In terms of allocating resources or extending invitations,
officials judged levels of friendship and enmity with statements and publica-
tions about the USSR centrally in mind—and here there were many shades of
grey. In Soviet eyes, foreigners’ status was mutable: friends, of course, could
become enemies, but some enemies could be “neutralized” or even potentially
turn into sympathizers. The result was a quintessentially Soviet mixture of flex-
ible and contingent classifications within a radically Manichean worldview.
The Soviet friend-enemy divide applied to foreigners did not completely
overlap with another cardinal distinction between us and them (svoi/chuzhoi).
Foreigners and non-party intellectuals, even the most ardent of friends, could
never be completely “ours.” Lunacharskii could hail Henri Barbusse in 1927
as nash chelovek, “one of our own”—a brother, friend, and comrade—in part
because he was a Communist Party member and in part because he wanted to
show his personal support.4 More common were the words of Fedor Petrov,
the head of VOKS, when in 1930 he referred to sympathetic visitors who
had indulged in criticisms of the Soviet order: “These kinds of ‘friends of the
USSR’ ”—that is to say, false friends—should no longer be invited to enter
the country, for they “abused that hospitality that is shown to them here.”5
Famously, when André Gide published a book critical of the regime after his
1936 Soviet tour, one of the most celebrated friends of the decade became a
maligned enemy faster than the blink of an eye.
Less well known in the history of Soviet cultural diplomacy are the cases in
which those considered enemies—right-wing nationalists, fascist intellectu-
als, and in rare cases, members of the Nazi Party—were courted and treated
as potential friends. The history of sudden or controversial inversions of the
Soviet friend-enemy divide assumes great interest in light of the fact that there
was a strain of ideological fascination as well as enmity for Bolshevism and
Stalinism on the extreme Right of the political spectrum in interwar Europe.
Going East: Friends and Enemies 249
spoke accent-free Russian, making many contacts in his trips to the USSR in
the late 1920s. His tendency in the early 1930s to view the Soviet Union as an
experiment-friendly model for Germany brought him into confl ict with the
Gesellschaft’s conservative old guard. In fact, Mehnert for a short time became
a radical of the Right: he became an active supporter of the “Left Nazi” Otto
Strasser’s Black Front, formed in 1930 after Strasser was expelled from the
Nazi Party. Although his Soviet experiences and access to Russian culture
were unusual, in terms of this political orientation, it was fitt ing that Mehnert
joined Arplan’s secretariat. According to one account, he was even responsible
for coining the organization’s name.9
The Arplan right-wing revolutionaries themselves, however, unlike the
moderate nationalist Hoetzsch and the vast majority of his group of scholars
and policymakers, went beyond the geopolitical calculations of the Eastern
orientation—they were propelled into contact with the Soviets out of a spe-
cific trajectory of ideological and political interest in Leninism and incipient
Stalinism. The violent anti-Occidentalism of Weimar’s “conservative revo-
lution” was layered onto a Russophilic strain in the intellectual evolution of
German nationalism. Th is was already evident in the early 1920s, given
Oswald Spengler and Moeller van den Bruck’s immersion in Dostoevsky as
they formulated their landmark “new nationalist” theories of “Prussian social-
ism” and the “Th ird Reich.”10 For German revolutionaries of the Right who
yearned to reorient the coming revolution from class to nation, the “proletar-
ian revolution” offered instructive lessons, a phenomenon that extended to
certain Nazi figures and publications. Others within the conservative revolu-
tion went further, openly admiring Bolshevism’s revolutionary vanguardism,
techniques of political violence, and capacity for mass mobilization.11 During
the Great Depression, German-nationalist interest in the Soviet Union broad-
ened to include planned economics and the Five-Year Plan, which lured the
radical Right as a potential model for German economic emancipation from
the West.
In each of these cases, certain nationalist and fascist German figures con-
sistently or episodically expressed praise for Bolshevism rather than the usual
vitriol. As a result, the term National Bolshevism (Nationalbolschewismus),
denoting an attempt to harness the experience of Bolshevism to national and
volkisch goals, was current in Germany from 1919.12 Th is ideological interac-
tion across Left and Right, moreover, was stimulated by a series of precedents
to the 1930–33 policies of which the opening to Arplan was a part: Comintern,
Soviet, and German communist leaders approved the injection of nationalist
slogans into communist propaganda and outreach to nationalism in order to
siphon off support from the fascist Right. These strategic openings occurred
in the crisis moments of Weimar: its rocky start in 1919, the occupation of the
252 showcasing the great experiment
Ruhr in 1923, and its fi nal crisis in the wake of decisive growth of electoral
support for the Nazi Party after 1930.13
The single most important liaison between German and Soviet communism
during all three of these strategic openings to the nationalist Right was the
“revolutionary, diplomat, and intriguer,” Karl Radek. Both in 1919 and 1923,
Radek was the chief Comintern and Soviet architect of engaging German right-
wing nationalists. Fayet, author of the most important biography of Radek,
argues that his motivation in publicly entering into a dialogue with fascist intel-
lectuals in 1923 and praising their martyr, the Ruhr Freicorps leader Heinz zu
Schlageter, was not Leninist flexibility taken to an extreme, but his “permanent
obsession” after 1922 with the danger of fascism. Fayet’s evidence suggests that
Radek placed his hopes not in converting fascist leaders but rather in winning
over some of their troops, just as the Comintern’s “united front” was designed
to lure workers away from Social Democracy.14 There was another factor at
play: revolutionary optimism. In run-up to the abortive “German October” in
1923 and once again at the start of Weimar’s fi nal crisis in 1930, Radek’s line
was based on expectations of imminent revolutionary victory. As the now ex-
Trotskyist Radek capitulated and was readmitted to the party, eagerly promot-
ing himself as Stalin’s “servile pen” and international advisor, he calculated that
fascist forces would need to be neutralized or enlisted in order to bring down
the capitalist state.15 A new German communist tactic designed to court work-
ing-class support from fascist organizations and inject nationalist slogans into
communist propaganda began in 1930, and in March 1931, after the high-pro-
fi le defection of the Nazi army officer Richard Scheringer to the Communist
Party, became known as the Scheringer Course.16 Th is was the direct successor
to the 1923 Schlageter line. In both cases, the communist movement’s efforts to
woo fascist support yielded only modest results.
Compounding the political implications of outreach to the far Right was
the “social fascism” doctrine of the Comintern’s “Left turn” after 1928, which
branded Social Democrats as the main enemy of communist parties and pre-
vented cooperation against the fascist menace. Comfortable with using the
mobilizing power of nationalism through Soviet nationalities policy, Stalin
approved the KPD’s “national populist” policies, especially through his “man
in Berlin,” the KPD Politburo member Heinz Neumann, who spoke Russian
and visited Stalin’s Black Sea dacha at several key moments. The KPD itself,
however, pursued nationalism too hotly for the Comintern, and in 1931, the
Comintern executive committee tried to reign in the KPD’s Scheringer line—
before further outreach to the Right was once again sanctioned in 1932.17
By 1932, Radek had become Stalin’s preeminent German advisor. One
sign of this was the Politburo’s April 1, 1932, approval of Stalin’s initiative to
appoint Radek head of the Central Committee’s new Bureau of International
Going East: Friends and Enemies 253
far Right in 1932 was not publicized, but it used the same methods developed
for pro-Soviet friendship societies and anti-fascist front organizations.
Although Girshfel’d was single-mindedly focused on its right-wing contin-
gent, this represented only about 15 out of Arplan’s membership of more than
50.23 Not only was there a pool of economists, engineers, and other academ-
ics interested in studying the Five-Year Plan, but sitt ing cheek by jowl with
their far-right counterparts was a roughly equal-size group of members on the
Left. In the fervid days of late Weimar, social mixing and to a certain degree
intellectual cross-pollination of the political extremes had become a relatively
common phenomenon in Berlin cafes, circles, and salons. Among the six intel-
lectuals making up Arplan’s “communist fraction” were the Hungarian phi-
losopher and literary critic György Lukàcs; the China scholar Karl Witt fogel;
prominent KPD official German Dunker; and another Hungarian Communist,
Alexander Polgar, working in the Soviet trade representation in Berlin. Arplan
also included a swathe of non-party Marxist figures. Lukàcs, who joined
the Soviet Communist Party during his time in Moscow after 1929 and was
directed to Berlin in summer 1931, was in Moscow in exile from 1933–45.
Along with Witt fogel, Lukàcs also played a role in the behind-the-scenes
direction of a similar organization, the Bund Geistige Berufe [League of
Intellectual Professions], founded in early 1932 as a club for “ideologically
influencing” politically rightist professionals (architects, engineers, teachers,
and so on). The strategy was to keep communist involvement to a minimum
and target figures with an interest in the Soviet Union who were under the
sway of the radical Right and “were unreachable by our mass organizations.”
As with Arplan, Girshfel’d was also the Soviet point man for the Bund Geistige
Berufe.24
The chairman and initiator of Arplan was Friedrich Lenz of the University
of Giessen, a professor of law and economics who was deeply involved in far-
right political activity. Lenz, with his background in political economy, con-
verted from a brand of scholarly socialism to ultranationalism during Weimar,
but he was realist in his exposition rather than irrationalist and völkisch. 25
Another major Arplan rightist, Ernst Niekisch, like a number of other German
national revolutionaries, switched allegiances from the socialist movement;
as a revolutionary Social Democrat in 1919 Niekisch had briefly been chair-
man of the Bavarian Workers’, Peasants’ and Soldiers’ Soviet in Munich. The
French and Belgian occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 prompted his conversion
by the late 1920s to a fusion of extreme nationalism and workerism that made
an alliance with Soviet Russia against the world of Versailles into an idée fi xe.
Niekisch stood fi rst for a hybrid “proletarian nationalism” and then for what
he called “Prussian Bolshevism,” a concept that glorified a putative line from
early modern Prussian military absolutism in Potsdam to the total state in
Going East: Friends and Enemies 255
Moscow, and back again to a future Berlin. 26 By the early 1930s, Niekisch
had developed a racial interpretation of Russian and Soviet history. Lenin (“a
Mischling, half Slav, half Tatar”) was a great nationalist politician, and Stalin a
virile promoter of total mobilization and terror against the “Western” classes
of the population. The carrier of Westernization in the Russian Revolution
was “the Jew,” epitomized by Trotsky, but this tendency had been decisively
replaced by “primordial Russian instincts” (Urinstinkten) of enmity toward
Western Europe. 27
In addition to Niekisch, radical rightists in Arplan included Niekisch’s
friend and political confidante, Ernst Jünger, the icily brilliant loner of the
conservative revolution. Famous from his 1920 glorification of total war in
Storms of Steel, Jünger, who scorned the Nazis as plebeian despite repeated
overtures, published a work in 1932 inspired, in part, by the Five-Year Plan.
Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt [The Worker: Mastery and Form] was “an
elaborate vision of a future totalitarian order mobilized for industrial produc-
tion and destruction,” in which the “worker-soldier” would become the “new
man.”28 Arplan member Hans Zehrer was the leading figure behind the revival
of the journal Die Tat [The Deed] in 1929, boosting its circulation from 1,000
to 30,000 and making it into one of the most widely discussed political jour-
nals of the day; another member, Hugo Fischer, also belonged to the Tat circle.
The group had in common with Niekisch a tendency toward the Eastern ori-
entation and an attempt to transcend Left and Right, although Niekisch and
Zehrer had a falling out. The nationalist intellectuals grouped around Zehrer
developed the concept of Zwischeneuropa, a joint German-Slavic space between
East and West, a notion that provided justification for geopolitical partnership
with the Soviet Union within the framework of the “conservative revolution.”29
Many of these figures from the new nationalist camp, such as Niekisch and
Jünger, were involved in the attempt to combine nationalism and socialism
outside the Nazi Party, a group at the time generally termed “national revolu-
tionaries” to distinguish them from the National Socialists. Others were more
directly involved in the ideological and political world of Nazism, or can be
seen as contributors to the intellectual development of pre-1933 German fas-
cism. Th is contingent was bolstered by Graf Ernst zu Reventlow, a völkisch
social revolutionary who had publicly engaged with Radek in the communist
press during the period of the Schlageter line. Reventlow, who joined the Nazi
Party in 1927, is counted among the so-called Left Nazis, those who took the
socialism in “national socialism” seriously. It should be noted that the mem-
bership of Arplan fluctuated after its founding meeting on July 14, 1931. Other
documents name as Arplan members the legal philosopher Carl Schmitt , later
the court jurist of the Th ird Reich, and the national-revolutionary publicist
Friedrich Hielscher. 30
256 showcasing the great experiment
On the Soviet side, Girshfel’d briefed VOKS on the unusual new German
organization as he helped arrange Arplan’s fi rst activities in Berlin. Girshfel’d
was able to make himself useful to the German group by arranging lectures,
meetings, and teas with Soviet planning and economic officials. At Arplan’s
opening two-day conference in January 1932, and on later occasions, the com-
munist and nationalist intellectuals of Arplan sparred over the applicability of
the Soviet planning model for Germany, the viability of the Soviet economic
model, and how to characterize Soviet intentions in Europe. 31
The VOKS leadership and its German analysts in Moscow were initially
unaware that a new German organization was interested in the planned
economy. Only in the fi rst half of 1932 did they become acquainted with it,
through reports from Girshfel’d. When Shuman, the head of VOKS’s Central
European Section, fi rst studied the list of Arplan members in early 1932, he
appeared confused by the bizarre combination of left-wing and right-wing
intellectuals.
potential German stances toward the Soviet Union in the event of a Nazi rise
to power. Part of Radek’s attempt to establish a direct channel beyond conven-
tional diplomacy between Stalin and the German fascist Right were meetings
between top Soviet officials and German “National Bolshevik” intellectu-
als. For example, in mid-1932, Radek spoke for five to six hours with Arplan
member Adolf Grabowsky, a prominent publicist from Berlin’s Hochschule
für Politik and former member of the Anti-Bolshevik League. Grabowsky
also briefed Foreign Affairs analysts on the orientations of various National
Bolsheviks and, in particular, focused on the Tat circle, from which a number
of Arplan members came. 39 During his time in Moscow as a member of the
Arplan delegation, Niekisch also held a “very detailed” political consultation
with Radek. Niekisch recalled how impressed he was with Radek’s familiarity
with the tendencies of the German Right, and Radek’s intention to deal with
the Nazis even should they come to power.40
The back channel opened to the German Right clearly had an influence on
the calculations of Soviet leaders. In August 1932, Politburo member Lazar'
Kaganovich wrote to Stalin about his readings of transcripts of conversations
between Soviet diplomats in Germany and the Nazi Party member Graf Ernst
zu Reventlow, another Arplan member, as well as the military agent, adven-
turer, and professor of military geography Oskar Ritter von Niedermayer, who
lived in the USSR for eight years as the Wehrmacht’s principal representative
in the covert Soviet-German military collaboration. Niedermayer had invited
the Soviet embassy in Berlin to contact Nazi leader Hermann Göring and
through him build permanent Soviet contacts with the NSDAP. “From the
transcripts it is clear,” Kaganovich assured Stalin, “that even fascist elements
need to trust us, that they are not inclined to disrupt the relations that have
grown between us. Th is, of course, is very important, because, it seems . . . these
elements will remain in power in Germany.”41 Kaganovich’s naive reading of
the cautious inclinations of German fascism toward communism, soon to be
widely branded in the Th ird Reich as “Judeo-Bolshevism,” suggests the dan-
gers for the Soviet leadership of extrapolating from conversations with those
figures most willing to engage the Soviets.
Kaganovich’s att itude fits the broader picture of how Stalin and his lieuten-
ants at the helm of the Comintern and KPD discounted and gravely underesti-
mated the Nazi danger. In 1932, the year Arplan was formed, Nazi strength was
already apparent, but after years of focusing on the “social fascists,” that is the
Social Democrats, hard information on the Nazis was lacking. Many commu-
nist leaders and Soviet diplomats thought they could be easily manipulated. At
the same time, as Hoppe has shown, Stalin appears to have thought highly of
the potential for pragmatic ties between a pro-Soviet, anti-Western Nazi group
that would continue Weimar-Soviet economic and military cooperation.42
Going East: Friends and Enemies 259
to direct the delegation to Odessa, where they showed them the resorts and had
the possibility to swim in the sea, which brought the delegation to ecstasy.”48
Liubchenko boasted about his cleverness in choreographing other aspects of the
visit: the German Marxists were “accidentally” paired with a representative of
the Communist Academy, while the factory owners were steered toward indus-
trialists from the Commissariat of Heavy Industry.49
Liubchenko’s detailed records of conversations with the delegation sug-
gested that his on-the-ground activities were animated by a primary strategy:
drawing out att itudes and observations about the USSR that would be predic-
tive of what the foreigners would report. For example, it was a matter of great
concern that Lenz and Grabowsky visited the German consulate, where there
were many well-informed observers of the dire agricultural and economic
situation. They reportedly returned with negative views of policies forcing
independent farmers into collective farms and the poor harvest. “Finding out
about this, I put the question in conversation so as to see whether the agitation
of the general consul Walter had made a serious impression on Lenz. Lenz did
in fact begin to speak of our difficulties, mentioning the harvest, but nonethe-
less underscored that we do not hide these difficulties.” The hosts’ craving for
favorable reports was very obvious to the guests; how they adjusted their com-
ments shines through clearly in the report. Grabowsky, for example, explained
away his sharp questions on the rights of nationalities in the USSR by claiming
he only asked such questions so as to be able to counter anti-Soviet campaigns
abroad. Liubchenko, in turn, was aware that Grabowsky knew what he wanted
to hear. His verdict: Grabowsky’s att itude was one of clear “animosity,” and the
factory owner Brockhaus was “unquestionably fascist in outlook.”50
In the weeks that followed, the public statements of the returning Germans
were monitored carefully by the Soviet side. In one important matter, the hosts
succeeded: an official Arplan report on the trip, while noting that shortages
made the situation “very reminiscent of wartime conditions,” nonetheless saw
a range of positive developments, such as the clear “raising of the cultural level
of the wide masses.” The healthy faces of the “strong body-builders” in the
physical culture parade (in Leningrad) proved that “famine in Russia has no
place.”51 Even so, the evidence on whether the trip had succeeded was ambigu-
ous enough so that the pre-existing differences on the Soviet side on the utility
of Arplan would continue long after the Germans had returned home.
Lenz, as Arplan’s chairman, realized the importance the Soviets placed
on press reports and clearly hoped to remain on good terms with Gosplan,
VOKS, and other Soviet organizations. 52 After all, Arplan’s continued exis-
tence depended on keeping up relations with these Soviet partners. Harnack,
Arplan’s undercover communist secretary, joined Lenz in assuring VOKS that
the Arplan members had returned with “very positive impressions.”53
262 showcasing the great experiment
Yet there were also clear signs, some picked up by the assiduous “foreign
information” bulletin of TASS, that Arplan delegates were propagating openly
negative and critical impressions from their visit. 54 The head of the Dutch
Arplan, Frijda, who according to the Dutch Society of Friends had previ-
ously been “delighted” by the Five-Year Plan, spoke publicly after his return
of a goods famine, tendentious statistics, and an agricultural crisis threaten-
ing to turn collectivization into a catastrophe. Frijda left the Dutch society,
and VOKS refused to answer his multiple requests for additional literature on
planning. 55 Even Lenz was covered in the German press as speaking in late
1932 to “red student groups” about the “terrible conditions” and “monstrous
hardship” (ungeheure Not) endured by the Soviet population; any comparison
between German conditions and the “monstrous backwardness” of Russia was
impossible. 56
In the case of Arplan, many conventional Soviet methods of cultural diplo-
macy were deployed as part of a highly unconventional, covert operation. What
was unusual was the lengthy behind-the-scenes infighting over policy within
the Soviet camp, which revolved around whether Arplan rightists were potential
friends or irrevocable enemies. The pre-1933 flirtation between the intellectuals
of the German conservative revolution and the agents of Soviet cultural policy in
Germany was thus a highly ambiguous attraction in which both sides attempted
to use the other for its own purposes. Both were at once attracted and repelled by
the other. This was only underscored by the contested 1932 visit of the Arplan del-
egation. The Nazi Revolution would mark a sea change in the relationship, driving
beneath the surface the vestiges of German National Bolshevism and ushering in
the era of Soviet-sponsored anti-fascism.
they were both homosexual or bisexual, both personally close to Gide, and
both informed critics of Stalin’s Russia. 59 Both had an important impact on
Gide’s apostasy, which was shaped by a combination of world view and in-
country experience.
To a certain extent, it is accurate to say that Gide was primarily an aesthete
who, unlike Rolland, the champion of social art, had litt le engagement with
politics before the 1930s. After all, Gide the writer emerged from the Mallarmé
circle of Symbolist poets, and his fi rst fi fteen books were published in small
quantities at his own expense. Even as he launched what amounted to a second
career as a fellow-traveler, producing by his own admission nothing of literary
note for four years after 1931, in part because of his pro-Soviet commitments,
he worried constantly about his “submission to a dogma.” Soviet analysts
who monitored Gide and international literary politics were well aware that,
even after his prominent pro-Soviet statements in the early 1930s, he openly
rejected partiinost’ (party-mindedness) and remained reluctant to make pro-
nouncements on political and economic issues.60 However, Gide had a signifi-
cant history of civic engagements that deeply informed his later relationship
with the Soviets. In this sense, his att raction to Soviet communism had deep
roots in his biography before he became a fellow-traveler.
Like André Malraux and others, Gide approached communism through the
antechamber of anti-colonialism. Long before 1936, Gide had written another
book, called Retour, establishing himself as a travelogue writer of a very different
sort than the pro-Soviet authors. After touring Congo from July 1925 to June
1926, Gide published his Voyage au Congo and Retour de Tchad. His condemna-
tion of the big rubber companies to a large extent marked his social awakening. As
Gide himself recalled in 1937: “As long as I travelled in French Equatorial Africa
accompanied by officials, everything seemed to me little short of marvelous. I
only began to see things clearly when I left the Governor’s car.” Conservative
defenders of colonial Congo in 1926, like his left-wing critics a decade later,
called abuses exceptional, justified the present by comparison to odious condi-
tions before conquest/revolution, and approved everything as a “temporary evil
for the sake of greater good.”61 Indeed, the greatest uproar in 1936 was caused by
Gide’s inclusion of a comparison between the far Right and the far Left: “I doubt
whether in any country in the world, even Hitler’s Germany, thought be less free,
more bowed down, more fearful (terrorized), more vassalized.”62
If Gide’s previous exposé of colonialism figured in his 1936 and 1937
bombshells, an even greater concern coloring his other criticisms of the USSR
remained almost completely buried in those works. In a single footnote in
Retour, Gide deplored the 1936 Soviet law against abortion and the 1934 law
criminalizing male homosexuality, for they ensured that “non-conformity”
would be “hunted down even in sexual matters.”63
Going East: Friends and Enemies 265
well before the trip, he briefed the older writer extensively about issues such as
Soviet living conditions and ordinary workers’ salaries. As someone who had
sexual relationships with Russian men, he also informed Gide about the “odi-
ous” effects of Soviet anti-homosexuality.69
The Dutch communist Last, who also accompanied Gide in 1936, had
discussed the law against homosexuality with Gide and Herbart in 1934,
when he met them at an anti-fascist literary conference. After gett ing his
start a decade earlier as a projectionist and orator screening Soviet fi lms to
crowds of Dutch workers, Last had traveled to the USSR three times, start-
ing in 1930. He had been aware of his own homosexual tendencies since
adolescence, but “to conform to Dutch society he married and sublimated
his homosexuality in, paradoxically, communism.” In February 1935, Gide
invited Last to travel with him to Morocco, hoping the man twenty-fi ve
years his junior would fi nd sexual liberation there the same way Gide had in
his North Africa trip of 1895. During their three weeks of travel, Last was
indeed liberated.70
Gide’s experiences inside the USSR were shaped by his ability to gather a
loyal group of followers, to whom he was teacher and patron, who effectively
replaced those Soviet ambassadors mediating reality to other eminent guests.
The native speaker of Russian, Jacques (Yacha) Schiff rin, was a Jew born in
Baku who had emigrated in 1914, and during the trip he facilitated unofficial
contacts. Gide’s status of friend helped him here as well, for he enlisted Louis
Aragon to help persuade the Soviets to issue Schiff rin a visa.71 In fact, the mem-
bers of his entourage warned Gide about the perils of a guided tour long before
they crossed the border. Last had told him about the endless receptions and
speeches, monitoring, and tendentious translation to which eminent foreign
guests were subjected. “If you go to the USSR on an official visit, as a famous
man, you will be used in the stupidest way,” he wrote Gide. “You will never see
the USSR as it really is.” 72 As a number of sources attest, one of Gide’s motiva-
tions in deciding to travel was to meet Stalin in the misguided belief that Gide
could influence Stalin to ameliorate some of the Soviet Union’s shortcomings,
including the position of homosexuals.73
Gide abhorred crowds and felt an especially visceral revulsion for the con-
straints of a guided tour. From North Africa, he and Last were used to an
expedition model of travel that included spontaneity and sexual adventures.
Soviet intermediaries knew full well that Gide did not want to be overloaded
with official obligations. The Foreign Commission of the Union of Writers,
which was in charge of Gide’s trip, was aware that the famous writer was, in the
words of Apletin, “the kind of person who does not like previously set plans.”
Kol’tsov’s solution had precedents in the history of Soviet cultural diplomacy:
they would plan the necessary spontaneity by arranging for leading literary
Going East: Friends and Enemies 267
figures such as Sergei Tret’iakov, Boris Pil’niak, and Isaak Babel’ to invite Gide
to visit their apartments.74 Despite advance knowledge of Gide’s proclivities,
by the mid-1930s the Soviet system of receiving eminent “friends” was simply
incapable of toning down the pomp and massive scale of the reception. The
Foreign Commission produced “an entire system of preparatory activities” a
month before Gide’s arrival on June 17, 1936, including a campaign to “popu-
larize” Gide’s writings in readers’ conferences and the media, so that Soviets
he met would know his work. Gide was horrified to learn from Herbart that
300,000 postcards with his image had been printed in advance of his arrival:
“But everyone will recognize me!” In general, Soviet hosts got great mileage
from persuading visitors that their works were honored in Soviet culture. In
summer 1934, for example, VOKS arranged for the Museum of Contemporary
Western Art in Leningrad to move the works of French artist Albert Marquet
from storage to prominent places in its permanent collection during the art-
ist’s visit. But to Gide, such flattery was only proof of the political and cultural
centralization that so disturbed him. The rounds of sumptuous banquets,
receptions, and meetings, especially during the party’s time in Moscow, rein-
forced Gide’s conclusions about Soviet conformity and the resurgence of a pet-
ty-bourgeois spirit. Herbart made Gide aware of the secret-police apparatus
that “followed behind us almost everywhere.” 75
Gide’s pronouncements inside the Soviet Union demonstrate that he knew
the rules of the game of Soviet friendship. Initially, he did more than make
the requisite public statements. For example, in a speech at Gorky’s funeral
on Red Square, Gide ostentatiously invoked Stalin’s formula about writers as
engineers of human souls. Gide openly admitted that he, like so many others,
contemplated self-censorship: “Deplorable and unsatisfactory as the state of
affairs in the Soviet Union is, I would have remained silent if I could have been
assured of any faint progress toward something better.” 76 His time in Moscow
in the middle of the trip turned out to be pivotal; that was when Gide appar-
ently made his decision to abandon his status as friend of the Soviet Union.
What changed during Gide’s stay in Moscow? Why did this middle part of the
journey prove to be the time, to use an expression common later during the
Cold War, when the Soviets lost Gide?
Gide’s overscheduled visit in the capital city was also the time when Stalin—
who was well briefed on the private affairs of his interlocutors and almost cer-
tainly knew of Gide’s intention to plead with him on the issue of homosexual
rights—chose not to receive him in the Kremlin. Ironically, given how Gide
wrote about the repulsive nature of the Stalin cult in his book, Stalin’s rebuff
may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back, for Gide would never
be able to influence the revolution’s retreat on the issue he held most dear. By
the time Gide and Herbart met with Boris Pasternak at the writer’s colony in
268 showcasing the great experiment
VOKS guide that in Europe the trial had “deprived the Soviet Union of two
thirds of its supporters.”84 Feuchtwanger was also displeased by the scale of
the Stalin cult and the anti-formalist campaign against the avant-garde, among
other things, but this did not overwhelm his burning desire to continue the
fight against fascism.85 How the confl ict between these fi rmly grounded, yet
contradictory, orientations would play themselves out—in other words, how
he would sort out his positive and negative views of Moscow and in what form
he would express his reservations—would be determined during the course
of his stay. In this sense, Feuchtwanger was not so very different from Gide,
though from the Soviet point of view they ended up on different sides of the
barricades. A prime matter for interpretation, then, involves the extreme itera-
tion of an issue that has run throughout this book: the gap between what the
Western visitor published for the world upon his departure and the views and
interactions recorded on the ground.86
The immediate context for Feuchtwanger’s visit was Gide’s sensational
critique in his 1936 travelogue. Gide returned to France in August, and his
intent to voice significant criticism was known to the Soviets long before
his book was published in December (and rapidly translated for the Soviet
leadership). The Politburo, holding Kol’tsov responsible for Gide’s visit as
head of the Foreign Commission of the Union of Writers, ordered him to
issue a book-length rebutt al. By this time, however, Kol´tsov was off playing
an outsized role on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War. His response
was to organize a visit by Feuchtwanger that would serve the same purpose.
Kol’tsov gained approval for a reception on the lavish scale of Gide’s, and
the Politburo’s special commission of “spin doctors” for the January show
trial of Radek and Georgii Piatakov steered permissions to attend the trial to
two major fellow-travelers, Feuchtwanger and the Danish proletarian writer
Martin Andersen Nexø. 87
The specter of Gide cast its shadow over Feuchtwanger’s entire visit. In gam-
bling on Feuchtwanger’s cooperation, Kol’tsov was playing for high stakes,
for it was known that the exiled German writer had been critical of the fi rst
Moscow trial. Arosev, for his part, hedged his bets. In a transparent attempt
to fi x blame for another potential public relations debacle on Kol’tsov, Arosev
warned Stalin and Ezhov in forceful language that Feuchtwanger could well
become another Gide.88
Although Kol’tsov was by nature a risk taker, behind his decision lay an appre-
ciation of Feuchtwanger as a figure whose primary concerns were anchored to his
Jewish identity and a struggle against National Socialism that predated 1933. The
Foreign Commission’s biography of the “left-bourgeois writer of the older gen-
eration” began with the phrase: “committed anti-fascist,” noting accurately that
it was anti-fascism (rather than any understanding of communism or Marxism)
Going East: Friends and Enemies 271
that prompted him to “stand closer to us than all the German bourgeois writ-
ers.” Indeed, Feuchtwanger’s literary production combined an exploration of
Jewish identity in historical novels with anti-fascism. His 1933 Die Geschwister
Oppermann [The Oppermanns], an explicit rebuttal to Nazism depicting the
clash between fascism and humanism, became the first anti-Nazi novel written
by a German writer in exile. The international popularity of Feuchtwanger’s his-
torical fiction, particularly in England and the United States, increased his value
for the Soviets.89
Kol’tsov had special grounds to believe that Feuchtwanger stood willing to
repudiate Gide. Feuchtwanger was tied to Moscow through the institutions
of international anti-fascist culture and the left-wing literary German emigra-
tion in Moscow. Particularly significant was his co-editorship of Das Wort, the
German-language literary journal in Moscow that aspired to lead the anti-fas-
cist diaspora. Kol’tsov’s trump card was Feuchtwanger’s close relationship with
Kol’tsov’s common-law wife, the writer and journalist Maria Osten. She was
a young German Communist, twenty-nine in 1937, who had helped publish
Gorky’s works in mass German editions before following Kol’tsov to Moscow
in 1932. There, she became deeply involved with the anti-fascist writers’ con-
gresses of the mid-1930s. Almost certainly at the advice and instigation of her
husband, “Madame Kol’tsov” met Feuchtwanger in 1935 at the Paris Congress
for the Defense of Culture, and, as one of the founders of Das Wort, she had
numerous contacts with him starting in early 1936. In the summer of that year,
even before the Gide scandal broke, Osten had sought out Feuchtwanger in
the exile of his luxurious villa in Sanary-sur-Mer in the south of France. In
order to win him over for a Soviet visit, Kol’tsov’s Foreign Commission orga-
nized a large-scale celebration of the writer’s work in Moscow on June 1, at
which Osten also spoke.90
The crucial role Osten played as Feuchtwanger’s most important mediator
is suggested by the archival documentation on his time in Moscow. The core
sources are the extensive reports of Dora Karavkina, the conscientious and
savvy VOKS guide-translator who later translated works by Hermann Hesse
and E. T. A. Hoff mann into Russian.91 Karavkina’s report of December 22,
early in the visit, noted that Feuchtwanger had already prepared his article
responding to Gide for Pravda.92 Producing an ideologically acceptable publi-
cation proved one of the most delicate parts of the journey and a sticking point
in co-opting the visiting writer, however. In private, Feuchtwanger was repeat-
edly willing to use Gide’s negative experience as a way of expressing criticism
of his hosts. As Karavkina reported on December 16:
that he had been told that in our country they do not like criticisms
here especially from foreigners, etc. On Gide I explained to him why
we are indignant: his hypocrisy and that he is now pouring water on
the mill of the fascists. On the last point he completely agreed.93
As this passage suggests, Feuchtwanger was aware of all the things Gide
had criticized: censorship, ideological and artistic conformism, and, not least,
a growing Stalinist superiority complex. The key difference was that he was
determined not to let his reservations jeopardize support for the Soviets in the
alliance against fascism. Feuchtwanger said as much in the introduction to
Moscow 1937: “The Soviet Union is engaged in a struggle with many enemies,
and is receiving only half-hearted support from its allies.” In the conclusion,
he put the “feebleness and hypocrisy” of the European response to fascism
squarely in terms of the East-West problematic. “The air which one breathes in
the West is stale and foul,” he declared. “In the Western civilization there is no
longer clarity and resolution.”94 The resolve he found in Soviet-led anti-fascism
overcame his own lack of clarity when it came to the Soviet domestic order in
the Purge era.
By whom had Feuchtwanger “been told” that the Soviets were especially
sensitive to foreign criticism? As usual for such a visit, the celebrated fellow-
traveler had a heavy schedule of meetings with leading members of the Soviet
intelligentsia, including Il´ia Il´f and Evgenii Petrov, Valentin Kataev, and
Babel’, as well as with German and Hungarian émigrés such as Johannes R.
Becher and György Lukács. Although his handlers, Karavkina and Mikhail
Apletin of the Union of Writers Foreign Commission, strenuously tried to
control access to Feuchtwanger’s room at the Metropol hotel, he was besieged
with visitors. Some fed him damaging information—including the fact that
the Russian translation of his own 1925 historical novel Jud Süss had been
banned for several years.95 Even in 1937, foreign visits could not be completely
stage-managed.
Pravda editor Lev Mekhlis returned Feuchtwanger’s article on Gide with
the request to change several passages, for the original draft included such
taboo formulations as a reference to the “cult” of Stalin. “I explained to him
the essence of the relations of the Soviet peoples with comrade Stalin . . . that
it is completely false to call it a ‘cult,’ ” Karavkina reported. Feuchtwanger,
outraged, refused to make any changes. At this juncture, it was Osten who
played the key role in producing the desired result. As Karavkina described it
on December 22, Osten’s intervention was crucial: “He was furious for a long
time, saying that he would not change anything, but when Maria Osten arrived
he meekly sat down with her at the desk and corrected what she asked, with the
exception of the sentence about ‘tolerance,’ which nothing would make him
Going East: Friends and Enemies 273
throw out.” Osten’s success was clearly only possible because of their close per-
sonal relationship. “Feuchtwanger is very close with her and trusts her.”96
Although Feuchtwanger’s public support for the campaign against Gide and
the show trials immediately made him appear sycophantic to anti-Stalinists,
like so many Western sympathizers Feuchtwanger remained unconsciously
arrogant about the superiority of European culture. As the sensitive Karavkina
critically monitored his interest in learning about Russian-Soviet achieve-
ments, he demonstrated that he was not particularly knowledgeable about
Russian culture: “Feuchtwanger said, supposedly quoting the writers whom
he met here, that in Russia there was never a tradition of painting and there
is none now.” Feuchtwanger, like so many European and American visitors
before him, also equated the inconveniences of Soviet everyday life with an
overall backwardness. “In the morning Feuchtwanger started endless conver-
sations about the inconveniences of life in the Soviet Union and complained
about the service in the hotel, inefficient delivery of the mail and a whole range
of other defects,” Karavkina dutifully recorded. Since, of course, Karavkina
defended everything Soviet, he dubbed her a “local patriot.” In response,
like other guides before her, Karavkina upheld the now-ingrained tradition
of enlightening and instructing the visitor, asserting her own superiority: “I
objected that I am simply better informed about our conditions and consider
it my duty to orient him.”97
Even as he condemned Western civilization for the appeasement of fascism
in Moscow 1937, Feuchtwanger’s own appeasement of Stalinism smacked of
European superiority. Bookended by undiluted statements of allegiance to
the Soviet system, Feuchtwanger’s work explained various flaws of the Soviet
system as the result of its youth and, implicitly or explicitly, its backwardness.
“If a community . . . has risen up from extreme indigence to the beginnings of
prosperity, then it inevitably develops certain petit-bourgeois characteristics,”
Feuchtwanger followed up on Gide’s sharp critique of Soviet philistinism.
Feuchtwanger must have not intended to express condescension, but rather
state the obvious, when he wrote about how easy it was to discover the “mate-
rial and moral defects” of the Soviet Union, followed by the remark that “it is
true that, for a West European, life in Moscow is still by no means comfortable.”
Such implicit assertions of cultural superiority were evident to the Soviets and
were excised in Russian translation. For example, when “The Aesthete in the
Soviet Union,” Feuchtwanger’s Pravda article on Gide, was fi nally published
in the “central organ” after a five-day delay, it praised the totally new culture
created in the USSR. The German-language text in Das Wort more high-hand-
edly referred to a “culture in its infancy.”98 The discrepancies, typical of Soviet
translations of Western commentaries, not only made the Russian-language
version pro-Soviet politically but also had the effect of describing the Soviet
274 showcasing the great experiment
Union as more advanced than was intended. Soviet intellectuals were very
much aware that the celebrated foreign notable issued his praise while looking
downward: he reportedly made himself disliked and was indicted in the Union
of Writers as a carrier of the “Western disease of skepticism.” Feuchtwanger
may have retained his status as friend of the Soviet Union, but on the ground
he left “few friends behind.”99
Ironically, in his conversation with Feuchtwanger on January 8, 1937, Stalin
himself resorted to Soviet backwardness as an explanation for his own cult
of personality. Like Rolland before him, Feuchtwanger made efforts to raise
potentially difficult topics but at the same time accepted all of Stalin’s answers
about the show trials and the intelligentsia’s ability to criticize Soviet reality.
When it came to the “exaggerated and tasteless” forms of “colossal ecstasy”
expressed in praise of Stalin, Feuchtwanger made it clear that the cult was
politically and aesthetically offensive to sympathizers abroad. Always ready
to emphasize his own modesty, Stalin ascribed the hero worship to primitive
behavior, the spontaneous joy of people exploited and oppressed for centuries.
When his interlocutor suggested that Stalin might simply order it stopped, the
dictator pounced: force could never be used to restrict the “freedom to express
opinions.” In his book, Feuchtwanger praised Stalin as the “most unpreten-
tious” of “all the men I know who have power.”100
Feuchtwanger was one of those intellectuals who saw the Soviet domestic
order as an expression of reason and progress, and, hence, an extension of the
Enlightenment tradition—the opposite of the primitive passions and barbaric
anti-Semitism of the Nazi Party. Th is opposition was made explicit in Moscow
1937, in which “reason” was the key indicator of approval of the Soviet social
system and fascism was described as “prejudices and passions in the place of
reason.” Th is, perhaps, was one reason Feuchtwanger objected so viscerally to
the emotional “ecstasy” of the Stalin cult. Feuchtwanger’s positive views about
the scale of the plan to reconstruct the city of Moscow and the privileged posi-
tion of writers and artists in Soviet society can both be seen in the context of
his conception of rational progress.101
Yet, if anything appeared irrational to Feuchtwanger, it was the confes-
sions of revolutionary “spies” and counter-revolutionaries in the show trial
he attended and was expected to justify. The guide, Karavkina, had good
reason to document every shred of doubt Feuchtwanger expressed in order
to illustrate her efforts in the event he became another Gide, but her reports
can be independently verified in the case of Feuchtwanger’s meetings with
Comintern leader Georgi Dimitrov. According to Karavkina, Feuchtwanger
was determined to use his meetings with Dimitrov (whom he met, accompa-
nied by Osten, on December 18 and February 2) to complain about the basic
incomprehensibility of the show-trial confessions. Dimitrov’s diary confi rms
Going East: Friends and Enemies 275
Figure 7.1 Lion Feuchtwanger and Iosif Stalin in Moscow, January 8, 1937. When the
anti-fascist writer expressed distaste for the Stalin cult, Stalin replied that force could
never be used to restrict freedom of expression.
Source: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv kinofotodokumentov (RGAKFD).
West, “the hysterical confessions of the accused seemed to have been extorted
by some mysterious means, and the whole proceedings appeared like a play
staged with consummate, strange, and frightful artistry.” Only while breath-
ing the Moscow air was he was able to believe in the guilt of the accused. That
said, Feuchtwanger termed the confessions of guilt “inexplicable” to “Western
minds.”103 The East-West cultural divide he so strongly felt ultimately served a
profoundly political purpose.
Feuchtwanger was less naïve and more purposeful in his endorsement of
Stalinism and the show trials than commonly understood, but the Karavkina
reports also show him to be innocent of crucial knowledge about Soviet cul-
tural politics circa 1937. He trusted his guide-interpreter so openly that her
reports often noted the specific writer or intellectual who provided him with
information or shaped his opinion, and in the context of 1937, Karavkina’s
fi ngerpointing assumed the character of a Purge-era denunciation. As Stern
has noted, Karavkina sometimes penciled in the names of the “culprits” on the
pages she submitted, which were later underlined and marked up by higher-
ups registering politically important or damaging data.104
Like others before him, this friend of Stalinism engaged in self-censorship.
As Hartmann has shown, in the wake of Kol’tsov’s visit to Sanary-sur-Mer in
May 1937, Feuchtwanger extensively revised the manuscript of Moscow 1937,
especially the parts on Trotsky. The Russian translation was published in a
print run of 200,000 copies.105 Moscow 1937 was already out of date in 1937,
however. The work too openly discussed Western critics of the trials, and even
its criticisms of Trotsky now too flagrantly broke the Soviet taboo of silence in
the rapidly widening vortex of the Great Terror. Within a few months of pub-
lication, Feuchtwanger’s apology for Stalinism was removed from the book-
stores and banned.106
Revolution enjoyed the prestige it did among Left intellectuals. “Only revo-
lution . . . or a revolutionary regime, because it accepts the permanent use of
violence, seems capable of attaining the goal of perfection.”107
The true scale of early Soviet violence was an exceedingly politicized issue,
but foreign residents, diplomats, and even sympathizers could be very well
informed on the nature and scale of Soviet repressive policies.108 At issue was
not merely acknowledgement but also ideological explanation or justifica-
tion. When the friends of the Soviet Union justified political violence, Russian
history and backwardness loomed large. Just as Soviet socialism when emu-
lated elsewhere would acquire a distinctly more human face, so violence was
explainable both in terms of the savage nature of the population and centuries
of autocratic rule. After the Webbs had sailed from London to Leningrad on
the steamer Smol’nyi for a two-month visit, Beatrice wrote in her notebook
that Soviet communism was made out of material “very raw indeed . . . Owing
to this initial backwardness, some features of Soviet Russia will be and remain
repulsive to more developed races.”109 David Engerman has shown the preva-
lence among American Russian experts and observers, many of them far from
any affi liation with communism or even pro-Soviet views, of favorable opin-
ions about Soviet modernization and a justification of its costs, fed among
those with in-country experience by an often visceral disgust for the beastly
peasantry.110 In August 1936, Beatrice Webb met the fi rst Moscow trial with
notes in her diary of torture and lack of judicial due process, but only in the
context of British imperial atrocities done with “an easy conscience.” Indeed,
one of the arguments justifying the brutality of Soviet collectivization in the
Webbs’ book had been to portray it as historically inevitable when compared
to earlier periods of English history, in this case the hardships associated with
the enclosure of the English commons in the late eighteenth and early nine-
teenth centuries. The fi rst Moscow show trial prompted Beatrice to reach back
to a much earlier analogy: “The U.S.S.R. is still medieval in its savage pursuit
of the heretic.”111
The irony that apparently escaped Beatrice Webb when she wrote those
words was that medieval barbarism had become virtually synonymous with
fascism in the anti-fascist culture of the Popular Front. In 1933, the medieval
trope had been furthered in the transnational commentary of German émi-
grés inside the Soviet Union and Europe and was dominant in Soviet commen-
tary as well: “fascist middle ages” was the title of the chronicle of arrests, book
burnings, and imprisonments run in the Soviet journal International Literature
after the Nazi seizure of power.112 The predominance of this analysis of fas-
cism as an anti-modern phenomenon on the Left not only ignored all modern
aspects of fascism but also made National Socialism appear as a throwback
to past barbarism rather than an unprecedented novelty. In one of the many
278 showcasing the great experiment
of consequential “measures taken” in his own personal life, and the incident
haunted him later in life. Koestler attempted not only to speak Bolshevik but
also to go Bolshevik. While on an ensuing five-month trip to Central Asia
in 1933, he befriended the American poet Langston Hughes, who recalled
Koestler’s fascination watching a political trial in Ashkabad. “I guess that was
the beginning of Darkness at Noon,” wrote Hughes.115 He might have added
The God that Failed. The closer a sympathizer was to the Party or the politi-
cal culture of communism, the more likely he was to attempt to internalize
Bolshevik conspiratorial ruthlessness rather than uphold the 1930s taboo
on acknowledging political repression that followed Gorky’s writings on
Solovki.
Upholding Bolshevik ruthlessness, however, was entirely possible without
any cultural exchange, proximity to the Party, or going native. Early Soviet
political culture may have provided the inspiration in all these cases, but the
basic ethical underpinnings on which Bolshevik ideology itself rested—the
revolutionary doctrine that the ends justified violent means—was grounded
squarely in European social democracy and revolutionary thought, easily
accessible by independent political thinkers of many colors. Of the fellow-
travelers, Bernard Shaw demonstrates this best. In his unpublished 1932–33
Rationalization of Russia, a work that anticipated his justification of violence
in his plays of the next several years, Shaw included an entire section on exter-
mination, almost gleefully employing the metaphor of “weeding the garden.”
Like Beatrice Webb, Shaw normalized Stalinist extermination with reference
to the history of Western atrocities: “Cromwell saw that the extermination of
the Irish was a logical part of the policy of sett ling Ireland with English planta-
tion . . . The red man has been exterminated in North America almost as exten-
sively as the bison.” In Shaw’s extended justification of mass killing, Fabian
social engineering rested on utilitarian social calculation: “Our question is not
to kill or not to kill, but how to select the right people to kill.” At the same time,
Shaw’s brief trip to the USSR in 1930 encouraged him to adopt a distinctively
Bolshevik inflection to this utilitarian credo. Anyone who opposed the collec-
tive must be “liquidated as vermin” and this was “inevitable and irremediable
under the stern morality of Communism.”116
In the introduction to his 1933 play On the Rocks, Shaw included an unchar-
acteristically earnest lecture that developed his thoughts on political violence.
Cruelty for its own sake was not right, he avowed, and for a new model, “sooner
or later all countries will need to study OGPU.” Modern killing must become a
“humane science instead of the miserable mixture of piracy, cruelty, vengeance,
rare conceit, and superstition it now is.”117However, in a sequel to On the Rocks
entitled The Simpleton of Unexpected Isles, completed in 1934, Shaw’s rational
science of killing was transformed into a terrible chorus, as all the characters
280 showcasing the great experiment
Figure 7.2 Paul Robeson greeting Sergei Eisenstein in Moscow, January 11, 1934. The
emotional att achment the American singer and actor felt to the socialist homeland was
fueled by cultural Russophilia and the absence of racism he felt during several visits
between 1934 and 1938. Source: RIA Novosti Photo Library.
between 1934 and 1938, Robeson impressed VOKS official Isidor Amdur
with his view of Russian folk songs as reminiscent of African music. Amdur
reported that “of all European languages Russian, in his words, is the closest
to the negro language, since it is precisely the Russian language that is closely
tied to the East.”130 Robeson developed a theory of the universality of folk
music grounded in the pentatonic scale, something Baldwin has referred to
as his “own fiction of universality.” In other words, Robeson’s cultural mission
in promoting and performing folk music fit like a glove with his appreciation
for Soviet nationalities policy as preserving national cultural traditions while
promoting internationalism. VOKS materials on Robeson’s visit in 1935 con-
fi rm his special interest in Soviet nationalities policy, which, as he euphorically
accepted in talks on the achievements of the union republics and meetings with
ethnographers, allowed for equality of peoples at the same time as minorities
could develop and preserve their own cultures.131
Robeson was far from the only foreign visitor to develop this kind of vis-
ceral, emotional attachment to the land of victorious socialism. Zdeněk
Nejedlý, the Czech professor of musicology and head of the Czechoslovak
friendship society, developed such a strong bond to the land of socialism as
a model and “teacher” that, after visiting the Bolshevo commune, he tried to
convert two Turkish specialists to the view that the Soviet Union was “our
best friend.” The same summer of Robeson’s 1935 visit, Nejedlý linked the
284 showcasing the great experiment
nostrum of the revolutionary homeland as new and young to his own personal
rejuvenation, announcing that each time he visited he became ten or twenty
years younger.132
If the wayward foes and wayward friends examined in this chapter—the
Arplan rightists, Gide, Feuchtwanger—had anything in common, it was that
they all harbored unsett ling reservations about Stalin’s Soviet Union even as
they weighed whether to embrace it. On the other hand, Robeson and Nejedlý,
two very different figures in their backgrounds and motivations, personally
identified with the notion of an internationalist homeland, or a reconcilia-
tion of the national and the international. On the strength of these emotional
attachments, they remained loyal to their home away from home, through the
Purges and the Pact and for decades to come.
8
285
286 showcasing the great experiment
history of mankind,’ and ‘only in our country’ would prove to be among the
most frequent.”2
The new willingness to trumpet Soviet superiority over the rest of the
world was a far-reaching phenomenon far broader than agitprop. It became
engrained in Socialist Realism and popular culture; the fi red-up young enthu-
siasts of the 1930s generation were thirsting for revolutionary achievements
of their own. They formed part of what became known as the “fi rst Soviet
generation”—itself depicted as “new” and “unprecedented.”3 At the same
time, NKVD reports on popular reactions to press coverage and extensive
workplace discussions of international affairs noted cynical jokes about the
slogan of overtaking the West: “When we catch up, can we stay there?” What
is more, observers have noted among the elites a covert and oft en exaggerated
respect for things foreign. Th is remains true even later, at the apogee of the
nativist condemnation of “foreignness” (inostranshchina) during the Zhdanov
period.4 When the pendulum had fi nally swung back again and the Soviet
Union during the Thaw once more needed to learn from the advanced West,
Ilya Ehrenburg reflected on the dialectical nature of Stalinist aggrandize-
ment: “Unending talk about one’s superiority is linked with groveling before
things foreign—they are but different aspects of an inferiority complex.”5 In
some respects, the two were part of the same ideological worldview: Péteri
has referred to “the inevitable oscillation between two diametrically opposite
states of mind among the Leninist modernizing elite of a relatively backward
country: the hubris of systemic superiority on the one hand, and the admis-
sion of the developmental (economic, social, and cultural) inferiority.”6 In the
late 1930s and under late Stalinism, that admission for a time became rare,
even taboo.
We are faced, therefore, with a paradox, one that to a certain extent con-
founds any analysis of Stalinism and what it changed after 1928–29. On the
one hand, in terms of the reception of foreigners, the “second revolution” in
many ways involved merely shifts and modifications of the 1920s system, not
radical transformations. In terms of att itudes, representatives of the bour-
geois world were already sources of both heightened opportunity and grave
suspicion from the fi rst years after the revolution. On the other hand, pre-war
Stalinism involved some of the most ostensibly abrupt reversals imaginable
toward the outside world: after the height of the carefully cultivated Soviet
appeal to Western Europe and the United States during the Popular Front,
the international contacts and influence that had brought prestige suddenly
became the basis for mass physical annihilation as VOKS and the organs of
Soviet cultural diplomacy were decimated during the Great Terror. The anti-
fascism so ingrained in the mid-1930s was fi rst undermined during the Terror,
then shockingly reversed with the Nazi-Soviet Pact.
R ise of the Stalinist Superiority Complex 287
One common way of explaining the shifts and reversals of the 1930s is to
simply ascribe all causal change to the dictator and his henchmen, for it was
they who started the Purges and signed the Pact. Yet, this begs the question
of how the leadership arrived at its decisions and how Stalin responded to piv-
otal developments in the evolution of the Soviet system. At the same time, the
dramatic and rapid changes in the Soviet domestic order and in the interna-
tional arena in the 1930s had a deep impact on practices and att itudes built up
for many years. In the fi nal analysis, Stalin was also a creature of the system
that he shaped; his henchmen operated within the system’s considerable con-
straints. Why, then, did such very different phases of the Soviet system occur
under his rule?
The Stalin Revolution comprised four substantially different phases: the
Great Break of 1928–31, the mid-1930s stabilization of 1932–36, the Great
Purges of 1936–39, and the post-Purge period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of
1939–41. The movement between these very different subperiods is of cru-
cial importance, especially the way these subperiods accompanied radically
different stances toward the outside world. For, as in the 1920s, the external
and internal dimensions of the Soviet system remained very tightly linked,
and each of the four periods had its international counterpart. Most notably,
the militant and iconoclastic proletarianization campaigns of the Great Break
corresponded with the sectarian stances associated with the “third period” of
the Comintern; the post-iconoclastic, mid-1930s stabilization of “socialism
achieved” corresponded with the height of Soviet anti-fascism and the flex-
ibility of the Popular Front, in many ways facilitating the heyday of Western
att raction to the Soviet order.
Any theory of a simple, anti-internationalist volte-face applied to the 1930s
glosses over the fact that Stalin-era culture—at least until the Great Terror—
remained extensively engaged with the Western world. Stalinism writ large is
commonly associated with a repudiation of internationalism and the incorpo-
ration or fusion of communist ideology with ethnic Russian nationalism, itself
closely associated with Nicholas Timasheff ’s famous thesis of a “Great Retreat”
from revolutionary goals toward a conservative social order. In this context,
the promotion of Soviet superiority might be seen as a function of the mid- to
late-1930s campaigns for Soviet patriotism, rehabilitation of the tsarist past,
and “official Russocentrism.” David Brandenberger’s study of these campaigns
implied as much, noting how “the sense of distinctiveness associated with
nationhood often endows constituents with a sense of belonging to a ‘supe-
rior’ or ‘elite’ group.”7 The Soviet superiority complex represents more than an
injection of nationalism into communist ideology, however. Katerina Clark
refers to a “great appropriation,” rather than a Great Retreat, in which 1930s
culture reworked elements from the past and from “world culture” in a bid to
288 showcasing the great experiment
turn Moscow into the capital of a world order conceived along various inter-
national axes, so that patriotism and cosmopolitanism were not incompatible.
Many Soviet intellectuals channeled this endeavor into a pursuit of cultural
primacy in their world, Europe, while the party leaders, declaring superiority
in all realms, were moved to compete in the cultural sphere as well. 8
International engagement—the height of which corresponded to the hey-
day of the Western pilgrimage of the interwar years—thus accompanied the
rise of the Stalinist superiority complex in the same period. The key point is
that ambitious Soviet international activity, even while drastically different
from the anti-foreign spy mania of the Terror, was itself deeply committed to
the promotion of Soviet superiority as culture moved to the center of Soviet
claims to global pre-eminence. In other words, both the politics of interna-
tional engagement and the politics of anti-foreign isolationism in the 1930s
helped develop a more robust superiority complex, but the ways in which they
did so were different. One attempted to promote Soviet hegemony through
state-sponsored engagement; the other strove to isolate through vigilance
against conflated foreign and domestic foes.
The manner in which forces on each side intersected and clashed is thus
key to understanding the Stalinist 1930s and the ultimate, Pyrrhic victory of
extreme isolationism and autarky. As this suggests, “Stalinism” itself is best
understood as a volatile and often contradictory mix; decisive shifts occurred
only when major developments changed the relations among its component
strands. Among the competing tendencies of the 1930s, one of the most notable
was the sharpening clash of hegemony versus vigilance in the Soviet approach
to the outside world.
achievements. All in all, VOKS’s Amdur gushed that 1935 was the year of a
significant “breakthrough.”11
The heyday of Soviet cultural diplomacy in the mid-1930s was predicated
on receptivity to the Soviet message among new groups of potentially sympa-
thetic Western figures and a broader and more flexible Soviet desire to reach
them. Popular Front coalition politics legitimized outreach to non-commu-
nist left ists abroad, but Popular Front tactics, which began only in 1934, were
themselves made possible by the domestic muting of sectarian struggle and
the campaign mode after 1931–32. In other words, Comintern policy was itself
partially the consequence of the repudiation of the Great Break in domestic
cultural politics, and there was a direct link between the two.
Nothing demonstrates the tight interconnection between internal Soviet
and external communist cultural politics better than the literary arm of
the Comintern, the International Organization of Revolutionary Writers
(MORP), which was founded in 1930. The literary figures in Moscow who
led MORP—largely Central European émigrés—directly modeled them-
selves on the Soviet proletarian-writers movement and specifically RA PP, the
Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, the most powerful of the Great
Break cultural organizations that so deeply imprinted the culture of the Five-
Year Plan with infighting and militant proletarianization. MORP upbraided
non-communist foreign sympathizers much as RA PP’s proletarianizers
harshly att acked the non-party intelligentsia within the Soviet Union, and
MORP leaders feuded with the Communist Henri Barbusse for his attempts
to create a more heterodox coalition. The liquidation of RA PP, a signal event
paving the way for a repudiation of Great Break sectarianism and a general
shift within Soviet culture in 1931–32, combined with the influx of German
émigré writers into MORP to transform it in 1932–34 into an organ of anti-
fascism and a professional, extensively organized arm of cultural diplomacy
in literature.12
A watershed moment in the development of Soviet culture came with the
fi rst Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers, the paradigmatic Stalin-era cul-
tural organization that unified the warring factions of the earlier era and set the
course for all to rally under the banner of Socialist Realism. At the same time,
the 1934 Congress was an international event. Mixing with the 600 Soviet
writers and top political figures who were delegates to the Congress were 43
foreigners representing a who’s who of left ist literary friends and sympathiz-
ers including Louis Aragon, Johannes R. Becher, Jean-Richard Bloch, Oskar
Maria Graf, and André Malraux. Their presence cemented the predominance
of literary figures as the foreign friend par excellence.13 It was also at the Writers’
Congress, as Boris Frezinskii has shown, that a complicated circulation of
ideas occurred that planted the seed for the great Soviet-sponsored writers’
R ise of the Stalinist Superiority Complex 291
poets and writers with international reach such as Boris Pil’niak and Boris
Pasternak.19
The outset of the Popular Front period in 1934 coincided with the appoint-
ment to VOKS of Aleksandr Arosev, who energetically attempted to parlay
the new possibilities for Soviet cultural diplomacy into a higher stature for his
organization. Arosev’s doubts and insecurities were matched by keenly felt
political ambitions and a longstanding alliance with the Stalinist wing of the
Party dating to the mid-1920s. Arosev repeatedly turned to Stalin to help ren-
ovate VOKS, using his old friendships with Molotov, Ezhov, and other party
leaders whenever possible. He faced an uphill batt le. VOKS, no longer under
attack for its focus on the intelligentsia, had nonetheless lost a good deal of
prestige since the 1920s and appeared to Arosev a clear demotion from his
ambassadorial days. He yearned for a new diplomatic posting in Paris, but this
discontent stimulated him all the more to succeed as head of VOKS.
Plagued by his personal doubts about Soviet culture and the West, Arosev in
the mid-1930s fi red off a barrage of proposals to redeem VOKS’s standing: to
increase the qualifications of its cadres, to give it a clear-cut stature in the state
(in 1936, he proposed subordinating VOKS to Sovnarkom), and to boost its
place in the hierarchy through the Central Committee, proposing for the pur-
pose to convene an “authoritative commission on foreign cultural relations.”
Arosev dreamed that VOKS would be granted a monopoly claim on managing
international cultural relations from on high, just as Intourist’s monopoly on
foreign tourism was solidified in 1936. A newly empowered VOKS, he wrote
with bombast to Stalin, would provide “political verification” of all cultural
currents flowing in from outside Soviet borders. Arosev used the argument
that his agency was neglected to lobby for an increase in his own stature and
privileges—for example, in his bid to build a dacha at the writer’s colony in
Peredel’kino.20
Arosev never convinced Stalin or other leaders to upgrade VOKS to a
monopoly in the realm of cultural diplomacy. His ambitious flurry of activity,
however, set the stage for his agency to take advantage of the great new oppor-
tunities of the Popular Front. Like other Soviet cultural institutions involved
in the international arena, the organization committed to wooing foreign
intellectuals had banner years in 1935 and 1936. Lists of foreign intellectuals
from this period who “actively” collaborated with VOKS in cultural relations
expanded to include not only the most visible fellow-travelers, like Rolland and
Bloch, but also architects, artists, pedagogues, and scientists. A 1936 wish list
of foreigners to be invited to visit the USSR reflected the ambitious scope of
the new conjuncture; it included the radical American historian Charles Beard
and actor Charlie Chaplin, whose 1936 assembly-line fi lm “Modern Times”
was hailed as a “great turn to the left .”21
294 showcasing the great experiment
Arosev’s steady stream of proposals to Stalin and the Politburo can also
be read for fascinating clues about the embrace by both cultural and politi-
cal elites of a newly prominent 1930s international cultural agenda. Popular
Front-era outreach was fueled by the new Soviet interest in promoting cul-
ture as a sign of systemic superiority, for the culture of showcases was now
aimed not to point to the bright future of socialism but to turn Moscow into
an internationally dominant beacon of socialist culture. Th is new ethos was
apparent in the writings of Arosev, despite his confl icted identity as an Old
Bolshevik whose att itudes toward the Europe he had known in his many
years abroad frequently bordered on reverence. As he put it, VOKS would not
merely, as before, display to foreigners the concrete achievements of Soviet
“cultural construction”; it would secure recognition among wide circles of
the West European intelligentsia of the historical superiority of the socialist
culture created in the USSR. In a 1935 bid to persuade Stalin to put VOKS at
the head of the commercially powerful Intourist, Arosev announced that the
rival organization discredited the country even as its successes were making it
into the “cultural center of the world.” 22 The superiority complex had found its
expression in cultural diplomacy. Arosev may well have harbored hopes that
a program formulated in terms of cultural domination might in fact expose
the Soviet side to beneficial exchange with the left ist West European culture
that he admired.
Although cultural interaction and intellectual travel between the United
States and the USSR picked up noticeably after the United States recognized
the Soviet Union diplomatically in 1933, it is noteworthy that America, how-
ever important an alternative to Europe as a second site of advanced modernity,
was still left out in such formulations by Arosev and other Soviet intellectu-
als involved in cultural diplomacy. The most influential Soviet text on the
United States in this period was Il’f and Petrov’s One-Story America, a rich,
complex, and often sympathetic account of the two satirists’ 1935 road trip.
But even there, American work efficiency led the list of features praised, while
American culture was depicted as decidedly puerile: “There are a lot of annoy-
ingly childish and primitive traits in the people’s character. But the most inter-
esting childlike quality, curiosity, is almost absent among Americans.” Even
some of the most pro-American sentiments expressed by a Soviet politician
in the period—the gushing 1936 missive from food supply and trade commis-
sar Anastas Mikoian in the middle of a three-month U.S. visit to Henry Ford
and industrial sites—almost ritually invoked a lack of “culturedness” among
American experts: “There is much they do not know, they are limited people,
but they know their own area, their narrow speciality, wonderfully.” Mikoian
felt nothing out of place in expressing these sentiments to perhaps the most
poorly educated and least literate member of the Soviet leadership, the brutal
R ise of the Stalinist Superiority Complex 295
in 1936. The effects of the vigilance campaign were felt at Intourist as well,
which experienced limitations in issuing visas to foreigners as early as 1935
and a purge of “alien elements” the same year.25
At the same time that the internationalist fervor surrounding the Spanish
Civil War reached the height of mass popularity in the USSR, party campaigns
with Russocentric overtones began rehabilitating prerevolutionary and tsarist
heroes. Amid these contradictory signals in 1935–36, even savvy Soviet elites
were hard pressed to discern the emerging party line.26 In the mid-1930s, the
divided perception of foreigners also escalated within Soviet cultural out-
put itself, leading to the propagation of diametrically opposed portrayals, as
recent students of cinema have suggested. On the one hand was the figure of
the sympathetic foreign visitor who is enlightened and converted, culminating
in Grigorii Aleksandrov’s 1936 Circus; on the other hand, far more numerous
in the 1930s were depictions of foreigners as evil characters or masked foreign
agents. Vigilance against spies was already a live issue not only in popular cul-
ture but in cultural diplomacy. As early as March 1935, whether he believed
it or not, Arosev cited to Stalin the increased likelihood of foreign spies pen-
etrating Soviet space under a “friendly mask” as an argument for hiring better-
qualified VOKS cadres.27
Arosev yearned for powerful patrons, but was hemmed in as the cultural
politics of the 1930s increasingly centralized decision making on international
initiatives in the hands of the Central Committee and the NKVD. The old
problem of delays and restrictions resulting from the need to hunt for high-
level bureaucratic approval reappeared. In 1936, even relatively minor VOKS
events, such as lectures by a British art historian already approved for Soviet
entry by Foreign Affairs, required special sanction by the Central Committee.
As “the famous and highly influential English economist” John Maynard
Keynes prepared to give a talk in Moscow in August 1936, on the recommen-
dation of the Soviet ambassador to Britain, Ivan Maiskii, Arosev needed to
secure Central Committee approval even to instruct the audience to treat him
with “kid gloves” rather than respond with harsh rebuttals in the question-
and-answer session.28
The campaign Ezhov launched in 1935 against foreign influences was con-
nected to the cultural politics in the period 1936–38 through the meteoric
rise of the figure at the forefront of the anti-formalist campaign, Platon
Kerzhentsev. Like Arosev, Kerzhentsev was an Old Bolshevik intellectual
with a cosmopolitan European diplomatic past. But if Arosev was a Stalinist
Westernizer who wished to join Soviet culture with Europe’s, Kerzhentsev
allied himself unambiguously with the security interests of the NKVD on
the cultural front. Kerzhentsev became chief architect of the anti-formalist
campaign, launched with the sensational attack on Dmitrii Shostakovich’s
R ise of the Stalinist Superiority Complex 297
opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” in his unsigned January 28, 1936, Pravda
article, “Muddle Instead of Music.”29 By so doing, he helped to launch a new
period of militant ferment on the cultural front that repelled Western intel-
lectuals who were att racted to the Soviet avant-garde. Kerzhentsev’s rapid
accumulation of power, partly a function of the anti-formalist campaign, was
also, in part, a salvo against the Central Committee’s Department of Culture
and Enlightenment on behalf of his own new All-Union Committee for Arts
Affairs. Th is agency derived its rising power from the fact that Kerzhentsev
was spearheading an effort important to the Stalin cult, the unification of the
images of Stalin in non-print media (theater and fi lm). As Leonid Maksimenkov
has shown, Kerzhentsev’s alliance with the security organs led him to make
tactical errors that ultimately led to his downfall. For example, he opposed
international travel without appreciating its foreign-policy significance. In one
instance of this, he tried to veto Soviet participation in a ballet on the Paris
Commune, a performance important to Soviet cultural diplomacy during the
Popular Front. He was overruled by Stalin. 30
During this time, Arosev got caught in the cross-fi re over precisely this
issue of VOKS’s promotion of international travel and cultural exchange.
Kerzhentsev lashed out against Arosev on the pretext that he had made irre-
sponsible promises to art figures about Soviet participation in European
exhibitions without fi rst clearing them with him, the new power broker. The
embatt led Arosev sharply defended VOKS’s successes in international exhibi-
tions, denying that Kerzhentsev’s Arts Committee had any authority to med-
dle in that arena. 31 As this episode suggests, Kerzhentsev viewed international
cultural contacts as a convenient weapon as he tried to ride the crest of the
crackdown in the “Stalinist cultural revolution.”32
In early to mid-1936, the arrest and persecution of former party opposition-
ists increased dramatically, sett ing the stage for the fi rst of the great show trials
that August. Given the well-worn ideological connections between internal
and external enemies, this had the effect of increasing the political and secu-
rity tensions for those involved in international affairs as well. For VOKS,
Central Committee oversight became increasingly difficult to manage. In May
1936, Arosev sent to Ezhov lists of all foreigners invited by VOKS the previ-
ous year, as part of a Politburo requirement to review categories of foreigners
deemed “dangerous to the USSR.” In a separate missive, Arosev appealed to
his old Civil War comrade personally: “The entire situation as well as direct
party directives on increased vigilance in our cultural ties abroad, as you
know, demands from me the most exact coordination of almost every VOKS
activity with the Central Committee, Foreign Affairs, the NKVD, and other
organizations.” Confi rming that Ezhov was behind the crackdown, he added:
“It was precisely from you that a whole range of directives to me originated
298 showcasing the great experiment
about increased vigilance and warning against attempts to use VOKS by hos-
tile elements.”33
Long before the Purges actually hit, Arosev felt a noose of “distrust” tight-
ening around him personally. Love interfered with politics as Arosev’s sec-
ond wife, Gertrude (Gertrud Adol’fovna) Freund, became a liability in the
mid-1930s. Arosev had married Gertrude, a Czechoslovak ballerina of Jewish
background twenty years his junior, during his time in Prague. She took Soviet
citizenship but traveled back to Prague frequently in the mid-1930s to visit her
mother. Arosev encountered intensifying suspicions about his intimacy with a
“foreign woman” and his fears about his standing in the Party became focused
on xenophobic reactions to his marriage. In December 1935, he wrote Ezhov
from Paris, asking for permission for Gertrude to travel abroad to meet him
with their infant son. She was denied. In April 1936, she was denied again,
and Arosev wrote to Stalin as his “only justice,” pleading to remove this “unde-
served stain.” According to Arosev’s daughter, Ol’ga Aroseva, suspicions about
Gertrude in party circles were raised by the couple’s age difference and the fear
that she might have come to Moscow for reasons more sinister than amorous
devotion to the pudgy intellectual. 34
By August 4, 1936, two weeks before the opening of the show trial of the
“Trotskyist-Zinovievite Center,” Arosev’s travel requests for Gertrude had
again been refused without explanation. Using the lingo of the cult, the Old
Bolshevik appealed to “my leader and teacher” Stalin to relieve his “great inter-
nal depression.” His wife, he maintained, was “to her core one of us, a non-party
Bolshevik, but because she is a foreigner it is easier to act poorly toward her.”
The most difficult thing for him to bear was that he received neither an answer
to his pleas nor punishment—increasingly anguished, he appealed repeatedly
to Stalin. “What kind of life can come from this at work and in my family?”
Arosev ended his plea with an extraordinary statement that almost defiantly
affi rmed what he himself so often doubted—Soviet supremacy in the face of
the traditional Russian-Soviet inferiority complex about the West:
When certain comrades say, as it were, look, his wife often travels
abroad . . . it has the sound of that servility toward the outside world
we are fighting against. Why don’t they speak in the same tone of
reproach: ah, how often you travel to Kaluga! In fact we, our coun-
try is higher and better and cleaner and let Europeans and Americans
among themselves grow envious over who travels to the USSR. 35
Arosev’s agony was but one manifestation of the growing fear of foreign
penetration of Soviet security during the mid-1930s that, ironically, coin-
cided with the peak of Soviet international success. A key component of the
R ise of the Stalinist Superiority Complex 299
The Nazi book burnings were public rituals; the Soviet book burnings were
secret manifestations of the Party’s infallibility, carried out by surreptitiously
hauling truckloads of printed materials away to be destroyed. The factory
“Kleituk” figures in the documents as the location where literary materi-
als from VOKS were liquidated. Among the English-language books sent to
the factory in March 1936 for destruction were issues of the Left Review, The
Nation, The New Republic, The Statesman and Nation, The New York Times Book
Review, The Harvard Lampoon, and even Soviet publications directed abroad,
such as Soviet Russia Today. In April, three more truckloads of VOKS-held pub-
lications were destroyed. At the same time, access to foreign publications was
further restricted among analysts. In 1936, the quantity of materials received
and processed by VOKS’s own Secrets Department had climbed an estimated
30 to 50 percent over 1934–35. The workload of the department had risen so
much that salary increases for its overburdened workers were requested—and
a copy of the request sent to the NKVD. A laconic note on one of the lists
records that the foreign publications were disposed of “by means of burning.”45
It was no longer enough to quarantine or restrict tainted words and images.
In a kind of Stalinist extraterritoriality, diplomats at the Soviet embassy in
London also burned material on condemned oppositionists from the library of
the supposedly independent cultural friendship society, and foreign newspa-
pers and journals at VOKS continued to be incinerated during the fateful year
1937.46 As Heine predicted, a year after the Party began to incinerate foreign
literature, it turned to the mass destruction of people.
could be received that Feuchtwanger’s visit earlier in the year could scarcely
have been repeated.
Natal’ia Semper, the VOKS guide, recalled the day in January 1937 when
the analyst Shpindler did not show up for work. Like so many others promoted
quickly to replace purged cadres, the twenty-five-year-old Semper agreed to
take his place with “joy in my heart.” But others quickly followed: “A person
disappeared, and his co-workers observed a significant silence and soon forgot
him.” Semper professed no knowledge in those days about life in the Gulag
or what happened after arrest. But she would never forget the “agitation and
pain” written on the face of the soon-to-be-purged Arosev after he emerged
from the 1937 VOKS general assembly at which he had been “worked over,”
bombarded by accusations and denunciations in the militant Purge-era style
that revived earlier incarnations of revolutionary activism with a deadly, xeno-
phobic twist.48
Despite his childhood friendship with Molotov, Arosev was a perfect can-
didate for purge: a proud member of the soon-to-be decimated Bolshevik “old
guard” with a checkered diplomatic past and a foreign wife, not to mention innu-
merable contacts abroad. At the end of 1936, fearing ominous signs of distrust
around him, Arosev had already written in his diary of his own demise: “Life,
like a book, suddenly slams itself shut.” The annus horribilus 1937 began at the
foreign-relations society with a January “verification” of all employees, which
determined that 22 of 115 staff members had relatives abroad and that some
had been employed with recommendations from party members since purged
and discredited. The noose continued to tighten around Arosev for half a year.
In typical fashion, the Purge-era upheaval at VOKS began by singling out one
figure who had been a former oppositionist, but expanded in the spring and
summer of 1937 into tangled, vitriolic attacks “from below” against the leader-
ship and any and all ideological, fi nancial, and other workplace irregularities
that could serve as ammunition in the frenzy. Around this time, his daughter
recalled, Arosev suddenly had a lot of free time. The telephone did not ring,
and high-level assignments no longer came down from the party leadership.
Shortly before his arrest in July 1937, an agitated Arosev called Molotov on the
telephone (his daughter Elena witnessed the call): “Viacha, I ask you to tell me,
what should I do?” Two times Molotov hung up the phone; two times Arosev
called back. Finally, an answer came: “Make arrangements for the children.”49
Much later, in the early 1970s, Molotov claimed to have no specific knowledge
when asked why his “very close comrade” was repressed. “He could have been
indicted for only one thing: he could have somewhere thrown around some
sort of liberal phrase . . . He could have gone after some sort of woman (za baboi
kakoi-nibud’), and she . . . There was a struggle going on.” On February 8, 1938,
Arosev was sentenced to death by a troika after having denied all guilt. The
302 showcasing the great experiment
sentence was carried out two days later, most likely in the usual way, with a
shot to the back of the head. 50
The era of mass purging that began in 1937 essentially led to the end of Soviet
interwar cultural diplomacy and the remarkable era of intensive Western inter-
est in visiting the great experiment. Internally, the show trials and spy mania
of the Purge era drastically undercut the position of Soviet cultural diplomacy
and outreach to the outside world, which had always been engaged in a delicate
balancing act with ideological hostility toward the bourgeois West. Although
the Stalin era had begun by heightening the anti-Western element in the late
1920s with a war scare and deepening ideological linkages between interna-
tional and domestic enemies, the campaigns of the Great Break were formu-
lated in class terms as anti-bourgeois and, therefore, only by extension assumed
an anti-foreign and anti-Western cast. The Purge era marked the triumph of
Soviet xenophobia, defi ned by Terry Martin as “the exaggerated Soviet fear
of foreign influence and foreign contamination”—in other words, a phenom-
enon that was in its origins “ideological, not ethnic.”51 Th is was the point at
which the superiority complex, which in the mid-1930s was promoted both
by those seeking Soviet cultural hegemony and those intensifying vigilance,
was struck by the terror. There was an explicit link between the vilification of
Western-oriented revolutionaries such as Radek and Bukharin and crude dec-
larations of across-the-board Soviet superiority. For example, the Presidium
of the Union of Writers condemned the two former oppositionists in January
1937 for “capitulationist” cultural conceptions that denigrated the USSR in
front of the “West.”52
The Great Terror is now widely analyzed as a series of distinguishable
campaigns that not only bludgeoned political and cultural elites but included the
national purges of diaspora populations in borderland regions and mass opera-
tions against former kulaks and other “aliens.” No matter how disparate these
centrally planned operations were, however, they cannot be disaggregated, for
they began and ended at the same time. One of the most plausible interpreta-
tions that has been advanced is that they were all conceived as a kind of pre-
ventative strike that would, once and for all, rid Soviet society of enemies who
could not be re-educated, a kind of socially defined final solution that appeared
urgent in light of the war that, from 1937 on, Stalin and the leadership firmly
expected.53 In terms of the international-domestic interconnections that this
book has traced, it is interesting to note that Oleg Khlevniuk, who has consis-
tently pointed to the eradication of a “fifth column” as the prime motivation
behind the Terror, points to Stalin’s preoccupation with traitors in the republican
camp in Spain as the origin of the “fifth-column factor.” As the Purge era began,
the Soviet interest in the Spanish struggle paradoxically served simultaneously
to highlight Soviet ties to Europe and as a concrete symbol of the coming war.54
R ise of the Stalinist Superiority Complex 303
spies and diversionists, ritualistically citing Stalin’s speech against spies and
saboteurs at the March 1937 Plenum, not only depicted tourists as undercover
spies, but also explicitly stated that previously honored members of the cul-
tural friendship societies and visiting trade-union delegations were likely hid-
den enemies. 58
In 1938, the head of counter-espionage at the NKVD was put in charge not
only of foreign embassies and national populations of “neighboring bourgeois-
fascist states,” but also of now equally suspect groups of foreign political émi-
grés, tourists, and international visitors connected to cultural and economic
relations. The Purges went far beyond the destruction of the “old guard” within
the Party, but this long-recognized part of the violence was especially signifi-
cant for foreign intellectual visitors. Physical annihilation wiped out much of
the multilingual and multinational generation of cosmopolitan Bolshevik and
Comintern elites in Moscow. 59
In the wake of Arosev’s arrest, the purge of VOKS followed a pattern
repeated around the country: tense and deadly meetings of the party cell,
waves of denunciations, and an ever-widening net of those associated with
the condemned enemies of the people. By February 1938, twelve top VOKS
officials had been arrested as “alien elements.” Like many others who lived
through the Great Terror, Semper recalled a chilling silence and tacit agree-
ment not to speak about politics as leading officials disappeared one after
the other, including Arosev’s two deputies, Kuliabko and Cherniavskii: “No
one said a word about what was happening . . . on politics everyone was as
silent as the dead, no one trusted anyone.”60 For organizations whose work
was predicated on interactions with foreigners, the spy mania and xenopho-
bia associated with the Purges had particularly devastating consequences.
Arosev’s temporary replacement, Viktor Fedorovich Smirnov, reported to
Molotov in July 1937 that the leadership of VOKS had been “unmasked”
and the “apparatus of VOKS was soiled by people who in most cases had ties
abroad, had lived abroad, etc.”61 Evidently, he did not see the irony in using
“ties abroad” as evidence of guilt in the All-Union Society for Cultural Ties
Abroad.
With top posts left unfi lled and the organization reeling from accusations
of “wrecking,” the agency’s hard-currency funding was temporarily cut off at
the end of 1937—either the outcome of anti-foreign terror, the chaos caused
by it, or both. Some funds were restored in 1938, but at less than one-sixth
the level of what would be allocated after the era of mass purging came to a
close the following year. Many parts of the state, economy, and society expe-
rienced severe disruption in these years, but in this case, sheer lack of money
led to a virtual standstill in operations. Basic tasks, such as mailing the VOKS
bulletin to foreign countries, were not carried out. The rump leadership also
R ise of the Stalinist Superiority Complex 305
had to counter new proposals to liquidate VOKS. These recalled earlier epi-
sodes in the late 1920s, but at that time, the importance of cultural diplo-
macy and its protectors had allowed the institution to weather the upheaval,
whereas this time, it abandoned much of its core mission. In 1938, VOKS
virtually stopped its activities related to the invitations to and reception of
foreigners inside the USSR, focusing only on external operations. A budget
document confi rms that for the year 1938, expenditures on the reception of
foreigners ceased. 62
What was fi nancially prohibitive and dangerous politically was, inevitably,
elevated to the level of ideological principle. In 1938, Smirnov condemned the
entire tradition of tours and tailored travel for intelligentsia visitors as an ille-
gitimate and, by implication corrupt, gravy train (podkarmlivaniia i prikarmli-
vaniia) for foreigners.63 Operations abroad did not fare much better, however,
although it was possible for many VOKS activities to continue through the
offices of VOKS representatives stationed abroad. In 1939, however, VOKS
operations were reportedly reduced to a mere six countries, and, in the words
of Smirnov, “the principal connections of VOKS were lost” and “the work of
VOKS started to cease.” The break in continuity was so severe that the orga-
nization that emerged during and after the war can be considered a very dif-
ferent institution. Semper herself, summoned repeatedly to meetings with
NKVD agents to discuss VOKS’s contacts with foreigners, resigned in 1938.
“It became completely boring. VOKS had ceased to be what it once was.”64
The operations of Soviet cultural diplomacy abroad were considerably
hampered, needless to say, by the ideological fallout from the show trials
and purges. Arosev’s tainted leadership (known as “the time of Arosev,” or
Arosevshchina) and his “wrecking” activities were directly linked to lax con-
trol over the cultural friendship societies. While fabricated Trotskyism fueled
the purges inside the USSR, foreign left ists and erstwhile Soviet sympathizers
did have genuine sympathies for the exiled revolutionary in Mexico—notably
New York intellectuals and those associated with the American Committee
for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, which began its work under the chairmanship
of John Dewey after the fi rst show trial, in late 1936. Unsurprisingly, the pres-
ence of “Trotskyists” in New York explicitly figured in the report condemning
the legacy of Arosev.65
The efforts of the VOKS representative in the United States, Konstantin
Umanskii (Oumansky), a high-level diplomat in Washington who became
ambassador in 1939, were typical of the challenges encountered by capable
and energetic figures active abroad. Umanskii had been a TASS correspon-
dent in Rome and Paris and then a high-level censor of foreign correspon-
dents as chief of the Foreign Affairs press division in the famine years of the
early 1930s. After his move to Washington in 1936, he advocated adapting to
306 showcasing the great experiment
the international crisis in Europe by shift ing the center of gravity in Soviet
“cultural-political work” from Europe to the United States—a continuation
of the Soviet turn from Berlin to Paris and Western Europe circa 1933. As one
historian has recently noted, shortly after Umanskii’s arrival in the United
States in 1936, “President Roosevelt, via the secretary of state, ordered FBI
Director Hoover to investigate potential foreign connections of domestic fas-
cist and Communist groups. The travels of the Soviet counselor, Konstantin
Oumansky, were of special concern to the President.”66 Among his destina-
tions was New York, where he traveled on VOKS work.
In a stream of long, incisive reports to Moscow between 1936 and 1938,
Umanskii detailed his intricate political and financial maneuverings at the
American-Russian Institute in New York in response to the imperative to
exclude Dewey and other “Trotskyists.” He also faced pressure from the
U.S. government through its requirement to register foreign-backed insti-
tutions, increasing reluctance on the part of wealthy liberal donors and
resistance from an array of non-communist American intellectual sympa-
thizers who found it impossible to exclude or silence colleagues criticizing
the show trials. At one point, Umanskii railed in exasperation about being
forced to rely upon “little groupings of wavering New York liberal intel-
lectuals.” In the era of the show trials, the Soviet modus operandi of act-
ing through a trusted key individual or core group as proxy for the Soviet
handler had become elusive. But with potentially real rather than fictitious
Trotskyists involved during the fallout from Arosev’s purge, Umanskii had
to angrily repudiate Smirnov’s accusation from Moscow that he himself
was “too liberal.”67
As VOKS declined, some of the slack was taken up by the powerful and
well-connected new organization, the Foreign Commission of the Union
of Writers. Headed by Kol’tsov, its day-to-day operations were run by its
vice chairman, the capable VOKS and MORP veteran Mikhail Apletin. The
Foreign Commission kept up the best traditions of information gathering on
foreigners, keeping up-to-date biographies and personal evaluations of leading
writers with an emphasis on their recent publications and att itudes toward the
Soviet Union.68
Att itudes toward the show trials and purges became an obligatory new lit-
mus test in the evaluation of foreign intellectuals and tracking markers of their
world view, creating considerable complications for Soviet intermediaries.
The Foreign Commission’s 1937 entry for Bertolt Brecht, for example, noted
that “after the trial of the Trotskyists he displayed well-known waverings” and
recorded that Brecht and his wife were close friends with a “Trotskyist,” the
ex-communist Marxist philosopher Karl Korsch. Meeting foreign visitors on
the ground, VOKS guides reported that even “friends,” including one engineer
R ise of the Stalinist Superiority Complex 307
from Prague, quickly changed the subject and “obviously did not wish to talk
about the trial of Trotskyist-Zinovievist terrorists.”69
A September 1936 letter from the Foreign Commission, perhaps penned by
Kol’tsov, directly concerns strategies for presenting the show trials to foreign
literary intellectuals. Its recipient was Joshua Kunitz, whom Alan Wald has
called one of the “most highly educated” American communist intellectuals
and “the Party’s undisputed authority on Russian literature.” A key figure on
the editorial board of the New Masses, Kunitz had traveled around the Soviet
Union and in 1935 published the ardently pro-Soviet travelogue cum his-
tory, Dawn over Samarkand. Th is book, dedicated “to the Negro people of the
United States,” shaped its message around Gorkian/Socialist Realist tropes of
“rebirth” and miracles coming true. Although Kunitz received the sensitive
and unenviable assignment of justifying the show trials to U.S. left ists, he was,
according to Wald, never fully trusted by the U.S. party leadership.70 In typical
fashion, the Foreign Commission letter, addressed to “Dear Jack,” began with
flattery: “I know that you are a wonderful polemicist.” The letter then provided
talking points and attempted to influence Kunitz’s own reasoning at the same
time: deriding the pett y-bourgeois intelligentsia for cheering revolutionary
events such as 1917 but not understanding the need for the NEP, it called the
Purges another episode that demonstrated that intellectuals did not under-
stand the revolution as a whole. Gett ing down to business, the letter instructed
Kunitz to address two issues of great concern to foreign observers: the charges
that the trial was fabricated, and that confessions had been extracted by means
of torture and mistreatment, including psychological violence. This possibil-
ity needed to be tackled delicately: Kunitz should say that foreign witnesses
had seen how the defendants “looked excellent and were in complete con-
trol of their faculties.” In sum, the argument had to be convincing about the
psychology of those who confessed while persuading Kunitz’s audience that
“the confessions were voluntary and legal.” 71 The arguments given to Kunitz
recall in an uncanny fashion Feuchtwanger’s treatment of the January show
trial in Moscow 1937—notably his insistence, denied by other observers, that
the “obvious freshness and vitality of the prisoners” proved they had not been
mistreated and his emphasis on explaining the psychology of those who had
confessed.72 Surely Feuchtwanger, most likely orally, was given the same sug-
gestions as Kunitz.
Like Feuchtwanger, Romain Rolland in 1937 remained a Soviet friend and
publicly accepted the trials and arrests as genuine conspiracy. In private, he
agonized. He sent Stalin a barrage of unanswered letters, hoping to save the
arrested Arosev, Bukharin, and others. Rolland was “exceptionally proud” of
his Soviet fame—1.3 million copies of his works had been published in the
USSR by November 1937—as his position in France weakened after the eclipse
308 showcasing the great experiment
of the Popular Front. Remarkably, as late as May 1937 Rolland was still con-
sidering a return trip to Moscow. By September, however, after his letters went
unanswered and the purges widened, he refused through his wife—whose son
remained in Moscow—to continue answering Soviet requests for ritualistic,
congratulatory public praise.73 In an October 1938 letter, Kudasheva warned
Apletin about Rolland’s new stance. “Telegrams are useless and don’t bother
calling by telephone . . . In the West right now one is not up to ‘jubilees’ and
‘congratulations’ . . . It is impossible to keep disturbing him over nonsense . . . it
is even harmful.” 74
At the same time, the Stalinist superiority complex, now inflected with
xenophobic dimensions, played a role in Rolland’s disillusionment. Rolland
criticized Soviet jingoism in a pointed letter he repeatedly attempted to publish
in the Soviet press. It was addressed to two Soviet schoolgirls who had written
Rolland; Kudasheva translated it into Russian on November 26, 1937:
National pride, Rolland audaciously concluded, was one of the first phases of
fascism. The letter, of course, was never published, but more galling was that the
elderly writer, glorified as a giant in Soviet culture, was never given the courtesy
of a response to his repeated inquiries. When the Purges began, Rolland was
careful not to break with the Soviet Union, although his 1938 play Robespierre
explored his doubts about the terror. The Nazi-Soviet Pact achieved what the
Great Terror could not: in 1939, Rolland quietly resigned his position in the
Soviet-French friendship society.75
Even as the Purges diminished the ranks of Western intellectual sympathiz-
ers willing to assume the mantle of “friend of the Soviet Union,” the dramatic
late-1930s reordering of Europe—the victory of Franco’s nationalists in the
Spanish Civil War, Munich in 1938, and the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia
the following year, and later the fall of Paris and the outbreak of war—gave the
Soviets new opportunities for transnational cultural patronage. The cultural
bureaucracies were able to provide aid, and sometimes salvation, to belea-
guered sympathizers and longstanding committed “friends.” For example,
the head of the Union of Writers, Aleksandr Fadeev, arranged for aid and in
R ise of the Stalinist Superiority Complex 309
select cases immigration for Spanish writers and responded to appeals from
desperate Spanish refugees in France in 1939.76 After the Munich agreement,
the atmosphere in Prague, a major center of Soviet cultural diplomacy for
more than a decade, became inhospitable. “People who previously consid-
ered it fashionable and even honorable to enter into friendship with the Soviet
Union,” a diplomatic report noted, “have started to hide in the bushes and have
fallen out of our sphere of influence.” In Slovakia, all Soviet cultural activi-
ties were suddenly halted under the clerico-fascist regime of Father Jozef Tiso
in late 1938. After Munich, Zdeněk Nejedlý, the head of the Czechoslovak
cultural friendship society in Prague, curtailed its activities after a meeting
with the Soviet ambassador in response to a looming ban on the Czechoslovak
Communist Party. Nejedlý agreed that the society’s main goal should be to
refute those blaming Munich on the Soviet Union. In Moscow, the over-
whelmed interim head of VOKS, Smirnov, could only brusquely opine that no
contacts should be preserved with any fair-weather friends. When Nazi troops
entered Bohemia and Moravia on March 15, 1939, Nejedlý evaded arrest by
the Gestapo and obtained a Soviet passport from the embassy, after which he
fled to the USSR.77 He returned to Prague after the war to become the Stalinist
minister of culture from 1948 to 1953.
The concrete benefits for some Western intellectuals who retained their
Soviet contacts after the Purges are perhaps best illustrated by Apletin’s late-
1930s correspondence with Brecht, who was living in Sweden after April 1939.
The letters, of course, observed complete silence about the decimation of the
German diaspora and anti-fascist literary émigrés in Moscow, nor did they men-
tion the purge of Brecht’s friend Tret'iakov in the summer of 1937 or the arrest
of Vsevolod Meyerhold in 1939. The ever-solicitous Apletin was eager to push
cooperation with Brecht as far as he was willing to go. He helped Brecht publish
in Literaturnaia gazeta, wrote with great enthusiasm about the Soviet reception
of Brecht’s play Galileo, tried to gain financial credits for him for a serial publica-
tion of his new play Mother Courage in 1939, and sent along German translations
of Stalin’s pronouncements on international affairs. Insight into Brecht’s own
attitude in this period comes from Walter Benjamin’s records of their conversa-
tions, in which Brecht told him: “In Russia a dictatorship is in power over the
proletariat. We must avoid disowning it for as long as this dictatorship still does
practical work for the proletariat.” When Benjamin mentioned that Brecht had
Soviet friends, Brecht replied: “Actually I have no friends there. The Muscovites
don’t have any, either—like the dead.”78 Still, maintaining Soviet contacts proved
useful to the exiled playwright in 1940, when Apletin helped cash in all his
extant Soviet honoraria and gain permission to travel across the Soviet Union to
Vladivostok.79 From there he sailed to the United States, arriving in California
one day before the start of Operation Barbarossa.
310 showcasing the great experiment
Each phase in the history of Soviet cultural diplomacy in the two decades traced
in this book was intimately connected to the reception of foreign visitors inside
the USSR. In pre-war and wartime Europe, cultural diplomacy had begun as a
branch of foreign policy that attempted to harness the realm of culture to newly
discovered capabilities of affecting public opinion in foreign countries. In Soviet
Russia, by contrast, it was only the fi rst influx of foreign visitors and representa-
tives of the bourgeois West in the early 1920s that prompted the crystallization
of a novel and distinctive system to shape the Soviet image abroad and, fi rst
and foremost, to put the fi rst socialist society on display. Visits and depictions
of the model sites of socialism became the centerpiece of this new type of cul-
tural diplomacy as it was consolidated in the mid- to late 1920s. Stalin’s series of
meetings with prominent foreign friends and the grandiose celebration of them
in Soviet culture, exemplifying a shift to the more choreographed pomp of the
1930s, extended the significance of visiting and showcasing the great experi-
ment. Time spent within the socialist homeland was supposed to work wonders
in changing consciousness; it was the touchstone for cementing ties to friend-
ship societies and the most prominent fellow-travelers. Even the drastic reor-
dering of cultural diplomacy during the Great Terror was most immediately
manifested in the curtailment of foreign travel.
The reception of foreign visitors was central to the development of Soviet
cultural diplomacy for reasons that went well beyond animosity to interna-
tional communism among the great powers. The Bolsheviks revolutionized
a country that had long compared itself against Western models and incor-
porated this practice into a core component of its national identity; the new
regime, in its attempt to leap forward into a more advanced modernity, imme-
diately began to implement its unprecedented aspirations to shape conscious-
ness. As the interwar tour of the Soviet experiment got under way, foreign,
and especially Western, audiences became one special target within a novel
and extensive enlightenment-propaganda machine. The dictatorship of the
proletariat did not feel the need to imitate its European predecessors by
carving out a new cultural branch within conventional diplomacy. Rather,
312
Epilogue 313
of the phenomenon has been called a “defi ning” tendency in Stalinist culture
that was already present in the early 1930s.4 The history of foreign visitors sug-
gests that this date must be pushed back at least a decade. The promotion of the
exceptional miniature—from communes to a vast array of sites and institu-
tions designated as model institutions—took off shortly after 1917 and soon
became an important part of early Soviet “cultural show” directed at foreign
visitors. It then moved, in ever-more centralized and hierarchical form, to the
very center of Stalinist culture, the very building blocks of which were imag-
ined and tangible showcases. The external and internal dimensions of the
Soviet system were live wires that contained many conduits.
Perhaps the most significant example of the external-internal nexus in this
study has been the methods used to teach foreign observers how to view the
positive features of the Soviet system, kul´tpokaz, or cultural show. These
were among the fi rst methods developed in the 1920s to convey kernels of
the great future-in-the-making, as opposed to exceptional showcases amid
general squalor. As this book has argued, there were direct and indirect links
between cultural show and the rise of Socialist Realism as it became the domi-
nant aesthetic doctrine and a key to culture and ideology under Stalin. Th is by
no means reduces the roots of Stalin-era ideology to kul´tpokaz, which itself
reflected broader trends. Stalin-era ideology derived from many other sources.
Caveats aside, it can be concluded that approaches fi rst innovated for Western
visitors affected those later applied on a grand scale to the Soviet population
itself.
Finally, there were crucial gaps and disjunctures between the internal and
external, or, put another way, cultural diplomacy was always partially insu-
lated from cultural revolution. Soviet international initiatives held a privileged
place amid the fierce ideological and political maelstrom of the “cultural front”
at home. Foreign bourgeois intellectuals continued to be wooed abroad even
as the Russian intelligentsia was most severely persecuted, for example in the
early 1930s. Yet, even in this instance, the way “Soviet power” interacted with
the intelligentsia and conceptual frameworks about intellectuals cut across the
border. Just as foreign observers in this period were sometimes acute in their
perceptions but often woefully misled, the history of Soviet analysis of foreign-
ers and foreign countries (in genres from analysts’ summaries to the reports of
guides and translators) reflected Soviet projections and miscalculations. Even
in the heyday of Western sympathy for Stalinism, understanding European
and American views solely through the prism of att itudes toward the Soviet
Union or attempting to control them from afar produced significant failures
of understanding.
The time Europeans and Americans spent inside the Soviet Union—the
moment of on-the-ground interaction with the Soviet system—reveals bigger
316 Epilogue
cultural engagement before and after 1937, suggests that, in crucial respects,
Stalinism cannot be conceived as a consistent or unified phenomenon.
Analyzing the world view of communist elites over time, György Péteri has
posited an oscillation along two axes: one of inferiority-superiority and one of
isolationism-integrationism. 5 Modifying his terms, one can conclude that the
balance in the Soviet 1930s shifted between two differing claims on superior-
ity: a hegemonic-integrationist variant that peaked during the Popular Front
to the xenophobic-isolationist brand that quickly predominated with the onset
of the Great Terror. The consequences of this far-reaching internal clash were
the deadly conflation of internal and external enemies and a drastic reordering
of relations with foreigners and the outside world.
The superiority complex entrenched by the late 1930s, forged by loud and
categorical declarations of Soviet ascendancy over the Western world, was an
unstable phenomenon. It was predicated on an extreme isolation during the
Great Terror that was quickly punctured, fi rst by the Soviet “revolution from
abroad” in the Baltics, western Ukraine, and western Belorussia as a result of
the Nazi-Soviet partition of Poland in 1939, and then by the advance of mil-
lions of Soviet soldiers west at the end of World War II. “What Red Army con-
scripts saw in this backwater of provincial Poland, in small villages and towns,
not to speak of cities like Lwów and Wilno,” in the words of Jan Gross, “were
unknown marvels and undreamed of abundance.”6 World War II, alongside
the whipped-up hatred and all-out ideological struggle on the Eastern Front,
along with pillaging, atrocities, rape, and genocide, was also the era of cultural
diplomacy from below. For the fi rst time, soldiers and officers advancing west
came into direct contact with bourgeois Europe. “It was not just the striking
difference in the material level of life, which dealt a fatal blow to propaganda
about the advantages of the Soviet system,” Oleg Budnitskii writes. “It may
seem paradoxical, but in occupied Germany, as in other European countries
not notable for their democratic regimes, Soviet soldiers received a dangerous
taste of freedom.” 7
While the Nazi invasion created major disruptions in international cultural
contacts already hit hard by the Terror and the Pact, the grand alliance against
National Socialism made the war into a period of enormous opportunity for
Soviet propaganda and cultural diplomacy. Th ree days after the invasion, on
June 24, 1941, the Sovinformburo was set up to coordinate wartime informa-
tion and propaganda under the aegis of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs,
but with directions from the Politburo and Central Committee. Th is power-
ful organ, with its two most important departments focusing on the wartime
allies Britain and the United States, coordinated a massive public relations
effort that built directly on the legacy of interwar Soviet cultural diplomacy.
318 Epilogue
It mobilized and deployed (with a new latitude that was later reversed in post-
war campaigns) members of the intelligentsia—including the most popular
and talented literary talents and international figures, most famously Ilya
Ehrenburg. It supervised international anti-fascist committees for work among
Slavs, women, youth, scientists, and as is best known, among Jews in the guise
of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC). While pre-war cultural diplo-
macy had hosted delegations in the USSR, these committees by necessity sent
their own delegations abroad. In this limited context, as during the Popular
Front, newly flexible forms of direct Soviet cultural diplomacy could harness
the force of anti-fascism, now supplemented by alarm among Western Jewry
about the Holocaust in the East.8
The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee is by far the best documented of the
Sovinformburo organizations, and the range of its activities are a striking con-
fi rmation of how the pre-war legacy was renewed and updated in the midst of
all-out war. Its goals in developing a “broad anti-fascist campaign” were to oper-
ate in a vast array of media, from fi lm, radio, and song to a panoply of literary
and journalistic genres. As with the cultural friendship societies, it attempted
to create Jewish anti-fascist committees abroad, but it was now also able to
raise significant amounts of money. In keeping with pre-war innovations, it
aimed to target the most influential individuals in order to influence public
opinion. In addition to harnessing the talents of the most Western-oriented
Soviet intellectuals, it gathered the information on the Holocaust in the East
(in one report euphemistically termed the “situation of the Jews” in occupied
territories) that later became the banned Black Book. The highlight of the sev-
en-month mission of Solomon Mikhoels and Itzik Fefer to the United States,
Canada, Mexico, and Britain in 1943 was a mass pro-Soviet rally at the Polo
Grounds in Manhattan, attended by nearly 50,000 people, during which Paul
Robeson sang Russian and Yiddish songs.9
The “anti-foreign hysteria” and obsession with secrecy of post-war Stalinism,
which was connected to Stalin’s decision to reestablish discipline and attain
new heights for the official dogma of total superiority, was, underneath the
surface, all the more complicated and unstable because it came on the heels of
these extraordinary wartime experiences. At the same time, the regime had,
in fact, passed the acid test of superiority: it had emerged victorious and found
a new lease on legitimacy. Unsurprisingly, though, the new post-war quaran-
tine concealed covert forms of exaggerated admiration and inversions of the
official propaganda about the outside world—something that had become
noticeable among groups in the Soviet population already in the 1920s.10 The
anti-Western triumphalism of the Zhdanov period hid the continuation, and
even growth, of fascination with the illicit or semi-illicit fruits of contact with
kapstrany, or capitalist countries. Th is is exemplified by what Stephen Lovell
Epilogue 319
calls “trophy Westernization”—not merely the display of trophy fi lms but the
pursuit of every opportunity to acquire Western goods.11
At the same time, late Stalinism recapitulated a drastic curtailment of direct
cultural diplomacy that recalled the era of the Purges and Pact. Until the mid-
1950s, international cultural exchange and the reception of foreign visitors,
which had assumed such an important place in early Soviet history, slowed to a
trickle. In this respect, the fi rst post-war decade, like the Purge era, marked an
exceptional break in the history of Soviet cultural diplomacy. In March 1946, a
month after George F. Kennan’s famous “Long Telegram,” his British counter-
part, Frank Roberts, sent his own cable: “Never since the Revolution has the
Soviet Union been so cut off from the outside world as today . . . Cultural con-
tacts are canalised through VOKS, an institution whose purpose is to restrict
rather than to encourage exchanges of knowledge and the promotion of real
friendship.”12 Between 1947 and 1951, for example, VOKS hosted a mere fi ft y-
seven visitors from the United States, many of them prominent fellow-travelers
such as Paul Robeson, who visited in 1949.13
The enforced yet britt le isolationism, xenophobia, and official trium-
phalism of late Stalinism held profound implications for what followed. The
cycles of openings and closings to the outside world begun during imperial
Russia’s Westernization, so intimately connected to the reform and counter-
reform of the domestic order, were now recapitulated with special force. The
re-engagement with the world that Ehrenburg fi rst dubbed “the Thaw” hit
the Soviet Union with bombshell strength. Major increases in travel and cul-
tural traffic between the USSR and Western countries reflected the ambitions
of Khrushchev’s attempt to enhance Soviet international status through his
“peaceful coexistence” strategy and the thoroughgoing, often unwarranted
confidence of his cultural diplomacy.14 Th is led directly to a series of fateful
openings to the West: the sensational and highly charged Picasso exhibit in
1956, the extraordinary and unplanned mass exhilaration of the World Youth
Festival in 1957, the remarkable yet vigorously contested attraction of the
American National Exhibition at Sokol´niki Park in the summer of 1959.15
Thaw-era overconfidence was not only a function of the new superpower stat-
ure of the Soviet Union or Khrushchev’s impulsive personality but in part,
ironically, a legacy of the insularity and triumphalism of the Stalinist superior-
ity complex.
At the same time, Soviet cultural diplomacy from the early 1920s to the
Popular Front had more in common in certain intriguing respects with the
competitive rediscovery of the West during the Thaw than with the extremes
of post-1937 Stalinist cultural protectionism. In both the early Soviet expe-
rience and the Thaw, the touchstone of cultural diplomacy was the influx of
visitors and the reception of foreigners via direct cultural interaction, which
320 Epilogue
were significant for all involved however much they were circumscribed.16
Both during the drive to build socialism and the search to exorcise the ghosts
of Stalinism, engagement with foreign visitors was inextricably linked to far
broader issues of the Soviet historical path and the quest to att ain an alterna-
tive modernity. In both the pre-Purge and post-Stalin order, ambitious opti-
mism about Soviet ability to convince foreign audiences balanced out powerful
countervailing fears of capitalist contagion and hostile security breaches. By
contrast, late Stalinism displayed an almost unadulterated pessimism about
the pernicious effects of contact with the rest of the world.17 During the peri-
ods of the “construction of socialism” and de-Stalinization, a more total form
of cultural diplomacy was pursued not only in relatively circumscribed arenas
of foreign policy and external propaganda but as key components of dramatic
upheavals in the domestic order. Although these restructurings were of dif-
fering magnitude, they both made stances toward the leading industrialized
countries an overriding issue in domestic politics, culture, and ideology.
The differences between the interwar period and the Cold War, of course,
were immense. In the earlier period, the regime launched a massive and
wrenching assault on many fronts, whipping up enthusiasm and unleashing
unprecedented violence in the service of totalizing aspirations of transforma-
tion. Under Khrushchev, the attempt was to shake up and reform an already
deeply entrenched, and in certain respects petrified, Stalinist order. In the
fi rst instance, overtaking the West was therefore a primary end to be attained
by force, whether physical or ideological, whereas in the second it was a func-
tion of a superpower rivalry prompting Khrushchev’s USSR to compete more
intensely in an array of new areas, from the realm of consumption to far-flung
outposts in the developing world.
Symptomatically, even within one other crucial similarity between the
two periods there lay a decisive difference: after two decades of endless dec-
larations of Soviet superiority, the Thaw-era USSR once again, as in the early
1930s, had to catch up and overtake the West, this time personified by the
American consumerist superpower. In the words of Péteri, however much
state socialist “discourses of systemic identity had to insist on construing the
West as the constitutive other, on mapping it without, and on representing
it as socialism’s past, the Occident was also part of the self; it asserted itself
within, and appeared to be ahead rather than behind.”18 Given the birth of a new
civic movement in the 1950s, as well as the extreme fascination with the West
in the wake of the Stalin era, including among reformist elites, the systemic
clash animating Soviet cultural diplomacy had become a far more dangerous
game.19 Connections between interwar and Cold War cultural diplomacy, and
the contours of the communist cultural and ideological confrontation with the
West, clearly deserve further investigation.
Epilogue 321
The early Soviet Union’s intensive systemic competition with the West—
real and imagined, at home and abroad—thus shaped the country that formu-
lated it at least as much as it influenced those outside its borders. The expansive
approach to cultural diplomacy innovated in the Soviet Union in the 1920s
can be considered more modern—specifically, high modern—in its scope
and its statism.20 In these features, it at once anticipated and paved the way for
the great cultural and ideological clash of systems during the Cold War.21 As
David Caute has characterized that later confl ict, “Never before had empires
felt so compelling a need to prove their virtue, to demonstrate their spiritual
superiority, to claim the high ground of ‘progress’, to win public support and
admiration by gaining ascendancy in each and every event of what might be
styled the Cultural Olympics.”22
Th at the Cultural Cold War was engaged on this scale was a function of
the superpower competition in the post-war period, but it got under way
in part as a direct result of the precedents set by the Soviets in the inter-
war period. To be sure, formative experiences for the United States were its
experiments in Latin America and the massive anti-Nazi propaganda effort
of World War II. 23 There is ample evidence, however, that the Soviet example
and the conviction that it was far ahead in cultural diplomacy set in motion a
radical transformation of U.S. state involvement in shaping its image abroad.
For example, the 1947 Smith-Mundt act, which fi nally launched strong U.S.
state involvement in cultural diplomacy, came after Congressional commit-
tee members had toured Eastern and Western Europe, “being confronted on
every hand with the seeming superiority of the Soviet propaganda machine.”
The legislation’s call for a strong “information program” to counter Soviet
propaganda anticipated mobilizing all modern media, exhibitions, and
exchange programs long before the U.S. cultural offensive broadened in the
late 1950s. 24
Although the United States was the latecomer and continued to rely on a
state-private network that appears to have been less lavishly funded than the
mature Soviet effort, remarkable similarities quickly emerged between the
two superpowers’ cultural diplomacy, which formed the “overt, legal, and pub-
lic part of political or psychological warfare.” Both sides minimized access to
their own countries, so the key batt legrounds became divided Europe and the
developing world. Now the superiority-inferiority complex described in this
book assumed its most distilled and confrontational form, as both superpow-
ers tried to persuade European audiences—and themselves—that their “high
cultural accomplishments” trumped “Western and Central European claims
of cultural superiority.” Both Soviet and American efforts to reach Europeans
during the Cultural Cold War, at least according to the forthcoming study by
Mary Nolan, had limited success.25
322 Epilogue
Introduction
1. The phrase comes from the classic “pre-archival” work of Sylvia R. Margulies, The Pilgrimage
to Russia: The Soviet Union and the Treatment of Foreigners, 1924–1937 (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1968).
2. A. V. Golubev, et al., Rossiia i Zapad: Formirovanie vneshnepoliticheskikh stereotipov v soz-
nanii rossiiskogo obshchestva pervoi poloviny XX veka (Moscow: Institut Istorii RA N, 1998),
146.
3. The literature on intellectuals and communism is analyzed in chap. 6. The best-known
work in English has gone through four editions: Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Western
Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society, 4th ed. (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers,
1998).
4. Here see also Eva Oberloskamp, Fremde neue Welten: Reisen deutscher und französischer
Linksintellektueller in die Sowjetunion 1917–1939 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2011); Matt hias
Heeke, Reisen zu den Sowjets: Der ausländische Tourismus in Russland 1921–1941 (Münster:
Lit Verlag, 2003).
5. Theodore Dreiser, Dreiser’s Russian Diary, ed. Thomas P. Riggio and James L. W. West III
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 220; Ruth Epperson Kennell,
Theodore Dreiser and the Soviet Union, 1927–1945: A First-Hand Chronicle (New York:
International Publishers, 1969), 139.
6. Recent years have witnessed a great new interest in Soviet international cultural relations
and transnational history. Th is has led to notable studies focusing on views of Russia and the
USSR in individual Western countries: Sophie Coeuré, La grande lueur à l’Est: Les Français
et l’Union soviétique, 1917–1939 (Paris: Seuil, 1999); Heeke, Reisen zu den Sowjets; David
Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of
Russian Economic Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003); and
in comparative mode, Donal O’Sullivan, Furcht und Faszination: Deutsche und britische
Russlandbilder 1921–1931 (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1996). There have
also been significant studies of travel and travelogues, including Oberloskamp, Fremde
neue Welten; Rachel Mazuy, Croire plutôt que voir? Voyages en Russie soviétique (1919–1939)
(Paris: Odile Jacob, 2002); Christiane Uhlig, Utopie oder Alptraum? Schweizer Reiseberichte
über die Sowjetunion 1917–1941 (Zurich: Verlag Hans Rohr, 1992). Simultaneously, post-
Soviet Russian historiography has produced a flowering of works on the history of cultural
relations with individual Western countries, including Golubev, et al., Rossiia i Zapad. A
groundbreaking and complementary contribution to the present study is Katerina Clark’s
Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture,
1931–1941 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), which excavates the inter-
national dimensions of Soviet culture in the 1930s.
325
326 Notes 5 – 9
7. Th is book only became possible to write after the substantial “secret” part of the VOKS
archive was declassified in the mid-1990s. Previously almost unknown, VOKS has since
figured in a number of studies in the last decade, including, most notably, A. V. Golubev,
“Vzgliad na zemliu obetovannuiu” Iz istorii sovetskoi kul'turnoi diplomatii 1920–1930-x
godov (Moscow: Institut istorii RA N, 2004), which has an emphasis on the 1930s and
visitors from Britain. See also Ludmila Stern, Western Intellectuals and the Soviet Union,
1920–1940: From Red Square to the Left Bank (London: Routledge, 2007); Sheila
Fitzpatrick and Carolyn Rasmussen, eds., Political Tourists: Travellers from Australia to
the Soviet Union in the 1920s–1940s (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008);
Jean-François Fayet, “La VOKS: La société pour les échanges culturels entre l’URSS et
l’étranger,” Relations internationales, 114/115 (Fall 2003): 411–423, and Fayet, “Entre
mensonge, engagement et manipulation: Les témoignages d’Occidentaux avant séjournés
en URSS,” in Un mensonge déconcertant? La Russie au XXe siècle, ed. Jean-Philippe Jaccard
(Paris: L’Harmatt an, 2003), 377–418.
8. Here there is a comparison with the propaganda and cultural diplomacy efforts of East-
Central European states after Versailles, which focused above all on influencing Western
European and U.S. elites. Andrea Orzoff, Battle for the Castle: The Myth of Czechoslovakia
in Europe, 1914–1948 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), introduction, chap. 2.
9. Later, other communist countries would import and adapt this system. For example,
the Chinese People’s Association for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries was
modeled after VOKS. See Herbert Passin, China’s Cultural Diplomacy (New York:
Praeger, 1962).
10. In this area, some of the most revealing studies treat various kinds of resident foreign-
ers and foreign colonies. See, for example, Sergei Zhuravlev, “Malen'kie liudi” i “bol'shaia
istoriia”: Inostrantsy moskovskogo Elektrozavoda v sovetskom obshchestve 1920-x – 1930-x
gg. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2000); Michael Hughes, Inside the Enigma: British Officials
in Russia, 1900–1939 (London: Hamstedon Press, 1997). Less well studied are Soviet
personnel and operations abroad, but see Karl Schlögel, Berlin, Ostbahnhof Europas:
Russen und Deutsche in ihrem Jahrhundert (Berlin: Siedler Verlag, 1998); Oksana
Bulgakova, “Proletarskii internatsionalizm na Maslovke, ili eksport ‘russkikh’ v Berlin,”
Kinovedcheskie zapiski, no. 35 (1997): 37–54; Sabine Dullin, Des hommes d’influences: Les
ambassadeurs de Staline en Europe 1930–1939 (Paris: Payot, 2001).
11. Leonid Maksimenkov also uses the term zapadniki (Westernizers) in “Ocherki
nomenklaturnoi istorii sovetskoi literatury: Zapadnye pilgrimy u stalinskogo prestola
(Feikhtvanger i dr.), part 2, Voprosy literatury, no. 3 (2004): 272–342, quotation 304.
12. Lindsey Hughes, “Attitudes towards Foreigners in Early Modern Russia,” in Russia and the
Wider World in Historical Perspective: Essays for Paul Dukes, ed. Cathryn Brennan and Murray
Frame (Houndmills, Bastingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 2000): 1–24; Marshall T. Poe, “A People
Born to Slavery”: Russia in Early Modern European Ethnography, 1476–1748 (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2000), 47–48, 83–89, 199. On the nemetskie slobody, see T. A. Oparina,
Inozemtsy v Rossii XVI–XVII vv. (Moscow: Progress-Traditsiia, 2007), 15–16.
13. Th is is the argument in chap. 1 of Eric Lohr’s “Russian Citizenship: Empire to Soviet
Union,” Harvard University Press, forthcoming 2012, drawing on S. P. Orlenko,
Vykhodtsy iz Zapadnoi Evropy v Rossii: Pravovoi status i real'noe polozhenie (Moscow:
Drevlekhranilishche, 2004). On the complex balance of assimilation and isolation of for-
eigners in late Muscovy, see Oparina, Inozemtsy.
14. See Edward L. Keenan, “Muscovite Political Folkways,” Russian Review 45, 2 (1986):
115–181, and Richard Hellie, “The Structure of Modern Russian History: Toward a
Dynamic Model,” Russian History 4, 1 (1977): 1–22, quotation 22, and the response by
Richard Wortman, “Remarks on the Service State Interpretation,” ibid., 39–41.
15. Alfred J. Rieber, “Persistent Factors in Russian Foreign Policy: An Interpretive Essay,” in
Imperial Russian Foreign Policy, ed. Hugh Ragsdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993), 315–359, and Rieber, “How Persistent are Persistent Factors?” in Russian
Foreign Policy in the Twenty-First Century and the Shadow of the Past, ed. Robert Legvold
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2007): 205–278.
N o t e s 9 –14 327
16. Michael David-Fox, “The Intelligentsia, the Masses, and the West: Particularities of
Russian-Soviet Modernity,” “Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in
Soviet Russia” (Pitt sburgh: University of Pitt sburgh Press, forthcoming).
17. For one example, see A. V. Lunacharskii, Kul'tura na Zapade i u nas (Moscow and
Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1928).
18. Lohr, “Russian Citizenship,” chap. 1.
19. Iver B. Neumann, Russia and the Idea of Europe: A Study in Identity and International
Relations (London and New York: Routledge, 1996).
20. Catriona Kelly, Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture, and Gender from Catherine
to Yeltsin (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), xviii.
21. Neumann, Russia and the Idea of Europe, xiv, 13.
22. Natalie Bayer, “Spreading the Light: European Freemasonry in Russia in the Eighteenth
Century” (Ph.D. diss., Rice University, 2007).
23. Catherine Evtuhov, “Guizot in Russia,” in The Cultural Gradient: The Transmission of
Ideas in Europe, 1789–1991, ed. Evtuhov and Stephen Kotkin (Lanham, Md.: Rowman
and Litt lefield, 2003), 55–72; Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy: History of a
Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth Century Russian Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1975); Nicholas V. Riazanovsky, Russia and the West in the Teaching of the Slavophiles:
A Study in Romantic Ideology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952); and,
most recently, Susanna Rabow-Edling, Slavophile Thought and the Politics of Cultural
Nationalism (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006).
24. Neumann, Russia and the Idea of Europe, 38–39; Vasilii Shchukin, Russkoe zapadnich-
estvo: Genezis – sushchnost' - istoricheskaia rol' (Łódź: Ibidem, 2001), quotation 36;
B. S. Itenberg, Rossiiskaia intelligentsiia i Zapad: Vek XIX (Moscow: Nauka, 1999); and
the classic study by Martin Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961).
25. Lars Lih (in his introduction to Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? In Context [Leiden and
Boston: Brill, 2006], 3–40) emphasizes the Europeanness of Russian Social Democracy,
whereas Claudio Ingerflom (Le Citoyen impossible. Les racines russes du léninisme [Paris:
Bibliothèque historique, 1988]), and in “Lenin Rediscovered, or Lenin Redisguised?,”
Kritika 10, 1 [Winter 2009], 139–168) brings out the Russianness in “Russian Marxism”
and Leninism.
26. Liah Greenfeld, “The Formation of Russian National Identity: The Role of Status
Insecurity and Ressentiment,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 32, 3 (1990):
549–591; the broader argument is in Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).
27. Here see Boris Grois, “Rossiia kak podsoznanie Zapada,” in Utopiia i obmen (Moscow:
Znak, 1993), 245–259.
28. Gorky, “K inostrannym rabochim,” in Publitsisticheskie stat'i (Moscow: Gosizdat litera-
tury, 1931), 290–293.
29. For example, see Adam B. Ulam, The Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political History of the
Triumph of Communism in Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998),
29.
30. Inter alia, Barbara Walker, Maximilian Voloshin and the Russian Literary Circle: Culture
and Survival in Revolutionary Times [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005]; Jan
Plamper, “The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power” (New Haven: Yale University
Press, forthcoming 2012); Peter Holquist, “Violent Russia, Deadly Marxism? Russia
in the Epoch of Violence, 1905–21,” Kritika 4, 3 (Summer 2003): 627–652; Holquist,
Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921 (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002).
31. Lohr, “Russian Citizenship,” chap. 1, 40. On foreign colonies, residents, and specialists
in imperial Russia, see Roger P. Bartlett , Human Capital: The Settlements of Foreigners
in Russia 1762–1804 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); E. V. Alekseeva,
Diff uziia evropeiskikh innovatsii v Rossii (XVII-nachalo XX v.) (Moscow: ROSSPEN,
2007): 42–62.
328 Notes 1 4 – 1 9
51. Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of
Western Dominance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); Jonathan Spence, The
Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998).
52. François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century,
trans. Deborah Furet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 67.
53. Malia, Russia under Western Eyes. Malia’s world-historical perch slights actual encoun-
ters, as he alternates analysis of the illusion-fi lled perceptions of the past with his own
grand narrative of Russian-Soviet history.
54. Aleksandr Panchenko, “Potemkinskie derevni kak kul'turnyi mif,” in O russkoi istorii
i kul'ture (St. Petersburg: Azbuka, 2000): 411–425, here 416. See also Sara Dickinson,
“Russia’s First ‘Orient’: Characterizing the Crimea in 1787,” and David Schimmelpenninck
van der Oye, “Catherinian Chinoiserie,” both in Orientalism and Empire in Russia, ed.
Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, and Alexander Martin (Bloomington, Ind.: Slavica,
2006); O. I. Eliseeva, Geopoliticheskie proekty G. A. Potemkina (Moscow: Institut istorii
RA N, 2000), chap. 5.
55. Irena Grudzinska Gross, The Scar of Revolution: Custine, Tocqueville, and the Romantic
Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Christian Sigrist, Das
Russlandbild des Marquis de Custine: Von der Civilisationskritik zur Russlandfeindlichkeit
(Frankfurt am Main and New York: P. Lang, 1990); Wolff, 364–365; Adamovsky,
103–106.
56. The classic work on theatricality is Iurii M. Lotman, “The Poetics of Everyday Behavior
in Eighteenth-Century Russian Culture,” in The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History, ed.
Alexander D. Nakhimovsky and Alice Stone Nakhimovsky (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1985, Russian orig. 1977); for a cogent challenge, see Michelle Marrese, “The
Poetics of Everyday Behavior Revisited: Lotman, Gender, and the Evolution of Russian
Noble Identity,” Kritika 11, 4 (Fall 2010): 697–700.
57. Bruno Naarden, Socialist Europe and Revolutionary Russia: Perception and Prejudice
1848–1923 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 30–31; Iver B. Neumann,
Uses of the Other: The ‘East’ in European Identity Formation (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1999), 93; Wolff, 362.
58. David C. Fisher, “Russia and the Crystal Palace in 1851,” in Britain, the Empire, and the
World at the Great Exhibition of 1851, ed. Jeff rey A. Auerbach and Peter H. Hoffenberg
(Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2008): 123–145.
59. August Freiherr von Haxthausen, Studies on the Interior of Russia, ed. S. Frederick Starr,
trans. Eleanore L. M. Schmidt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972, orig. 1846);
T. K. Dennison and A. W. Carrus, “The Invention of the Russian Peasant Commune:
Haxthausen and the Evidence,” Historical Journal 46 (2003): 561–582, esp. 567, 569.
60. Daniel L. Schlafly, Jr., “The Great White Bear and the Cradle of Culture: Italian Images
of Russia and Russian Images of Italy,” Kritika 9, 2 (Spring 2008): 389–406, quotations
389, 390.
61. Naarden, Socialist Europe and Revolutionary Russia, 27; for counterexamples, see
Adamovsky, 134–139.
62. Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore, chap. 2.
63. Steven G. Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World: From Art to Anti-Semitism, Ballet
to Bolshevism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), chap. 3; Lew Kopelew,
ed., Russen und Russland aus deutscher Sicht, 5 vols. (Munich: W. Fink, 1985–1990), vol.
4: 19/20. Jahrhundert: Von der Bismarckzeit bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg; Vol'fram Vette,
“Obrazy Rossii u nemtsev v XX v.,” in Rossiia i Germaniia, ed. B. M. Tupolev, vyp. 1
(Moscow: Nauka, 1998), 225–243.
64. Richard Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany
1933–1939 (London: Constable, 1980); Alastair Hamilton, The Appeal of Fascism: A
Study of Intellectuals and Fascism 1919–1945 (New York: Aron Books, 1971).
65. Peter Wagner, A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline (London: Routledge, 1994),
66.
66. Wagner, 62–67; Holquist, Making War; Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s
Twentieth Century (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1999).
330 Notes 2 3 – 3 0
67. On persisting images of Russian Asianness and barbarism in literature and film, see Oksana
Bulgakowa, “The ‘Russian Vogue’ in Europe and Hollywood: The Transformation of Russian
Stereotypes through the 1920s,” Russian Review 64 (April 2005): 211–35.
68. Here see David Caute, The Fellow-Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism, rev. ed.
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); Engerman, Modernization from the Other
Shore.
69. Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). For this division even in Fascist ideol-
ogy see Pier Giorgio Zunino, “Tra americanismo e bolscevismo,” in L’ideologia del fas-
cismo: Miti, credenze e valore nella stabilizzazione del regime (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1985),
322–344.
70. Anatolii Lunacharskii, “Mezhdu Vostokom i Zapadom,” Zapad i Vostok: Sbornik VOKS,
book 1–2 (Moscow, 1926), 10–13.
71. Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Introduction,” in Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism
and Nazism Compared, ed. Geyer and Fitzpatrick (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2009), 37.
72. Here one can make an analogy to the way the emerging culture of Fascism attempted to
overcome Italy’s traditional inferiority complex vis-à-vis France and Germany. See Ruth
Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California,
2001).
73. The interpretive framework of control is pursued by G. B. Kulikova, “Pod kontrolem
gosudarstva: Prebyvanie v SSSR inostrannykh pisatelei v 1920–1930-x godakh,”
Otechestvennaia istoriia, no. 4 (2003): 43–59; the manipulation framework is reproduced
most recently by Stern, Western Intellectuals and the Soviet Union.
74. Here see Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalinism
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).
Chapter 1
1. A. V. Golubev, “ . . . Vzgliad na zemliu obetovannuiu”: Iz istoriii sovetskoi kul'turnoi diplo-
matii 1920–1930-x godov (Moscow: Institut rossiiskoi istorii RA N, 2004), 90; Norman
E. Saul, Friends or Foes? The United States and Russia, 1921–1941 (Lawrence: University
of Kansas Press, 2006), 8–18.
2. Gábor T. Rittersporn, “Fremde in einer Gesellschaft der Fremden,” in Fremde und Fremd-
Sein in der DDR: Zu historischen Ursachen der Fremdenfeindlichkeit in Ostdeutschland,
ed. Jan C. Behrends, Thomas Lindenberger, and Patrice G. Poutrus (Berlin: Metropol,
2003): 43–55; Golfo Alexopolous, “Soviet Citizenship, More or Less: Rights, Emotions,
and States of Civic Belonging,” Kritika 7, 3 (Summer 2006): 487–528, quotation 492.
On the multiple connections between international confl ict and revolutionary politics,
see Arno J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
3. James von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, 1917–1920 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993), 200–205.
4. Golubev, “ . . . Vzgliad na zemliu obetovannuiu,” 90–99; N. V. Kiseleva, Iz istorii bor'by
sovetskoi obshchestvennosti za proryv kul'turnoi blokady SSSR (VOKS: seredina 20-x –
nachalo 30-x godov (Rostov na Donu: Izdatel'stvo Rostovskogo Universiteta, 1991),
9–11.
5. “Protokol zasedaniia Redaktsionnoi Komissii pri Biuro Inostrannoi Nauki i Tekhniki,
Berlin, 20-go ianvaria 1921 g.,” AVP RF f. 0528, op. 1, d. 120, p. 22, l. 70; “Doklad
Prezidiuma VSNKh ot Predstavitelia VSNKh v Germanii F. M. Fedorovskogo. 10 fevra-
lia 1921,” ibid., l. 87–89; see also ll. 255–256.
6. “Declaration to be Signed by all American Workers that Come to Soviet Russia,” 1922,
AVP RF f. 0528, op. 1, d. 105, p. 19, l. 52. Th is delo contains correspondence sent to Krasin
by foreign workers in various languages.
7. “Spisok knig, otoslannykh v Narkomindel tov. Klyshko s dir. kur'erom Serezhnikovym
18/VIII–1920 goda,” AVP RF f. 0528, op. 1, d. 121, p. 22, l. 12.
Notes 30 –37 331
8. Quoted in Bertrand M. Patenaude, The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief
Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921 (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2002), 27.
9. “Rossiiskomu predstaviteliu v Velikobritanii. Leonidu Borisovichu Krasinu. Paris, 4
August 1921,” AVP RF f. 0528, op. 1, d. 125, papka 23, l. 249–253; pamphlet, British
“Hands off Russia” Committee, 29 September 1921, ibid., l. 169.
10. Stuart Finkel, On the Ideological Front: The Russian Intelligentsia and the Making of the
Soviet Public Sphere (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 24–35, quotation 32;
Bruno Naarden, Socialist Europe and Revolutionary Russia: Perception and Prejudice 1848–
1923 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 436–444, here 439.
11. All foreign correspondents would therefore have to submit telegrams for preliminary
checking, a practice that became a significant lever of control over foreign press report-
age from the USSR. Litvinov to Chicherin, 30 August 1921, AVP RF f. 0528, op. 1, d. 126,
p. 23, ll. 144–145.
12. David Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the
Romance of Russian Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003),
chap. 6; Patenaude, 40 and passim; see also Saul, Friends or Foes, 44–97.
13. Patenaude, 43, 104–107.
14. Patenaude, 110–12, 346–353.
15. Aleksandr Eiduk, “Narkomindel Tov. Chicherinu,” copies Lezhava, Lenin, Tsiuriupa,
Litvinov, Kamenev, Molotov. AVP RF f. 0528, op. 1, d. 126, p. 23, l. 85.
16. Saul, Friends or Foes, 63, 71–76; Patenaude, 337, 508 and passim.
17. “Itogi deiatel'nosti ARA,” Kommunist, 24 June 1923, in GARF f. 4283, op. 1a, ed. khr. 6, l. 25.
18. Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore, chap. 6; Saul, Friends or Foes, 58.
19. Patenaude, 45, 337, 340, 350–351, 373.
20. Boris Chicherin to Lev Kamenev, 30 July 1921, in Bol'shevistskoe rukovodstvo: Perepiska.
1912–1927 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1996), 208–209.
21. GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 31, ll. 46–47; Patenaude, 84–85, 184–185, 375; Golubev,
“ . . . Vzgliad na zemliu obetovannuiu,” 100.
22. “Opis' sekretnogo dela Komissii Zagranichnoi Pomoshchi pri Prezidiume TsIK SSSR za
1923–24,” GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, ed. khr. 7.
23. On the “cultural” functions of KZP, see Kiseleva, Iz istorii, 12–28.
24. O. D. Kameneva, “Tov. Moskvinu. TsK VKP(b). Sov. sekretno. 5 ianvaria 1928,” GARF f.
5283, op. 1a, d. 118, l. 1–3.
25. O. D. Kameneva, “Narodnomu Komissaru po Inostrannym Delam, tov. G.V. Chicherinu,”
8 December 1924, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 31, ll. 10–12.
26. Posledgol and NKID documents, 1923, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 3, ll. 7, 63, 66, 101, 137,
143; Kiseleva, Iz istorii, quotation 11.
27. GARF f. 5283, op. 8, ed. khr. 3, ll. 108–11; ibid., op. 1a, ed. khr. 37, l. 2–3; Kiseleva, Iz
istorii, 20.
28. Kameneva to Iagoda, Zam. Pred. OGPU, and Menzhinskii, Zam. Nach. OGPU, 22
February 1924, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 21, l. 6, 8–9.
29. “Zasedanie politicheskogo i organizatsionnogo biuro ot 10/VII–19 goda,” RGASPI f. 17,
op. 3, ed. khr. 14, l. 1.
30. Matt hias Heeke, Reisen zu den Sowjets: Der ausländische Tourismus in Russland 1921–1941
(Münster: Lit Verlag, 2003), 25–27.
31. O. D. Kameneva, “K uluchsheniiu byta rabochikh,” in Kameneva, ed. V pomoshch'
kul'trabote v rabochem stolovoi (Moscow-Leningrad: Doloi negramotnost', 1926), 3–6.
Kul'turnost' has been examined in Soviet history not as a key concept of a decades-
long cultural revolution but mainly in the context of the culturedness campaign and
so-called “Great Retreat” in the mid- to late 1930s. For example, see Sheila Fitzpatrick,
“Becoming Cultured: Socialist Realism and the Representation of Privilege and Taste,”
in Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1992), chap. 9, and the discussion in Catriona Kelly and David
Shepherd, eds. Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution: 1881–1940 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998), 291–313.
332 Notes 3 7 – 4 1
50. Th is is one of the main topics pursued by Kiseleva, Iz istorii; on the purge of social organi-
zations, see Il'ina, 82–95.
51. “F.A. Rotshtein, chlen Kollegii NKID. Po voprosu ob informatsionnom biuro pri
Komissii zagranichnoi Pomoshchi,” 17 December 1923, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, ed. khr.
37, l. 54.
52. “O.D. Kamenevu. Tov. Moskvinu. TsK VKP(b). Sov. sekretno,” 5 January 1928, GARF
f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 118, l. 1ob; “Mezhvedomstvennoe Soveshchanie Organizatsii, vedush-
chikh zagranitsu rabotu. Soveshchanie,” 30 March 1929, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, ed. khr.
20, l. 10 ob.
53. Kameneva to Kuibyshev, 18 December 1924, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 31, l. 75; A.
Vinokurov (VtsIK) to O. D. Kameneva, 11 December 1924, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 31,
ll. 46–47.
54. “Protokol No. 2 Zasedaniia Praveleniia Vessoiuznogo Obshchestva kul'turnykh Sviazi
zagranitsei ot 26 sentiabria [1925],” GARF f. 5283, op. 1, ed. khr. 5, l. 58.
55. GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, ed. khr. 118, l. 50–51.
56. Ludmila Stern, Western Intellectuals and the Soviet Union, 1920–1940: From Red Square to
the Left Bank (London: Routledge, 2007), 42, 45–46, 48; on the Comintern, see chap. 2.
57. “O postanovke informatsii zagranitsy o SSSR. Prilozhenie k protokolu No. 2 Soveshchaniia
pri Inform-otdele TsK RKP(b) po informatsii zagranitsy o SSSR,” February or March
1925, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, ed. khr. 55, ll. 3–5. For 1924 attempts at multi-agency coor-
dination, see “Protokol No. 1 Soveshchnaiia Agitpropa IKKI,” 12 October 1924, GARF
f. 5283, op. 1a, ed. kihr. 27, l. 22.
58. See, for example, “Plan informatsii kommunisticheskikh partii i trudiashchikhsia mass
kap. stran ob SSSR,” fall 1924, RGASPI f. 495, op. 30, d. 51, l. 13–21. See also “Protokoll
der 1. Sitzung des Kollegiums der Propagandaabteilung [EKKI],” 25 January 1923, ibid.,
d. 37, ll. 7–8; ibid., l. 21; ibid., d. 51, ll. 1–6, 13–21.
59. “Thesen der Abt. Agitprop des EKKI zur Arbeit des Büros für kulturelle Verbindung
mit dem Ausland,” 15 June 1926, RGASPI f. 495, op. 30, d. 290, l. 19, also l. 24; O. D.
Kameneva, “An Gen. Frumkin. Zum Protokol vom 15/VI 1926,” ibid., d. 139, l. 57;
Kameneva to A. A. Shtange (VOKS representative in Germany), 24 September 1925,
GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 47, ll. 144–145.
60. GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 97, l. 47; “Krestinskii. Tov. Piatnitskomu. Kopiia: O.D.
Kamenevoi, 1 Marta 1927,” ibid., l. 48.
61. Kameneva, “V sekretariat TsK VKP(b),” no earlier than 2 August 1928, RGASPI f. 495,
op. 95, ed. khr. 26, l. 208–10; Christoph Mick, Sowjetische Propaganda, Fünfjahrplan und
deutsche Russlandpolitik 1928–1932 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1995): 193–197.
62. A. V. Golubev and V. A. Nevezhin, “VOKS v 1930–1940-e gody,” Minuvshee, 14 (Moscow
and St. Petersburg: Atheneum-Feniks, 1993), 313–364, here 316.
63. For example, “Zasedanie chlenov pravleniia [VOKS],” 26 September 1925, GARF f.
5283, op. 1, ed. khr. 5, ll. 1–22, here l. 2.
64. Report on VOKS sent to Central Committee, 19 March 1927, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 97,
ll. 1–25, here l. 1.
65. “Kameneva, “V Sekretariat TsK VKP(b),” 25 July 1928, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, ed. khr.
118, ll. 84–85; Golubev, “ . . . Vzgliad na zemliu obetovannuiu,” 102–106.
66. “O.D. Kameneva. Tov. Smirnovu, otd. pechati TsK VKP(b),” 21 January 1928, GARF f.
5283, op. 1a, ed. khr. 118, l. 13.
67. “O.D. Kameneva. Tov. Smirnovu, otd. pechati TsK VKP(b),” 21 January 1928, l. 20.
68. “Otkrytie kursov gidov pri VOKS"e,” 2 January 1927, GARF f. 5283, op. 1, d. 76, ll. 308–
324, here l. 308.
69. A view created in no small part by Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals
in Search of the Good Society, 4th ed. (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1998). For
a very different view, see Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore; Heeke, Reisen
zu den Sowjets; and Sheila Fitzpatrick and Carolyn Rasmussen, eds., Political Tourists:
Australian Visitors to the Soviet Union in the 1920s- 1940s (Melbourne: Melbourne
University Press, 2008). State Department diplomats in Riga, Helsinki, and elsewhere
collected masses of highly negative impressions from departing U.S. travelers: see Asgar
334 Notes 4 7 – 5 2
Asgarov, “Reporting from the Frontlines of the First Cold War: American Diplomatic
Despatches about Internal Conditions in the Soviet Union, 1917–1933” (Ph.D. diss.,
University of Maryland, 2007).
70. The number of foreign visitors VOKS handled expanded rapidly after its founding. In
1925, only 483 foreigners were received, but this jumped to 1,200 in 1926; by 1929 and
1930, this number had increased to approximately 1,500 per year. Numerically, the most
visitors came from the United States and Germany, respectively; in a six-month period
in 1929, for example, 51 percent of VOKS’s visitors came from the United States and 21
percent from Germany. O. D. Kameneva, “Tov. Raivid. Upoln. VOKS v Germanii. Berlin.
8 ianvaria 1927,” GARF f. 5283, op. 1, d. 76, l. 3; “Otchet o rabote VOKS. 1 iiulia 1929 - 1
marta 1930 g.,” GARF f. 7668, op. 1, d. 215, l. 35. However, large numbers of Americans
were uninvited “political tourists”; Germany before 1933 was the most important coun-
try in terms of invited and professional travel.
71. “Otchet o prieme inostrantsev O.B.I.,” no date, prob. August 1924, GARF f. 5283, op. 8,
ed. khr. 3.
72. Kameneva, 1923 circular letter to foreign embassies, no exact date, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a,
ed. khr. 37, l. 76; “Kantorovich. Uprav. Delami NKID. Pred. Komissii Zagran. Pomoshchi
pri TsIK SSSR tov. O.D. Kamenevoi,” 21 August 1924, ibid., l. 49; M. M. Litvinov to O. D.
Kameneva, 5 November 1923, ibid., l. 142.
73. “A. Shtraus, Zav. Otd. Priema Inostrantsev,” untitled report, GARF f. 5283, op. 8, ed. khr.
73, l. 8; “Dnevnik No. 118. Otdel po priem inostrantsev VOKS. 22.X.27,” GARF f. 5283,
op. 8, ed. khr. 51, l. 17.
74. E. R. Liberman, “Otchet o rabote s Chekhoslovatskim professorom Needly,” GARF f.
5283, op. 1a, d. 298, l. 110; “Otdel po priemu inostrantsev. Otchet No. 98. 29/IX-27 g.
Gid-perev. t. Shilenskii,” ibid., op. 8, ed. khr. 62, l. 4–5; ibid., op. 1, ed. khr. 334, l. 20, 21.
75. For examples of numerous ankety of employees, see GARF f. 5283, op. 1, d. 11, and ibid.,
op. 8, ed. khr. 41, l. 23; d. 43, l. 5.
76. B. A. Starkov, “Zapad glazami sotrudnikov OGPU,” Rossiia i Zapad: Sbornik statei (St.
Petersburg: Izdatel'stvo S.-Peterburgskogo Universiteta, 1996), 185–208, here 188.
77. On this point see Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Foreigners Observed: Moscow Visitors in the 1930s
under the Gaze of their Soviet Guides,” Russian History 35: 1–2 (2008): 215–234.
78. “Otchet N 54 Gid-Perevoch. t. Trakhterov A. po obsl. 5/IX g. Finch (s plemianitsei)/
Amerika/senator sht. Vashington,” GARF f. 5283, op. 8, ed. khr. 42, l. 16; “Soobshchenie o
rabote. Interpretor Trakhterev Aleksandr L'vovich,” no earlier than 8 February 1928, ibid.,
ed. khr. 62, l. 88. The phrase “personal efficiency” was written in English in the document.
79. “Gid-Perevodchik Gal'perin. Obsluzhival 6–7/X-27. Biberman—Amerika. Otchet,”
GARF f. 5283, op. 8, ed. khr. 41, l. 17; “Anketa” (Gal'perin), l. 23.
80. “Otchet Gid-perevodchik Trakhterov, A. L. po obslu. 7.IX. Miss Ellen Rid [Reed],
Amerika (Zhurnalistka),” GARF f. 5283, op. 8, ed. khr. 42, l. 19.
81. “Otdel po priemu inostrantsev. Otchet No. 84—17/IX-27. Gid-perevodchik Geiman,”
GARF f. 5283, op. 8, d. 41, l. 13; see also second report, l. 10.
82. Report by A. Shtraus, Zav. Otdelom Priema Inostrantsev, 1929, no exact date, GARF f.
5283, op. 8, ed. khr. 73, l. 8.
83. “Doklad o rabote. M. Pshenitsyna” [on Barbusse], 26 June 1928, GARF f. 5283, op. 8,
ed. khr. 62, ll. 155–56 (Lunacharskii and Gorky were present at the Gosizdat talks);
“Amerikanskii pisatel' Sinkler Liuis [Sinclair Lewis]. Obsluzhival gid-perevodchik V.
Chumak,” no earlier than 7 December 1927, GARF f. 5283, op. 8, ed. khr. 62, ll. 69–70;
see also other reports, l. 62, l. 65.
84. Leonid Maksimenkov, “Ocherki nomenlaturnoi istorii sovetskoi literatury: Zapadnye
pilgrimy u stalinskogo perestola (Feikhtvanger i drugie),” Voprosy literatury, no. 2 (2004):
242–291, here 279–280.
85. David Shearer, “Elements Near and Alien: Passportization, Policing, and Identity in the
Stalinist State, 1932–1952,” Journal of Modern History 76 (December 2004): 835–881,
quotation 850.
86. On surveillance, see V. S. Izmozik, Glaza i ushi rezhima: Gosudarstvennyi polit-
icheskii kontrol' za nasleneiem Rossii v 1918–1928 godakh (St. Petersburg: Izdatel'stvo
N o t e s 52 – 59 335
108. Theodore Dreiser, Dreiser’s Russian Diary, ed. Thomas P. Riggio and James L. W. West III
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), entry of 28 November 1927, 147;
entry of 3 December 1927, 181.
109. Romain Rolland, Voyage à Moscou (juin-juillet 1935), ed. Bernard Duchatelet (Paris:
Albin Michel, 1992), 284.
110. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? 2 vols. (London:
Longmans, Green and Co., 1935), 2: 586–594.
111. Michael Gelb, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Zara Witkin, An American Engineer in Stalin’s
Russia: The Memoirs of Zara Witkin, 1932–1934 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1991), 13–14.
112. Nikolai Loboda, Zam. Pred. VOKS, to Trilesser, Nachal'nik INO OGPU, 18 July 1925,
GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 42, l. 4.
113. “L. Cherniavskii, BRIO Pred. VOKS. OO. GUGB NKVD tov. Tkachevu,” 3 March 1936,
GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 307, ll. 51–52.
114. “Beseda O.D. Kamenevy s professorom Al'bertom Dzhonsonom,” 6 June 1928, GARF
f. 5283, op. 1a, ed. khr. 104, l. 52; A. Ia Arosev to G. G. Iagoda, 21 August 1936, GARF f.
5283, op. 1a, d. 307, l. 148.
115. GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 307 ll. 122–129, 150. The information-gathering function of
VOKS has been emphasized by Daniel Kowalsky, Stalin and the Spanish Civil War,
Gutenberg-e publication, Columbia University Press, 2004, htt p://www.gutenberg-e.
org/kod01/index.html, last accessed August 22, 2011, chap. 6.
Chapter 2
1. Hereafter referred to as the “Gesellschaft .”
2. “Vstupitel'noe slovo tov. O.D. Kameneva na vechere sovetsko-germanskogo sblizheniia,”
11 October 1926, GARF f. 5283, op. 8, ed. khr. 11, ll. 26-27; invitations, ll. 29-31; on East
Prussia, “Levit. Otchet po Germanii za 2-oe polugodie 1929,” GARF f. 5283, op. 6, d. 24,
ll. 25–28.
3. “Ein Vortrag von Professor Hötzsch [sic] in Moskau,” ll. 26–27; “Doklad prof. Getch
[Hoetzsch]. Nekotorye soobrazheniia o germanskom vospriiatii istoricheskogo razvitiia
Rossii,” GARF f. 5283, op. 6, d. 24, ll. 25–28.
4. Gerd Voigt, Otto Hoetzsch 1876–1946. Wissenschaft und Politik im Leben eines deutschen
Historikers (Berlin [East]: Akademie Verlag, 1978), 178–179; “Hoetzsch an Botschafter
Graf Brockdorff-Rantzau. Berlin, 28 Juni 1923,” reprinted in ibid., 318–319. See
Christiane Scheidemann, Ulrich Graf Brockdorff-Rantzau (1869–1928): Eine politische
Biographie (Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang, 1998).
5. Kameneva, “Chlenu kollegii NKID V. L. Koppu,” 14 October 1923, GARF f. 5283, op.
1a, ed. khr. 37, ll. 2–3; Kameneva, untitled 1924 letter on friends, l. 19. See also Eduard
Fuchs to Hugo Marcus, 23.5.25, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, ed. khr. 53, l. 11; Rolf Elias, Die
Gesellschaft der Freunde des neuen Russland: Mit vollständigen Inhaltsverzeichnis aller
Jahrgänge der Zeitschrift “Das neue Russland” 1923 bis 1932 (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein
Verlag, 1985), 32.
6. See Susan Solomon’s critical examination of the German-Soviet “special relationship”
in historiography in her introduction to Doing Medicine Together: Germany and Russia
between the Wars, ed. Solomon (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006). The general
literature includes, inter alia, Alexander Nekrich, Pariahs, Partners, Predators: German-
Soviet Relations, 1922–1941 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
7. Sabine Dullin, Des hommes d’influences: Les ambassadeurs de Staline en Europe, 1930–1939
(Paris: Payot, 2001), 186; “I. Maiskii. Pol. pred. SSSR v Belikobritanii. Brio Pred. VOKS
– t. Smirnovu. 9 ianvaria 1938 g.,” GARF f. 5283, op. 2a, d. 2, l. 68–72, esp. l. 69.
8. “Proizvodstvennyi plan raboty VOKS v Tsentral'noi Evrope na 1929 god,” GARF f. 5283,
op. 6, d. 129, l. 135.
9. Carole Fink, “The NEP in Foreign Policy: The Genoa Conference and the Treaty of
Rapallo,” in Soviet Foreign Policy 1917–1991: A Retrospective, ed. Gabriel Gorodetsky
(London: Frank Cass, 1994): 13, 18; Jon Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered
N o t e s 6 4 –7 0 337
World Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) 15–18, 98; Viktor Knoll,
“Das Volkskommissariat für Auswärtige Angelegenheiten im Prozess aussenpoli-
tischer Entscheidung in den zwanziger und dreisiger Jahren,” in Zwischen Tradition und
Revolution: Dominanten und Strukturen sowjetischer Aussenpolitik 1917–1941, ed. Knoll
and Ludmilla Thomas (Stuttgart: Frank Steiner Verlag, 2000), 9–30.
10. Gabriel Gorodetsky, “The Formation of Soviet Foreign Policy: Ideology and Realpolitik,”
in Soviet Foreign Policy, 30–44.
11. The place of Poland in Hoetzsch’s thought on Russia has been most forcefully explicated
by Friedrich Kuebart, “Otto Hoetzsch — Historiker, Publizist, Politiker. Eine kritische
biographische Studie,” Osteuropa, no. 8–9 (Aug.-Sept. 1975): 603–621. See also Michael
Burleigh, Germany turns Eastward: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988), 15–21; Uwe Liszkowski, Osteuropaforschung und
Politik: Ein Beitrag zum historisch-politischen Denken und Wirken von Otto Hoetzsch, vol. 1
(Berlin: Arno Spitz Verlag, 1988), 229–230.
12. Karl Schlögel, “Von der Vergeblichkeit eines Professorenlebens: Otto Hoetzsch und die
deutsche Russlandkunde,” Osteuropa 55, 12 (December 2005): 5–28, quotations 7.
13. Liszkowski, 1: 230, 204–239.
14. Liszkowski, 2: 494–495.
15. Schlögel, “Von der Vergeblichkeit eines Professorenlebens,” 14, 24–28.
16. Burleigh, 14, 25–32; Liszkowski, 2: 485, 488–489.
17. Liszkowski, 2: 490–94, 492 n. 37; Voigt, 320; Christoph Mick, Sowjetische Propaganda,
Fünfjahrplan und deutsche Russlandpolitik 1928–1932 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag,
1995): 263–265.
18. Edgar Lersch, Die auswärtige Kulturpolitik der Sowjetunion in Ihren Auswirkungen auf
Deutschland 1921–1929 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1979) 84–91; Voigt, 194–195;
A. Shtange to Kameneva, 24 August 1925, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 47, l. 113.
19. Fritz T. Epstein, “Otto Hoetzsch und sein ‘Osteuropa’ 1925–1930,” Osteuropa 25, 8–9
(Aug.-Sept.1975): 541–554, quotation 550; Jutt a Unser, “ ‘Osteuropa.’ Biographie
einer Zeitschrift ,” Osteuropa 25, 8–9 (Aug.-Sept. 1975): 555–602; Mick, Sowjetische
Propaganda, 20, 51.
20. Kameneva to Sergei Ol'denburg, 30 December 1926, and other correspondence in GARF
f. 5283, op. 6, d. 33, l. 1, 2, 8, 9, 16–20.
21. “Shtange. Pol. Pred. SSSR v Germanii. Pred. VOKS tov. O.D. Kamenevoi. 31 iiulia 1925,”
GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 47, l. 96.
22. Mick, Sowjetische Propaganda, 192.
23. A. Shtange to O. D. Kameneva, 24 August 1925. Copies to Fedor Rotshtein (NKID and
VOKS pravlenie) and Lorents, Otdel Tsentral'noi Evropy NKID, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d.
47, l. 113–115. Lersch, however, points out that Das neue Russland contained much mate-
rial on Soviet culture that seemed new and interesting to the German public. Lersch, Die
auswärtige Kulturpolitik der Sowjetunion, 83.
24. Shtange. Vo VOKS, tov. O.D. Kameneva,” September 1925, copy to Commissariat of
Foreign Affair’s Central European Section, GARF f. 5283, op 1a, d. 47, l. 127–128.
25. Shtange to Kameneva, 8 Sept. 1925, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 47, l. 134–135; Kameneva
to Shtange, 24 September 1925, ibid., l. 144–46; “Dokladnaia zapiska,” no later than
3 Sept. 1925, ibid., l. 48; Kameneva to N. N. Krenstinskii, 2 October 1925, ibid., l.
156–157; Shtange, “Vo VOKS,” ibid., l. 126–131. For background on Soviet-German
scientific relations after 1925, see Kolchinskii, ed., Sovetsko-germanskie nauchnye sviazi,
144–171.
26. GARF f. 5283, op. 6, d. 57, l. 92 ob; Dukh Rapallo, 168–70, 113–115; Mick, Sowjetische
Propaganda, 260–62; Mezhdunarodnye nauchnye sviazi Akademii nauk SSSR, 1917–1941
(Moscow: Nauka, 1972): 239–246; Kolchinskii, ed., Sovetsko–germanskie nauchnye svi-
azi, 232.
27. O. D. Kameneva to N. P. Gorbunov, 31 October 1925,” GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, ed. khr. 45,
l. 57–60.
28. Burleigh, 34.
29. See the 1929 NKID correspondence in AVP RF f. 082, op. 12, d. 80, 51, l. 13–14, 21, 24.
338 Notes 7 0 – 7 5
30. “Otchet po Germanii za 2-oe polugodie 1929,” GARF f. 5283, op. 6, d. 57, l. 88–89;
“Levit-Livent, Referent po tsentral'noi Evropy [VOKS]. “Germaniia,” 1929, ibid., l. 92
ob; “Doklad referenta [VOKS] po tsentral'noi Evrope – t. Livent-Levit [sic]. 17-go iiulia
1929 g.,” ibid., l. 97. The name was written in both ways in the documents.
31. Levit-Livent, “Germaniia,” cited in full in previous note, l. 93.
32. “Otchet o rabote VOKS 1 iiulia 1929 - 1 marta 1930 g.,” GARF f. 7668, op. 1, d. 215, l. 1–71.
33. Liszkowski, 2: 497, 506–507; Mick, Sowjetische Propaganda, 295–97; Voigt, 328–330,
334–335.
34. Unser, “Osteuropa,” 590–591; Burleigh, 35–38.
35. Lersch, Die auswärtige Kulturpolitik der Sowjetunion.
36. Ann Taylor Allen, “German Radical Feminism and Eugenics, 1900–1908,” German
Studies Review 11, 1 (February 1988): 31–56; Christl Wickert, Helene Stöcker 1869–1943:
Frauenrechtlerin, Sexualreformerin und Pazifi stin. Eine Biographie (Bonn: Dietz, 1991);
Amy Hackett , “Helene Stöcker: Left-wing Intellectual and Sex Reformer,” in When
Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, ed. Renate Bridenthal,
Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984): 153–
174; and Regina Baker, “Helene Stöcker’s Pacifi sm in the Weimar Republic: Between
Ideal and Reality,” Journal of Women’s History 13, 3 (2001): 70–97.
37. “O. D. Kameneva. Predsedateliu Leningradskogo OGPU, tov. Messing. 4 iiunia 1925,”
GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, ed. khr. 37, l. 12.
38. R. S. Veller to O.D. Kameneva, 12 December 1924, GARF f. 5284, op. 6, d. 1, l. 196–202;
“Polozhenie v Germanii,” prob. 1925, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 47, l. 5; “Otchet o rabote
VOKS 1 iiulia 1929 - 1 marta 1930,” GARF f. 7668, op. 1, d. 215, l. 155; “Doklad referenta po
Tsentral'noi Evrope—t. Livent-Levit [sic],” 17 July 1929, GARF f. 5283, op. 6, d. 57, l. 98.
39. “Kameneva. Chlenu kollegii NKID V. L. Koppu. 14 oktiabria 1923,” GARF f. 5283, op.
1a, ed. khr. 37, l. 5; “V otdel Dal'nego Vostoka NKID tov. Baranovskomu,” ibid., l. 16;
Kameneva, untitled letter on Society of Friends, May 1924, ibid., l. 19.
40. GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 24, l. 22–24; Erich Baron to Kameneva, no date, 1928, ibid., ed.
khr. 118, l. 168–169. The Society organized medical, technological, legal, and pedagogi-
cal sections, the largest of which was the pedagogical. “Polozhenie v Germanii,” l. 5.
41. Baron to Kameneva, ibid., l. 169 ob.
42. Quoted in Herta Wolf, Glauben machen: Über deutschsprachige Reiseberichte aus der
Sowjetunion (1918–1932) (Vienna: Sonderzafel, 1992), 202, 209.
43. The 1924 Kameneva-Baron correspondence is in GARF f. 5284, op. 6, d. 1.
44. “Polnomochnoe Predstavitel'stvo SSSR v Germanii. Dmitriev. Tov. O.D. Kamenevoi.
Berlin, 14 Iiulia 1924,” GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, ed. khr. 17, l. 33; Iu. Gol'dshtein to O. D.
Kameneva, 27 June 1924, ibid., d. 21, l. 36.
45. Kameneva to A. A. Shtange, 24 September 1925, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 47, l. 146;
Kameneva to N. N. Krestinskii, 2 October 1925, ibid., 156–157.
46. “Zam. pred. VOKS"a. E. O. Lerner. Upolnomochennomu VOKS v Germanii t.
Girshfel'du,” 2 January 1933, AVP RF f. 082, op. 15, d. 28, p. 71, l. 11. On other occasions,
Baron did display familiarity with several regional affi liates that in fact were active.
47. R. S. Veller to Kameneva, Berlin, 12 December 1924, GARF f. 5283, op. 6, d. 1, l. 197.
48. “Levit. Otchet po Germanii za 2-oe polugodie 1929,” GARF f. 5283, op. 6, d. 57, l. 86–87;
“Doklad referenta po tsentral'noi Evrope—t. Livent-Levit,” 17 July 1929, ibid., l. 96–193;
Mick, Sowjetische Propaganda, 218.
49. “Ob"edinennoe Biuro Informatsii Komissii zagranichnoi pomoshchi,” GARF f. 5283, op.
8, ed. khr. 3, l. 108.
50. Kameneva to A. A. Shtange, 24 September 1925, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 47, l. 46; Kameneva,
“An Gen. Frumkin. Zum Protokol [Agitprop EKKI] vom 15/VI 1926,” RGASPI f. 495, op. 30,
d. 139, l. 157; on the KPD, Protokoll über die Sitzung von 10. Februar 1932, betr. Gesellschaft
der Freunde des Neuen Russlands,” AVP RF f. 082, op. 15, papka 71, ll. 70–75, quotation 74.
51. Veller to Kameneva, 12 December 1924, cited above, l. 197.
52. Shtange to Kameneva, 8 September 1925, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 47, l. 134–135;
Kameneva to Shtange, 24 September 1925, ibid., l. 144–46; “Dokladnaia zapiska,” no
later than 3 September 1925, ibid., l. 48.
N o t e s 76 – 8 0 339
53. Kameneva to Smirnov (Otdel pechati TsK), 21 January 1928, and “V TsK VKP(b),” no
date, 1928, in GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 118, l. 9–20, 115, respectively.
54. A. V. Lunacharskii, “Druz'ia Rossii,” no exact date, RGASPI f. 142, op. 1, d. 148, l. 3–4.
The figures Lunacharskii mentioned were the Futurist artist Ardengo Soffici, the Futurist
leader and avant-garde literary figure Giovanni Papini (who in 1921 turned to Roman
Catholicism and in the 1930s to Fascism), and the journalist and writer Giuseppe
Prezzolini.
55. “O.D. Kameneva, Pred. Komissii. Upolnomochennomu Komissii Zagranichnoi Pomoshchi
v Avstrii. Tov. Bogomolovu,” no earlier than 7 January 1924, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 24, l. 5.
56. “Zarubezhnaia set' VOKS v ee dinamike,” no later than 1 April 1931, GARF f. 5283, op.
1, d. 157, l. 2.
57. Donal O’Sullivan, Furcht und Faszination: Deutsche und britische Russlandbilder 1921–
1933 (Cologne: Böhlau, 1996), 322.
58. D. Bogomolov (VOKS representative in Vienna) to KZP, 7 January 1924, GARF
f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 24, l. 1; V. Kh. Aussem (VOKS representative in Vienna) to Ol'ga
Kameneva, 12 June 1924, ibid., l. 19; Bogomolov to Roman Veller, otvetstvennyi sek-
retar' KZP, ibid., l. 20–21. The society was much smaller than in Germany, and in 1931
had 200 dues-paying members (“Plan raboty VOKS,” no date, 1931, GARF f. 5283, op.
1, d. 158, l. 58).
59. Bogomolov to Kamaneva, 7 January 1924; Kameneva to Bogomolov, no date, GARF f. 5283,
op. 1a, d. 24, l. 1, 5; Klyshko (Narkomvneshtorg) to KZP, 2 February 1924, ibid., l. 7.
60. “M. [Mikhail] Apletin. Upolnomochennomu VOKS v Avstrii tov. Nekunde,” 17 March
1934, AVP RF f. 066, op. 17, p. 116, d. 270, l. 11; “Vypiska iz pis'ma t. Nikunde [sic],” 3
March 1934, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 196, ll. 36–37.
61. “Plan raboty VOKS,” for 1931, GARF f. 5283, op. 1, d. 158, l. 55, 59, which logically
counted interwar Czechoslovakia as part of Western Europe.
62. Erich Baron to Ol'ga Kameneva, 24 November 1924, GARF f. 5284, op. 6, d. 1, l.
184–189.
63. Bradley F. Abrams, The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation: Czech Culture and the Rise of
Communism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Litt lefield, 2004): 41–44.
64. “Vypiska iz otcheta Konsul'skogo Otele Polpredstva SSSR v Chekhoslovakii. Za Aprel.
mesiats 1927 g.,” GARF f. 5283, op. 6, d. 563, l. 85.
65. “Arosev, Aleksandr Iakovlevich,” RGASPI f. 124, op. 1, ed. khr. 80, l. 13–14.
66. Ibid., l. 4–14; Ol'ga Aleksandrovna Aroseva and Vera Maksimova, Bez grima (Moscow:
Tsentrpoligraf, 1999), 28–30, 32–33, 86; Natal'ia Aroseva, Sled na zemle, 146–165;
Nikolai Trachenko, “Sled na zemle,” introduction to Arosev, Belaia lestnitsa: Roman, pov-
esti, rasskazy (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1989), 4–9.
67. On his literary activities, see Michael David-Fox, “Stalinist Westernizer? Aleksandr
Arosev’s Literary and Political Depictions of Europe,” Slavic Review, 62, no. 4 (Winter
2003): 733–759.
68. Aroseva and Maksimova, 15, 20; Natal'ia Aroseva, Sled na zemle: Dokumental'naia povest'
ob ott se (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1987), 206, 227. On December 10,
1932, the Politburo approved his resignation as ambassador and put him at the disposal of
the Central Committee, but to his anguish he received no posting until his appointment
as head of VOKS in 1934. “Protokol No. 125 zasedaniia Politbiuro TsK VKP(b) ot 10
dekabria 1932 g.,” RGASPI f. 17, op. 3, ed. khr. 910 (53/47).
69. Aroseva and Maksimova, 47. Diary entry from 7 November 1932; David-Fox, “Stalinist
Westernizer.”
70. Arosev to Stalin, 3 December 1929, RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, ed. khr. 695, l. 2–4.
71. Arosev to Stalin, no date, prob. 1929, RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, ed. khr. 695, ll. 5–15. In 1931,
Arosev fi nally received a short reply to one of his letters from Stalin, prompting two more
eff usive, rambling responses in which he requested a “responsible post” in Paris. Arosev
to Stalin, 23 May and 31 July 1931, ibid., ll. 56–57, ll. 59–60.
72. E. M. Iaroslavskii to G. K. Ordzhonikidze, 1 February 1929, in Sovetskoe rukovodstvo.
Perepiska. 1928–1941, ed. A. V. Krashonkin, et al. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1999): 62–65,
here 63.
340 Notes 8 1 – 8 5
73. “Dnevnik po Chekhoslovakii ianvar'-fevral’ 1931 goda,” GARF f. 5283, op. 6, d. 563,
ll. 33–34; also, l. 38, l. 39; “Sviazi VOKS”a s otdel'nymi vazhneishimi deiateliami
Chekhoslovakii,” ibid., d. 658, l. 12; E. Cherniak, “Pred. VOKS – tov. A. Ia. Arosevu.
Dokladnaia zapiska o rabote t. Lingardta [Linhardt] – Sekretaria Chekhoslovatskogo
Obshchestva kul'tsviazi,” GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 319, l. 16.
74. On improved diplomatic relations, see G.E.O. Knight, “Anglo-Russian Relations: An
Appeal” and correspondence, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, ed. khr. 37, ll. 152–154; on initiative
of Soviet aktiv, ibid., d. 158, l. 67. A physician, Polovtsevaia was also the Soviet representa-
tive of the Russian Red Cross and the Bureau of Foreign Information of the Commissariat
of Health.
75. “Proof (confidential),” 1924 organizing brochure, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, ed. khr. 16,
ll. 1–2; A. V. Golubev, “Intelligentsiia Velikobritanii i 'novaia tsivilizatsiia’ (Iz istorii
sovetskoi kul'turnoi diplomatii 1930-x gg.), in Rosiia i vneshnii mir: Dialog kul'tur, ed. Iu.
S. Borisov, et al. (Moscow: Institut istorii RA N, 1997): 261–262.
76. V. N. Polovtsevaia to O. D. Kameneva, 4 January 1924; Kameneva to M. N. Pokrovskii,
no earlier than 4 January 1924, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 16, l. 3, ll. 19–21. In 1925, Soviet
embassy personnel were delegated for membership in the London Society for Cultural
Relations with the sanction of the party cell of the embassy. In 1936, two representatives
of the “Soviet colony” were elected to the executive committee of the Society, with 450
votes cast (GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, ed. khr. 55, ll. 12–13; ibid., d. 296, l. 6).
77. Margaret Llewelyn Davies, introduction to Life as We have Known It, ed. Llewelyn Davies
(London: Hogart Press, 1931), ix.
78. Polovtsevaia to Kameneva, 2 October 1925, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, ed. khr. 43, l. 59; ibid., l.
68.
79. Margaret Llewelyn Davies to Polovtsevaia, 30 September 1925, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, ed.
khr. 43, ll. 61–63; Golubev, “Intelligentsiia Velikobritanii,” 263.
80. Kameneva to A. Rozengol'ts, 5 December 1925, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, ed. khr. 43, l. 87.
81. Michael Hughes, Inside the Enigma: British Officials in Russia, 1900–1939 (London:
Hambledon Press, 1997), 211–221; Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics,
216–22; O’Sullivan, Furcht und Faszination, 261. A main conclusion of O’Sullivan’s com-
parative study is that British views of the Soviet Union shifted with the foreign policy
situation (23–26).
82. Helen Crawford, “Memorandum on the Society for Promoting Cultural Relations Between
Russia and Great Britain known as SCR,” GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 125, l. 71, 74.
83. Kameneva to comrade Gurevich (“Direktor Tsentrosoiuz v Anglii”), 13 April 1928,
GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, ed. khr. 104, l. 119; also ibid., l. 142; “Plan raboty VOKS,” 1931,
GARF f. 5283, op. 1, d. 158, ll. 67–68; “Society of Cultural Relations. Special Meeting of
Executive Committee,” 2 July 1936, ibid., d. 296, ll. 52–53 (see also l. 45); ibid., op. 3, ed.
khr. 325, l. 3. For a rather different account of Crawford’s report, citing the Russian trans-
lation, see Ludmila Stern, Western Intellectuals and the Soviet Union: From Red Square to
the Left Bank (London: Routledge, 2007), 101–102.
84. For the impact of the vociferously anti-communist Right in France on Franco-Soviet
relations, see Michael Jabara Carley, “Episodes from the Early Cold War: Franco-Soviet
Relations, 1917–1927,” Europe-Asia Studies 52, 7 (2000): 1275–1305.
85. Stern, Western Intellectuals, 97–105, and Stern, “The All-Union Society for Cultural
Relations with Foreign Countries and French Intellectuals, 1925–29,” Australian Journal
of Politics and History 45, 1 (1999): 99–109.
86. “Deviatin, Polnomochnoe Predstavitel'stvo SSSR vo Frantsii. Predsedateliu VOKS tov.
O.D. Kamenevoi,” 7 December 1925, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 45, l. 132; N. P. Gorbunov
to Paul Langevin, ibid., ll. 45–51.
87. Stern, Western Intellectuals, 103–4; Stern, “Iz predistorii sozdaniia frantsuzskogo obsh-
chestva kul'turnogo sblizheniia Novaia Rossiia (po ranee neopublikovannym materialam
VOKSa),” Australian Slavonic and East European Studies 11, 1–2 (1997): 143–159, here
143, 145, 155.
88. Leonid Krasin to I. I. Miroshnikov, 4 November 1925, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 45, ll.
84–86, also ll. 4, 7–8, 9, 14–16, 38, 93–98, 120–122; Ia. Deviatin [VOKS representative
Notes 85 –90 341
105. Otto Hoetzsch, letter to Soviet embassy, April 1923; Soviet embassy (Raznoboi) to
Maksim Litvinov, 17 April 1923, AVP RF f. 04, op. 13, d. 49988, p. 80, ll. 6, 8.
106. For example, Elizabeth W. Clark, Executive Secretary, American Russian Institute (New
York), to Anatolii Lunacharskii, 6 January 1931, and additional correspondence from Daniil
Novomirskii, VOKS head of Anglo-American sector, GARF f. 5283, op. 3, d. 139, ll. 37,
41–44; Armand Hammer to O. D. Kameneva, 25 August 1928, ibid., op. 1, ed. khr. 91, l. 7.
107. Such was the case with the German physician Heinz Zeiss (letter to VOKS, 26 April 1929,
GARF f. 5283, op. 1, d. 115, l. 31). On Zeiss as German-Soviet scientific broker, trav-
eler, and lobbyist, see Susan Solomon, ed., Doing Medicine Together: Germany and Russia
between the Wars (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), chaps. 4–7.
108. “Plan raboty VOKS,” 1931, GARF f. 5283, op. 1, d. 158, l. 49.
109. S. Vinogradov to Zam. Pred. VOKS Cherniavskii, 9 May 1936, ibid., op. 1a, d. 296, l.
45; Ivan Maiskii to Aleksandr Arosev, 24 July 1936, ibid., ll. 57–58; Arosev to Maiskii, 4
August 1936, ibid., l. 59. On the broader fi nancial and political crisis in the British society
to which this incident contributed, see “Society for Cultural Relations. Special Meeting
of Executive Committee, 2 July 1936,” ibid., ll. 52–53, and also l. 6, l. 47; “Split in Anglo-
Soviet Society,” Daily Mail, 1 July 1936.
110. “L. Cherniavskii. Biuro pred. VOKS. TsK VKP(b) tov. Angarov,” 5 July 1936, GARF f.
5283, op. 1a, d. 308, l. 75.
111. O. D. Kameneva to M. N. Pokrovskii (head of State Scholarly Council, GUS), 13 May
1925, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, ed. khr. 55, l. 9; Kameneva, “V Valiutnoe Upravlenie NKF
SSSR,” 10 May 1927, ibid., d. 93, l. 38; ibid., l. 105, l. 254.
112. GARF f. 5283, op. 1, d. 115, l, 97, 100, 123.
113. Robert Aron to VOKS, 28 June 1929 GARF f. 5283, op. 1, d. 115, l. 139.
114. GARF f. 5286, op. 1, d. 115, l. 70.
115. On Marr, see inter alia Vera Tolz, Russian Academicians and Revolution: Combining
Professionalism and Politics (Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan, 1997);
Yuri Slezkine, “N. Ia. Marr and the National Origins of Soviet Ethnogenetics,” Slavic
Review 55, 4 (1996): 826–862.
116. “Zasedanie Predstavitelei sekstii nauchnykh rabotnikov VOKS. 7 dekabria 1928,” GARF
f. R-5283, op. 1, d. 91, l. 100.
117. “Memorandum zur Frage der internationalen Massenaktion zur Schutz der Sowjet-
Union,” 10 July 1925, RGASPI f. 495, op. 30, d. 139, ll. 7–11; “Otchet po kampanii VOKS
protiv interventsii za period s 20 noiabria po 20 ianvaria s.g.,” GARF f. 5283, op. 1, ed.
khr. 139, l. 110; I. N. Il'ina, Obshchestvennye organizatsii Rossii v 1920-e gody (Moscow:
Institut istorii RA N, 2000), 140.
118. Unsigned denunciation sent to Kameneva “with communist greetings,” prob. 1929,
GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 136, l. 19; see also “Zasedanie Predstavitelei sekstii nauchnykh
rabotnikov VOKS. 7 dekabria 1928,” ibid., d. 91, l. 99–100.
119. Prof. A. A. Sidorov (Uchenyi sekretar' GAKhN) to O. D. Kameneva, 16 April 1929, GARF
f. 5283, op. 1, d. 115, l. 7.
120. Katerina Clark, “The Avant-Gardes of Russia and Germany (1917–1933): A Transnational
Entity?” paper presented at the conference “Fascination and Enmity: Russian-German
Encounters in the Twentieth Century and the Idea of a Non-Western Historical Path,”
Berlin, June 2007; Clark, “Tretiakov, Benjamin and Brecht in Pre-Nazi Berlin: A Case
of Cross-Cultural Dialogue,” paper presented at the “Workshop on New Approaches to
Russian and Soviet History,” University of Maryland, May 2003.
121. “Zapiska pred. VChK F. E. Dzerhzhinskogo v TsK RKP(b),” 19 April 1921, in Vlast' i
khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia. Dokumenty TsK RKP(b)-VKP(b), VChK-OGPU-NKVD
o kul'turnoi politike, 1917–1935, ed. Andrei Artuzov and Oleg Naumov (Moscow:
Demokratiia, 1999): 15, see also 17, 19, 22, 24, 25, 28–29. The materials of the Central
Committee commission on foreign travel are contained in several dela in RGASPI f. 17,
op. 85. On travel destinations, see d. 666, 1–20; on rejection rates and reasons, d. 665, ll.
8–22, d. 652, ll. 1–233; on political and bureaucratic strife around campaigns to reduce
travelers in 1927 and secret-police involvement, d. 655, ll. 37–43.
N o t e s 9 6 –10 2 343
122. N. V. Kiseleva, Iz istorii bor'by sovetskoi obshchestvennosti za proryv kul'turnoi blokady SSSR
(VOKS: seredina 20-x – nachalo 30-x godov) (Rostov-na-Donu: Izdatel'stvo Rostovskogo
Universiteta, 1991), 26–27. For Kameneva’s endorsement of Boianus, see GARF f. 5283, op.
1, ed. khr. 104, l. 128; he was turned down on the level of Narkompros on 21 February 1930
(ibid., op. 8, ed. khr. 79, l. 204). On Griuner, see Kameneva letter, 10 December 1927, ibid.,
d. 81, l. 141. On Bunak, see ibid., op. 8, ed. khr. 79, ll. 171, 172.
123. “Protokol Zasedaniia Komissii Sovetskogo Otdela na mezhdunarodnoi Vystavke
Kinometografii v Gollandii . . . 23 marta 1928”; “Zam. Pred. Sovnarkom A.M. Lezhava.
Uchraspred TsK VKP(b). Sekretno. Kopiia – tov. Ol'khovomu, Kino-Setskiia Agitpropa TsK
VKP(b),” RGASPI f. 17, op. 85, d. 663, l. 133, ll. 134–136.
124. Kameneva, “V Sekretariat TsK,” no exact date, summer 1927, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 97, l.
70; Radek to Stalin, 1 May 1932, RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, d. 789, l. 48, also ll. 54, 55, 58.
125. See Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Introduction,” in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Fitzpatrick (London
and New York: Routledge, 2000), 11; Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in
Extraordinary Times. Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999),
109–114, quotation 114; Fitzpatrick, “Intelligentsia and Power: Client-Patron Relations
in Stalin’s Russia,” in Stalinismus vor dem zweiten Weltkrieg: Neue Wege der Forschung, ed.
Manfred Hildermeier (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1998), 35–53.
126. See, for example, Professor Iulii Shkal'skii to A. Ia. Arosev, 22 July 1936, GARF f. R-5283,
op. 1a, d. 308, l. 80. On the underestimation of institutions and the remarkable “institutional
stubbornness” of the Soviet state, see Stephen Kotkin, “Mongol Commonwealth? Exchange
and Governance across the Post-Mongol Space,” Kritika 8,3 (Summer 2007): 487–531, quo-
tation 526. For a discussion of a “hybrid mode” of personalistic and modern, bureaucratic
administration in the context of late Stalinism, see Yoram Gorlizki, “Ordinary Stalinism: The
Council of Ministers and the Soviet Neopatrimonial State, 1946–1953,” Journal of Modern
History 74 (December 2002): 699–736.
127. Ian (Jan) Plamper, Alkhimiia vlasti: Kul't Stalina v izobrazitel'nom iskusstve (Moscow:
NLO, 2010), 253.
Chapter 3
1. “Plan raboty s inostrannymi spetsialistami,” Dzerzhinskii Club for foreign specialists
and workers in Moscow, for which VOKS arranged excursions, prob. June 1931, GARF f.
5283, op. 8, d. 86, ll. 8–9.
2. A. G. Man'kov, Dnevniki 30-x godov (St. Petersburg: Evropeiskii dom, 2001): 93. On
Herriot’s tour as part of a Soviet countercampaign to deny reports of famine by émigré
Ukrainian groups in Poland, see Iaroslav Papuha, Zakhidna Ukraïna i holodomor 1932–
1933 rokiv (Lviv: Astroliabiia, 2008), 56.
3. See Vladimir Solonari, Purifying the Nation: Population Exchange and Ethnic Cleansing
in Nazi-Allied Romania (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), Part II,
chap. 2; and Solonari, “ ‘Model Province’: Explaining the Holocaust of Bessarabian and
Bukovinian Jewry,” Nationalities Papers 34, 4 (Sept. 2006): 471–494.
4. “Biuro po Delam Inostrannoi Kooperatsii (illeg.)” to Georgii Chicherin, 18 May 1926,
AVP RF f. 69, op. 14, d. 60, p. 47, l. 1; “Professional'no dvizhenie. Rabochaia delegatsiia
v Rossii,” no date, 1925 or 1926, GARF f. 5451, op. 13a, d. 68, ll. 5–6; “O nedochetakh
obsluzhivaniia delegatov,” Agitprop IKKI report on 1927 Congress of Friends, RGASPI
f. 495, op. 95, ed. khr. 21, ll. 148–162, here l. 152.
5. “Otchet o rabote s g. Bekker po Germanii perev. Liberman,” no earlier than 29 May 1932,
GARF f. 5283, op. 8, d. 112, l. 54; on the ubiquity and changing use of the term among
travelers from Germany, where press reports on “Potemkin villages” were most wide-
spread, see Matt hias Heeke, Reisen zu den Sowjets: Der ausländische Tourismus in Russland
1921–1941 (Münster: Lit, 2004), 485–494.
6. Michael Gelb, ed., An American Engineer in Stalin’s Russia: The Memoirs of Zara Witkin,
1932–1934 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 43.
7. Heeke, Reisen zu den Sowjets, esp. 167.
344 Notes 1 0 3 – 1 0 7
24. E. Dobkin, “Plan raboty Otdela po priemu inostrantsev za period s noiabria 1930 po
oktiabr' 1931 g.,” GARF f. 5283, op. 1, d. 158, ll. 162–64; ibid., d. 87, ll. 1–107; Heeke,
Reisen zu den Sowjets, 486–88; G. V. Kulikova, “Pod kontrolem gosudarstva: Prebyvanie
inostrannykh pisatelei v 1920–1930-x godakh,” Otechestvennaia istoriia, no. 4 (2003):
43–59, here 47–48.
25. Politbiuro TsK RKP(b)-VKP(b) i Komintern, 1919–1943. Dokumenty (Moscow:
ROSSPEN, 2004): 316–317; “Spisok predpriiatii dlia osmotra nemetskoi delegatsiei v
gorode Moskva,” July 1925, GARF f. 5451, op. 13a, d. 65, l. 24; “Spisok zavodov i pred-
priiatii dlia poseshcheniia inodelegatsiiami. Moskovskaia oblast',” 1932, ibid., d. 423, l.
71; “Spisok rekomendovannykh ob”ektov dlia poseshcheniia zavodov i kul'tuchrezhdenii
ino. rabochikh delegatsiei, priezzhaiushchei k 15-letiiu oktiabr'skoi revoliutsii—gor.
Khar'kov,” ibid., l. 74.
26. B. E. Bagasarian, et al., Sovetskoe zazerkal'e: Inostrannyi turizm v SSSR v 1930–1980–e
gody (Moscow: Forum, 2007), 29.
27. “Doklad tov. Smirnova ob itogakh obsluzhivaniia inostrannykh turistov v 1936 g.,” GARF
f. 9612, op. 1, d. 36, ll. 234–260, here l. 242, l. 245; “Predlozheniia po upravleniiu obslu-
zhivaniia,” Intourist, 9 December 1936, ibid., ll. 199–208, here l. 202; “Otchet o priezde
grupp inostrannykh turistov v Sovetskii Soiuz za 1936 g.,” ibid., d. 40, ll. 1–8, here l. 6.
28. Hollander, Political Pilgrims, quotations 21, 87, 137. Two meticulous recent studies have
revealed far more skepticism and negative impressions among travelers and intellectuals
alike: Heeke, Reisen zu den Sowjets, and Eva Oberloskamp, Fremde neue Welten: Reisen
deutscher und französischer Linksintellektueller in die Sowjetunion 1917–1939 (Munich:
Oldenbourg, 2011).
29. See Uhlig, Utopie oder Alptraum, 23; Elizabeth Papazian, Manufacturing Truth: The
Documentary Moment in Soviet Culture (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press,
2008); Herta Wolf, Glauben machen: Über deutschsprachige Reiseberichte aus der
Sowjetunion (1918–1932) (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 1992).
30. Oberloskamp, Fremde neue Welten, conclusion.
31. Natal'ia Evgen'evna Semper (Sokolova), “Portrety i peizazhi: Chastnye vospominaniia o
XX veke,” Druzhba narodov, no. 2 (1997): 73–115, here 109, 111.
32. “Sotsialisticheskoe pereustroistvo sel'skogo khoziaistva. Kolkhozy,” sent to VOKS by
Moscow oblast' Kolkhoz Center (Mosoblkolkhozsoiuz), no date, early 1930s, GARF
f. 5283, op. 8, d. 168, l. 5; “Protokol zasedaniia otvetstevennykh rabotikov VOKS po
voprosu o rabote Otdela Priema Inostrantsev,” 28 May 1931, ibid., op. 1, d. 163, l. 2 ob;
“Programmy zagorodnykh poseshchenii dlia inospetsialistov,” no later than 1 June 1931,
ibid., op. 8, d. 86, l. 5; P. Nekunde (First Secretary, Soviet Embassy in Austria) to Timm
(VOKS), 6 January 1934, AVP RF f. 066, op. 17, p. 116, d. 270, l. 7.
33. Valentin Berezhkov, Kak ia stal perevodchikom Stalina (Moscow: Dem, 1993), 179.
34. Deborah Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), chap. 6, quotation 181.
35. “M. Liubchenko. Pred. Vseukrainskogo Obshchestva kul'tsviazi. Tov. Lerneru. Zam.
Pred. VOKS. 8 avgusta 1932 (Kharkiv),” AVP RF f. 082, op. 15, d. 28, p. 27, l. 187.
36. Witkin, American Engineer, 57–59.
37. Economist quoted in “Pred. VOKS A. Arosev. Sekretariu TsIK SSSR tov. Akulovu I.A.,” 5
November 1936, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 311, l. 7; “Stenogramma soveshchanie pravleniia
kolkhoztsentra s predstaviteliami inostrannykh rabochikh delegatsii,” 8 avgusta 1930 g., GARF
f. 5451, op. 13, ed. khr. 290, ll. 1–18; “Beseda predsedatelia Kolkhoztsentra tov. Kaminskogo s
inostrannymi predstaviteliami,” 21 November 1929, ibid., ed. khr. 264, ll. 2–33.
38. Marcello Flores, L’immagine dell’URSS: L’Occidente e la Russia di Stalin (1927–1956)
(Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1990): 112; S. O. Pidhainy, The Black Deeds of the Kremlin: A White
Book, vol. 1: Book of Testimonies (Toronto: Ukrainian Association of Victims of Russian
Communist Terror, 1953); Ewald Ammende, Human Life in Russia (London, 1936),
230–231; Robert Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-
Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 313–315.
39. Michael Jabara Carley, “A Soviet Eye on France from the Rue de Grenelle in Paris,
1924–1940,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 17 (2006): 298–299, 315, quotation 314; Ludmila
346 Notes 1 1 2 – 1 1 8
58. Schlögel, Terror und Traum, 592–602; Jan C. Behrends, Die erfundene Freundschaft:
Propaganda für die Sowjetunion in Polen und in der DDR (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag,
2006): 57–64; Ann E. Gorsuch, “ ‘There’s No Place Like Home’: Soviet Tourism in
Late Stalinism,” Slavic Review 62, 4 (2003): 771–775; Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker,
“Introduction,” in Turizm: The Russian and East European Tourist Under Capitalism and
Socialism, ed. Gorsuch and Koenker (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006): 9.
59. “Doklad tov. Smirnova ob itogakh obsluzhivaniia inostrannykh turistov v 1936 g.,” l.
242.
60. Semper, 108.
61. “Otdel po priemu inostrantsev. Gid-perevodchik G. M. Rabinovich. Gr. Leven—
Shvedtsiia,” 18 November 1927, GARF f. 5283, op. 8, ed. khr. 44, l. 27.
62. VOKS circular letter to commissariats, 8 January 1932, GARF f. 5283, op. 1, d. 177, l. 69;
“Stenogramma vystupleniia t. Kurts na soveshchanii ot 9-go febralia 1936 g. po voprosu
o povyshenii kvalifi katsii gidov,” GARF f. 9682, op. 1, d. 36, l. 27; “Otchet o prebyvanii i
obsluzhivanii po Moskve i o politicheskikh nastroeniiakh inostrannykh rabochikh dele-
gatsii, priezzhavshikh k 15-i godovshchine oktiabria (oktiabr' 1932 g.),” published in A.V.
Golubev, “Vzgliad na zemliu obetovannuiu”: Iz istorii sovetskoi kul'turnoi diplomatii 1920–
1930-x godov (Moscow: Institut istorii RA N, 2004), 200–215, here 202; “Organizatsiia i
metodika kul'tpokaza,” Intourist, 9 December 1936, ibid., l. 201.
63. Witkin, American Engineer, 46; “Doklad tov. Smirnova,” l. 243–244.
64. “O nedochetakh obsluzhivaniia delegatov,” 1927, l. 151.
65. “Brio Pred. VOKS (N. Kuliabko). Narkompros tov. Bubnovu,” 7 October 1935, GARF f.
5283, op. 1a, d. 283, l. 23; “O nedochetakh obsluzhivaniia delegatov,” 1927, ll. 148–55;
Witkin, American Engineer, 43–44, 178.
66. Heeke, Reisen zu den Sowjets, 436–440, 476.
67. Semper, 85–90.
68. “Ot redaktsii,” Na sushe i na more, no. 1 (January 1929), 1; “O mestnom turizme,” Na
sushe i na more, no. 16 (1931): 2–3, quotation 3.
69. G. P. Dolzhenko, Istoriia turizma v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii i SSSR (Rostov: Izdatel'stvo
Rostovskogo Universiteta, 1988): 76–86; on the proletarian-tourist movement, Diane
P. Koenker, “The Proletarian Tourist in the 1930s: Between Mass Excursion and Mass
Escape,” in Turizm, 119–140. Visits to industrial sites are mentioned on 128.
70. VOKS to VTsSPS on the guidebook Ves' SSSR, no date, 1929 or 1930, GARF f. 5451, op.
13a, d. 239, l. 13.
71. “Proletarskii turizm sluzhit delu rabochego klassa: Moskovskie rabochie turisty na fron-
takh piatiletki,” Na sushe i na more, no. 12 (1931): 8–9; K. Grigor'ev, “Voennyi turizm na
zapade,” ibid., no. 4 (1931): 18–20.
72. V. A. Emel'ianchenko and G. N. Pan'shin, Puteshestvuete po Moskovskoi oblasti (Moscow:
MOSTEU VTsSPS, 1940).
73. Untitled reports on delegations, 1927, RGASPI f. 495, op. 99, ed. khr. 21, ll. 64–68, l. 91;
“O nedochetakh obsluzhivaniia delegatov,” ibid., l. 149.
74. Numerous Agitprop IKKI documents include “O posylke delegatsii v SSSR,” 21 May
1927, RGASPI f. 495, op. 99, d. 22, l. 37 (also ll. 76, 134); ibid., ed. khr. 21, l. 67, l. 92;
“Gegen die Lügenmeldungen der sowjetfeindlichen Presse. Für die Wahrheit über
Sowjetrussland,” resolution of German workers’ delegation, 13 October 1927, ibid., ed.
khr. 9, l. 91.
75. “O nedochetakh obsluzhivaniia delegatov.”
76. “Vystupleniia delegatov za rubezhom,” RGASPI f. 495, op. 95, ed. khr. 21, ll. 123–62,
here l. 144, 150.
77. Quotation from “Shugar,” in “O nedochetakh obsluzhivaniia delegatov,” 1927, RGASPI f.
495, op. 95, ed. khr. 21, ll. 148–162, here l. 49.
78. Rykov speech to Congress of Friends fi rst session, 10 November 1927, RGASPI f. 495, op.
99, ed. khr. 1, l. 27; on coordinating the message of achievements, “Vystupleniia delegatov
za rubezhom,” l. 144.
79. “Congress of Friends, Second Session” (in English and German), 11 November 1927,
RGASPI f. 495, op. 99, ed. khr. 3, l. 6–7, 28–30, l. 62.
348 Notes 1 2 4 – 1 3 4
80. Ibid., l. 6; also, stenographic report of delegate meeting with Valerian Kuibyshev, chair-
man of VSNKh (in English), GARF f. 5451, op. 13, ed. khr. 187, ll. 96–113, here l. 112.
81. “Otzyvy delegatov,” l. 184 ob.
82. Untitled transcript of fi rst session of Congress of Friends of the USSR, RGASPI f. 495, op.
99, ed. khr. 1, l. 3; “Veranstellung der WOKS,” 4 November 1927, ibid., ed. khr. 23, l. 189.
In terms of citizenship the delegates included 173 Germans, 146 French, 127 English, 74
Czechoslovak, 47 Austrian, 34 American, 22 Chinese, and small numbers of delegates
from 28 other countries.
83. “V. Miuntsenberg. Pervoe predlozhenie dlia organizatsii v 1927 g. bol'shoi mezhdunaro-
dnoi volnoi simpatii k Sovetskoi Rossii,” 26 November 1926, RGASPI f. 495, op. 99, d. 25,
l. 4–10, here l. 4.
84. A. I. Rykov, “Zamechaniia k proektu Rezoliutsii,” no date, ibid., d. 12, ll. 15–16.
85. “O nedochetakh obsluzhivaniia delegatov,” RGASPI f. 495, op. 95, ed. khr. 21, ll. 148–62;
untitled report on VOKS delegation, RGASPI f. 495, op. 99, ed. khr. 21, ll. 86–96.
86. “O nedochetakh obsluzhivaniia delegatov,” RGASPI f. 495, op. 95, ed. khr. 21, ll.
148–162.
87. “Rezoliutsiia vynesennaia obshcheevropeiskoi konferentsiei oktiabr'skikh gostei-chle-
nov Obshchestv sblizhenie s SSSR,” RGASPI f. 495, op. 99, d. 22, l. 113–115.
88. “O posylke delegatsii v SSSR,” l. 34.
89. “Foreign Delegation’s Interview with Stalin,” in English, 5 November 1927, GARF f.
5451, op. 13, ed. khr. 187, ll. 69–95. Fischer and Maslow were German Left oppositionists
who allied with the United Opposition in the USSR.
90. Theodore Dreiser, Dreiser’s Russian Diary, ed. Thomas P. Riggio and James L. W. West III
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 28–29.
91. Ruth Epperson Kennell, That Boy Nikolka and Other Tales of Soviet Children (New York:
Russian War Relief, 1945). On Kennell’s later career, see Julia L. Mickenberg, Learning
from the Left: Children’s Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
92. Ruth Epperson Kennell, Theodore Dreiser and the Soviet Union, 1927–1945. A First-Hand
Chronicle (New York: International Publishers, 1969), 32–33. The translator here mis-
translates: it should be “not completely a Soviet woman.” In archival documents, includ-
ing a letter from a provincial informant on Dreiser (GARF f. 5283, op. 1, d. 142, l. 89), this
guide is identified as S. P. Trivas, referent in the VOKS Anglo-American section.
93. Kennell, Theodore Dreiser, 119, 200.
94. R. N. Mookerjee, Theodore Dreiser: His Thought and Social Criticism (Delhi: National
Publishing House, 1974); Riggio, “Introduction,” Russian Diary, 15.
95. Dinamov to Dreiser, 10 December 1926, and Dreiser to Dinamov, 5 January 1927, Dreiser
Collection, University of Pennsylvania Rare Book Division, cited by Mookerjee, 96.
96. O. D. Kameneva, “Tov. I. V. Stalinu. Ts.K. VKP(b). 25 noiabria 1927,” GARF f. R-5283,
op. 1a, d. 97, l. 43; Kennell, Theodore Dreiser, 88, 94.
97. Dreiser’s Russian Diary, entry of 30 November 1927, 162.
98. See diary excerpts given to Iaroshevskii, the head of VOKS’s Anglo-American sector at
the time, in GARF f. 5283, op. 1, d. 142, l. 96–108.
99. Dreiser’s Russian Diary, entry of 24 Nov. 1927, 137. Th is is in keeping with the editorial
practice of the published edition.
100. Kennell, Theodore Dreiser, 87–88, citing her own diary from 1927.
101. Ibid., entry of 5 Dec. 1927, 186, 188, 270. The whole interview with Bukharin is recorded
on 183–192.
102. Dreiser’s Russian Diary, entry of 29 Nov. 1927, 157, and also 102, 108, 129, 136, 173–174
and passim. For his defense of the genius of American “fi nancial giants” Vanderbilt,
Rockerfeller, Carnegie, and Pullman, see 158.
103. Riggio, “Introduction,” 12; Kennell, Theodore Dreiser, 216–217.
104. Ibid., entry of 18 November 1927, 108; Kennell, Theodore Dreiser, 200.
105. Dreiser’s Russian Diary, entry of 28 October 1927, 46.
106. Ibid., entry of 3 November 1927, 54, 56.
107. Ibid., entry of 8 November 1927, 72.
N o t e s 13 4 –14 4 349
108. Theodore Dreiser, Dreiser Looks at Russia (New York: Horace Liveright, 1928), 20, 21;
Dreiser’s Russian Diary, entry of 31 December 1927, 259.
109. Ibid., entry of 4 November 1927, 59.
110. Kennell, Theodore Dreiser, 81.
111. The quotations are from David C. Engerman, “Modernization from the Other Shore:
American Observers and the Costs of Soviet Economic Development,” American
Historical Review 105: 2 (April 2000), 382–416, here 382, 383.
112. Dreiser’s Russian Diary, entry of 4 December 1927, 182.
113. Dreiser Looks at Russia, 50–67.
114. Ibid., entry of 4 January 1928, 264.
115. Kennell, Theodore Dreiser, 206.
116. James Farson, Black Bread and Red Coffins (1930), quoted and discussed in Donal
O’Sullivan, Furcht und Faszination: Deutsche und britische Russlandbilder 1921–1931
(Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1996): 249.
117. Dreiser’s Russian Diary, entries of 10 and 13 January 1928, 272, 276.
118. Sergei Dinamov to Kameneva, GARF f. 5283, op. 1, d. 142, l. 9. The text follows, l. 10–15;
reprinted in Dreiser’s Russian Diary, 287–291.
119. Theodore Dreiser, untitled letter from Odessa, 13 January 1928. GARF f. 5283, op. 1, d.
142, l. 10–15.
120. O. D. Kameneva to Stalin; Kameneva to Bukharin, 25 November 1927, GARF f. 5283,
op. 1a, d. 97, l. 147. On the Sovietization of the old intelligentsia ethos of self-evaluation,
see Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalinism (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), esp. 351–356.
121. “O prebyvanii Dreizera v SSSR,” 28 January 1928, GARF f. 5283, op. 1, d. 142, l. 62–64.
122. Eric Naiman and Christina Kaier, eds., Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the
Revolution Inside (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).
123. A particularly striking example of a guide att ributing the criticisms of a sympathetic
“friend” (a female French pacifi st) to the absence of bourgeois comfort can be found in
GARF f. 5283, op. 8, d. 112, ll. 24–25.
124. “O prebyvanii Dreizera v SSSR.”
125. Dreiser Looks at Russia, 90, 115–116, 121, 123. The last quotation was the title of chap. 3.
126. Quoted in Kennell, Theodore Dreiser, 213, 216.
127. Kennell, Theodore Dreiser, 212–213.
128. Kennell, Theodore Dreiser, 211–316; Mookerjee, 113–227.
129. “O prebyvanii Dreizera v SSSR.”
Chapter 4
1. M. Gor'kii, “Po Souzu sovetov,” Nashi dostizheniia, no. 1 (1929), 11–43, here 38.
2. M. A. Babicheva, “Tragicheskie stranitsy istorii Solovkov” in “V Belom more krasnyi
SLON”: Vospominaniia uznikov Solovetskogo lageria osobogo naznacheniia i literatura
o nem, ed. Babicheva (Moscow: Pashkov Dom, 2006): 6–35, esp. 6, 8, 13, 17, 21 (see
also the bibliography, 418–426); Oleg V. Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From
Collectivization to the Great Terror, trans. Vadim Staklo (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2005), 28–29.
3. In the fi rst category, see Mikhail Geller, “Gor'kii i lozh',” Cahiers du monde russe et sovié-
tique 29, 1 (1988): 5–12, and, more recently, Dariusz Tolczyk, See No Evil: Literary Cover-
Ups and Discoveries of the Soviet Camp Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1999): 94–183; in the second, for example, V. N. Chernukhina, “Poezdka M. Gor'kogo na
Solovki (Svidetel'stva ochevidtsev),” in Neizvestnyi Gor'kii, vyp. 4, M. Gor'kii i ego epokha:
Materialy i issledovaniia (Moscow: Nasledie, 1995): 124–135.
4. Elizabeth Papazian, chap. 3 of Manufacturing Truth: The Documentary Moment in Early
Soviet Culture, 1921–1934 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009), quota-
tions 127, 129.
5. Mary Louise Loe, “Maksim Gor'kii and the Sreda Circle: 1899–1905,” Slavic Review
44, 1 (Spring 1985): 49–66, quotation 52. See also Andrew Barratt and Barry P. Scherr,
350 Notes 1 4 4 – 1 4 8
“Introduction,” in Maksim Gorky: Selected Letters, ed. Barrat and Scherr (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1997): xxv–xxvi.
6. In 1921, Lenin and Zinoviev’s relations with Gorky became strained, and Lenin insisted
that Gorky leave the country, ostensibly for rest (Viacheslav Ivanov, “Why Did Stalin Kill
Gorky?” Russian Studies in Literature 30, 4 (1994): 5–40, here 9; L. A. Spiridonova, M.
Gor'kii: Novyi vzgliad [Moscow: IMLI RA N, 2004]: 106). In the same year, the Politburo
formally prohibited Gorky from publishing in Comintern journals (Andrei Artuzov and
Oleg Naumov, eds., Vlast' i khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia. Dokumenty TsK RKP(b)-
VKP(b), VChK-OGPU-NKVD o kul'turnoi politike, 1917–1953 [Moscow: Demokratiia,
1999], 14–15). By the mid-1920s, Gorky was drawn more and more into Soviet liter-
ary affairs (Natal'ia Nikolaevna Primochkina, Pisatel' i vlast': M. Gor'kii v literaturnom
dvizhenii 20-x godov, 2nd ed. [Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1998]).
7. Evgeny Dobrenko, The Making of the State Writer: Social and Aesthetic Origins of Soviet
Literary Culture, trans. Jessica M. Savage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001),
361.
8. Tolczyk, See No Evil, 122.
9. Papazian, 130–154.
10. The correspondence is contained in RGASPI f. 558, op. 11.
11. Spiridonova, 124–135, quotation 146; S. V. Zaika, et al., eds., M. Gor'kii: Neizdannaia
perepiska s Bogdanovym, Leninym, Stalinym, Zinov'evym, Kamenevym, Korolenko (Moscow:
Nasledie, 1998): 275–309.
12. See, for example, the exchange of 25 and 28 January 1928 in M. Gor'kii i R. Rollan
(Moscow: Nasledie, 1996): 144–151; and Stuart Finkel, On the Ideological Front: The
Russian Intelligentsia and the Making of the Soviet Public Sphere (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2007), 161.
13. Gorky to Iagoda, 6 February 1930, and Gorky to Iagoda, 2 November 1930, both in
“Perepiska M. Gor'kogo s G. G. Iagodoi,” Neizvestnyi Gor'kii (k 125-letiiu so dnia rozh-
deniia), ed. V. S. Barakhov et al. (Moscow: Nasledia, 1994): 162–206, here 172–174.
14. M. Gor'kii, “Rabsel'koram,” Sobranie sochinenii, 30 vols., vol. 24: Stat'i, rechi, privetstviia
1907–1928 (Moscow: Gosizdat khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1953): 304–307, quota-
tion 306; see also 299, 301–303, 313–315 (orig. 1928). On the mass journalism of NEP
as a key site for the emergence of Socialist Realism’s focus on the adventurous hero, see
Matt hew A. Lenoe, Closer to the Masses: Stalinist Culture, Social Revolution, and Soviet
Newspapers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).
15. Erika Wolf, “USSR in Construction: From Avant-Garde to Socialist Realist Practice”
(Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1999): 16–34.
16. Tovah Yidlin, Maxim Gorky: A Political Biography (Westport: Praeger, 1999): 150.
17. Gor'kii, “Desiat' let,” in Publitsisticheskie stat'i (Moscow: Gosizdat literatury, 1931), orig.
Pravda, 6–7 November 1927.
18. Ibid., 9, 11–12.
19. Hans Günther, “The Heroic Myth in Socialist Realism,” in Traumfabrik Kommunismus:
Die visuelle Kultur der Stalinzeit / Dream Factory Communism: The Visual Culture of the
Stalin Era, ed. Boris Groys and Max Hollein (Frankfurt: Schirn Kunsthalle, 20003),
106–123, here 108–111.
20. Mishel' Nike, “Revoliutsionnyi romantizm,” in Sotsrealisticheskii kanon, ed. Gans Giunter
[Hans Günther] and Evgenii Dobrenko (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2000):
473–480, esp. 475.
21. Gorky to Stalin, 8 January 1930, in Vlast' i khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia, 124–125.
22. Timo Vikhavainen, Vnutrennyi vrag: Bor'ba s meshchanstvom kak moral'naia missiia
russkoi intelligentsii (St. Petersburg: Kolo, 2004): 209–214.
23. Stalin to Gorky, no later than 15 December 1930, in Vlast' i khudozhestvennaia intelligen-
tsiia, 138.
24. Ivanov, “Why Did Stalin Kill Gorky?” 12. Th is article is unusual in that it combines inter-
esting observations from the author’s research with what he learned from his father, the
writer Vsevolod Ivanov, who was under Gorky’s patronage in the 1930s; it also contains
unfounded speculation.
N o t e s 14 9 –1 5 3 351
25. “Protokol zasedaniia Politbiuro TsK VKP(b) ot 17-go maia 1928 goda,” RGASPI f. 17,
op. 3, ed. khr. 687, l. 1; Politburo resolution from 15 December 1929, in Vlast' i khudoz-
hestvennaia intelligentsiia, 123–124; Vikhavainen, 209; Kaganovich to Stalin (on Gorky),
23 June 1932, in Oleg Khlevniuk, et al., eds., Stalin i Kaganovich: Perepiska, 1931–1936
gg. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2001): 198; Ivanov, “Why Did Stalin Kill Gorky?” 33; and, for
an example of Gorky’s proposals to Stalin on “cultural construction” forwarded to the
Politburo, see 25 May 1932, RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, d. 719, ll. 50–54. Despite the falling
out and Gorky’s virtual house arrest at the end of his life, Stalin continued to approve
Gorky’s proposals in 1936 (ibid., d. 720, ll. 110–112, 116). For one take on the ambiguities
of Gorky’s relationship with Stalin over time, see Lidiia Spiridonova, “Gorky and Stalin
(According to New Materials from A. M. Gorky’s Archive),” Russian Review 54, 3 (July
1995): 413–424.
26. Telegram from Kriuchkov to Poskrebyshev and related correspondence, March 1932,
RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, d. 719, ll. 46–48.
27. “Art. Khalatov. Zav. ‘OGIZ.’ Predsedateliu Soveta Narodnykh Komissarov tov. Molotovu,
V.M.,” 29 March 1932; “Zav. OGIZ Art. Khalatov. Valiutnoi komissii pri SNK SSSR,” 21
March 1932, both in RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, d. 719, ll. 45, 46.
28. Ivanov, “Why Did Stalin Kill Gorky?” 6 (relying on the recollections of V. M. Khodasevich,
who was present).
29. A. S. Smykalin, Kolonii i tiur'my v sovetskoi Rossii (Ekateriinburg: Izdatel'stvo Ural'skoi
gosudarstvennoi akademii, 1997): 59, 235–246.
30. Iurii Brodskii, Solovki: Dvatsat' let Osobogo naznacheniia (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2002), 13;
Michael Jakobson, Origins of the Gulag: The Soviet Prison System, 1917–1934 (Lexington,
KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1993): 112–114; Khlevniuk, 9; G. M. Ivanova, Istoriia
GULAGa 1918–1958: Sotsial'no-ekonomicheskii i politiko-pravovoi aspekty (Moscow:
Nauka, 2006): 161, 165; Roy R. Robson, Solovki: The Story of Russia Told Through Its
Most Remarkable Islands (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004): 205, 221. Among
the 700 photographs in Brodskii’s extraordinary book is one of Gorky in a worker’s cap
surrounded by leather-jacketed Chekisty on the Solovki camp boat and one of the writer
standing in front of workers’ barracks (325).
31. Ivanova, 149.
32. On the NEPman N. A. Frenkel', see Babicheva, “Tragicheskie stranitsy,” 6.
33. Khlevniuk, 39–40, quotation 39; Brodskii, 15; Robson, 243.
34. On this fi lm, see Cristina Vatulescu, Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film, and the Secret Police
in Soviet Times (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 124–135.
35. Brodskii, 58, 258–259, 326, 525 n. 95.
36. M. Gor'kii, “Po soiuzu sovetov,” Nashi dostizheniia, no. 6 (1929): 3–22, quotation 21. On
inoskazanie (hidden meanings) in the text—such as Gorky’s long discussions of nature,
his avoidance of central topics such as food, labor, and political prisoners, the replace-
ment of the very word “prisoner” in favor of euphemisms—as evidence of Gorky’s “moral
dilemma” in writing what he did, see Papazian, 152–154. In a letter of 22 January 1930,
Gorky felt it necessary to apologize to Iagoda, apparently because the roundabout essay
did not provide everything the secret police had wished (Chernukhina, 124).
37. Papazian, chap. 3.
38. M. Gor'kii, “Po Soiuzu sovetov,” Nashi dostizheniia, no. 1 (1929), 11–43; ibid., no. 4
(1929): 3–10.
39. Ibid., no. 3 (1929): 5; no. 4 (1929): 7.
40. “Protokol No. 1 Soveshchaniia Agitpropa IKKI 12-go oktiabria 1924 goda,” GARF f.
5283, op. 1a, ed. khr. 27, l. 22; “Vypiska iz protokola No. 1 Soveshchaniia pri Informotdele
TsK RKP(b) po informatsii zagranitsy o SSSR,” 17 February 1925, RGASPI f. 495, op.
30, d. 139, l. 1; Tsirkuliar o presse v sviazi s II Internatsionalom,” 4 May 1925, ibid., ll.
2–4; “O postanovke informatsii zagranitsy o SSSR,” February 1925, GARF f. 5283, op.
1a, ed. khr. 55, ll. 3–5; “An alle Sektionen der K.I.,” RGASPI f. 495, op. 30, d. 139, l. 14;
“Dokladnaia zapiska ob organizatsii informatsii ob SSSR Zagran. kompartii,” 26 May
1926, ibid., d. 272, ll. 3–12.
41. Ibid., no. 6 (1929): 21–22.
352 Notes 1 5 3 – 1 6 0
64. William Reswick, “An Experiment in Freedom,” The Nation, 11 November 1925; Marian
Tyler, Extension Division, The Nation, to Boris Svirskii, 23 November 1925, GARF
f. 5283, op. 3, ed. khr. 5, l. 153; Svirskii to Ol'ga Kameneva, 27 November 1925, ibid.,
l. 54; Letter from Ts. Rabinovich, Biuro Sviazi. to “St. Bolyshevo, Sev. zh.d. Sovkhoz
‘Kost'kino,’ ” no date, l. 156.
65. R. Pozamantir, “Predislovie,” Bolshevo, 3.
66. Gladysh, 102, 104.
67. Catriona Kelly, Children’s World: Growing up in Russia, 1890–1991 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2007): 184–185.
68. Reswick, “An Experiment in Freedom.”
69. On conditions and their disparity both with propaganda and policy statements, see Kelly,
Children’s World, 198–203, 215–219.
70. Pozamantir, “Predislovie”; Ia. G. Rezinovskii, “Govoriat dokumenty”; S. P. Bogoslovskii,
“Bolshevskaia ‘Pedagogicheskaia Poema’ ”; A. G. Dreirin, “Iskusstvo v kommune”; all in
Bolshevo, 3–4, 6, 19–20; 91–104. Most communards were boys accepted at the age of fi f-
teen or sixteen, but some as early as thirteen; the fi rst group of females was accepted in
1927 (ibid., 19). On the FED, see Oskar Fricke, “The Dzerzhinskii Commune: Birth of
the Soviet 35mm Camera Industry,” History of Photography 3, 2 (April 1979), available
at: htt p://www.fedka.com/Useful_info/Commune_by_Fricke/commune_A.htm, last
accessed August 28, 2011.
71. Zara Witkin, An American Engineer in Stalin’s Russia: The Memoirs of Zara Witkin, 1932–
1934, ed. Michael Gelb (Berkeley: University of California, 1991), 55.
72. Kelly, Children’s World, 72.
73. Bolshevo, cited in full in n. 63. What litt le analysis is contained in this rich collection of
sources largely corresponds to the “lacquered” versions of the commune’s success propa-
gated in the interwar period. More recently, journalist Svetlana Gladysh was given access
to KGB archival documents for her 2004 book centered on Bolshevo, Deti bol'shoi bedy;
despite this work’s sometimes heavy-handed efforts to uncover a tradition of Chekist
humanism, it contains many document publications and is an invaluable source.
74. Oleg Kharkhardin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), chap. 3, quotation 75, on Makarenko,
90–97.
75. Gladysh, 66–67; Hillig, “Bolshevskaia kommuna,” 22–27.
76. See the recollections of S. P. Bogoslovskii, who worked in the commune from 1924, in
GARF f. 7952, op. 3, d. 4, ll. 53–81, 82–134, reprinted in Bolshevo, 15–21; L. D. Vul',
“Prestupnyi mir i besprizornost',” ibid., 9–11; M. S. Pogrebinskii, Trudovaia kommuna
OGPU (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1928), 46; Hillig, “Bolshevskaia kommuna,” 25.
77. See the documents in Gladysh, 141–153.
78. Pogrebinskii, Trudovaia kommuna OGPU, 18.
79. Vincent N. Lunett a, “A Comparative Study: The Gorky Youth Colony and Boys Town,”
Educational Theory 11, 2 (1961): 93–98.
80. For an example, see A. N. Pogodin, “V kommune ia budto rodilsia vtoroi raz,” and M. F.
Sokolov-Ovchinnikov, “Segodnia, zavtra, vsegda,” in Bolshevo, 34–39, 39–41.
81. Götz Hillig, “Anton Semenovič Makarenko – ein Nicht-Kommunist im Dienst der sow-
jetischen Sicherheitsorgane,” Jahrbuch für Forschungen zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung
4, 3 (2005): 48–63, here 53. On the broader dynamic, see Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on
my Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).
82. Bogoslovskii, in Bolshevo, quotation 20; on von Körber, ibid., 135–142; see also von
Körber, Sowjetrussland kämpft gegen das Verbrechen (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1933).
83. G. G. Iagoda to A. S. Enukidze, 20 August 1925, in Bolshevo, 26; Iagoda prikaz of 10 June
1936, cited in Gladysh, 322.
84. “Daten zu Leben und Werk A. Makarenkos,” in Anton Makarenko, Gesammelte Werke:
Marburger Ausgabe, vol. 1: Veröffentlikchungen 1923–1931, ed. Siegried Weitz and Götz Hillig
(Ravensburg: Otto Maier Verlag, 1976): 141–152; Götz Hillig and Svetlana Nevskaja, eds.,
Perepiska A.S. Makarenko s M. Gor'kim: Akademicheskoe izdanie / Makarenkos Briefwechsel
mit Gor'kij: Kritische Ausgabe (Marburg: Makarenko-Referat, 1990).
354 Notes 1 6 7 – 1 7 2
gives another explanation for why the fi lm was never made. Room, like Gorky a friend
of Iagoda, planned to make it in a documentary manner, but the advisability of this was
thrown into doubt by the “mythological” mode of Nikolai Ekk’s 1931 Putevka v zhizn'.
102. Solonevich was the son of Tamara Solonevich, author of Zapiski sovetskoi perevodchitsy,
discussed in Chapter 3.
103. Iurii Solonevich, Povest' o 22-x neschast'iakh (Sofia: Golos Rossii, 1938): 50–51, 142–183,
quotations 173; on Dewey, see Gladysh, 106.
104. See documents published by Gladysh, 252–54, 260, 277–289; see also Hagenloh, 182–
194 (statistic of 85,000 from 189); Kelly, Children’s World, 231, 235; Smykalin, 105–107.
105. Hillig, “Anton Semenovič Makarenko,” 58; Gladysh, 249.
106. On the end of Bolshevo in the Purges, see G. V. Filaretov to Molotov, 9 December 1938,
and P. P. Poletaev, “Malen'kaia respublika,” both in Bolshevo, 8, 80, respectively; Gladysh,
168–172; Hillig, “Bolshevskaia kommuna,” 33–36.
107. Robson, 245.
Chapter 5
1. For a discussion of these restrictions with a secret-police component to the correspon-
dence, see: Litvinov to Stalin and Politburo members, 20 October 1928, GARF f. 5283,
op. 1a, ed. khr. 104, ll. 98–99; Kameneva to Central Committee and Stalin’s Secretariat,
31 December 1928, ibid., l. 152; Kameneva to Central Committee Secretariat, 15 March
1929, ibid., d. 125, l. 36; Kameneva to Litvinov, 25 May 1929, ibid., l. 30; Iu. V. Mal'tsev
(acting director of VOKS) to Meer Abramovich Trilesser (Zam. Pred. OGPU), 8 August
1929, ibid., d. 125, l. 57; Mal'tsev to Stalin, 13 August 1929, ibid., l. 53; Litvinov to
Molotov, 9 October 1929, ibid., ll. 60–61. Trilesser was also head of the secret police’s
foreign section, INO OGPU.
2. One example: of the approximately 10,000 engineers in the Soviet Union, several thou-
sand, about 30 percent, were arrested during the Great Break. See Loren R. Graham, The
Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 45.
3. On the early history of Intourist, see V. E. Bagdasarian, et al., Sovetskoe zazerkal'e:
Inostrannyi turizm v SSSR v 1930–1980-e gody (Moscow: Forum, 2007).
4. Ivan Maiskii to O. D. Kameneva, 9 November 1926, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 79, ll. 1–2;
Kameneva to Knorin, Zav. Agitpropom TsK VKP(b), 15 December 1926, ibid., l. 27.
5. “N. M. Epshtein. Sekretariu TsK VKP(b) tov. Shverniku,” no later than December 1926,
GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 97, ll. 26–35.
6. “Protokol mezhduvedomstvennogo soveshchaniia pri VOKS"e po voprosu o turizme,” 3
December 1926, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 79, ll. 34; “Zasedanie Kommissii po Turizmu
pri VOKS”e ot 18-go dekabria 1926 g,” ibid., ll. 30–31; Chicherin to Krestinskii, 27 July
1928, citing views of the OGPU’s Trilesser, AVP RF f. 04, op. 13, d. 50396, p. 98, l. 7.
7. “Vypiska iz protokola Zasedaniia Orgbiuro TsK VKP(b),” 4 March 1927, GARF f. 5283, op.
1a, d. 97, l. 52; “Protokol uchrezhditel'skogo sobraniia Gosudarstvennogo aktsionernogo
obshchestva po inostrannomu turizmu v Soiuze SSSR /”Inturist”/,” GARF f. 9612, op. 1,
d. 1, ll. 1–3. On Sovtorgflot and the origins of Intourist, see Matt hias Heeke, Reisen zu den
Sowjets: Der ausländische Tourismus in Russland 1921–1941 (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2004),
31–37; “Ustav Gos. Akts. Obshchestva po ino. turizmu v Soiuze SSSR (Inturist),” ibid., l. 2.
8. Shawn Salmon, “Marketing Socialism: Inturist in the Late 1950s and Early 1960s,” in
Turizm: The Russian and East European Tourist under Capitalism and Socialism, ed. Anne
E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 186–204,
quotation 188; Salmon, “To the Land of the Future: A History of Intourist and Travel to
the Soviet Union, 1929–1991” (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 2008),
40, and more generally Part I on the early history of Intourist.
9. For example, “Zakliuchenie Revizionnoi komissii po otchetu za 1929 g. i Balansu na 1/1
1930 goda Gos. Akts. Obshchestva ‘Inturist,’ ” GARF f. 9612, op. 1, d. 1, ll. 13, 14, 16;
“Opisatel'nyi otchet,” 1931, ibid., d. 9, ll. 1–4.
356 Notes 1 7 8 – 1 8 6
45. On the economic situation and its foreign observers, see, inter alia, Osokina, Our Daily
Bread, 3–58, esp. 47; 100.
46. “To All Former Workers’ Delegates to the Soviet Union” (in English), VTsSPS Otdel
vneshnikh snoshenii, 28 February 1931, GARF f. 5451, op. 13a, d. 325, ll. 30–34, quota-
tion l. 31; Amy Randall, The Soviet Dream World of Retail Trade and Consumption in the
1930s (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
47. Erika Maria Wolf, “USSR in Construction: From Avant-Garde to Socialist Realist Practice”
(Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1999): 80–123.
48. Bagdasarian, et al., Sovetskoe zazerkal'e, 21.
49. See the conclusion of this book.
50. For more on this shift , see Michael David-Fox, “From Illusory ‘Society’ to Intellectual
‘Public’: VOKS, International Travel, and Party-Intelligentsia Relations in the Interwar
Period,” Contemporary European History 11, 1 (February 2002): 7–32.
51. “Poiasnenie povestki dnia dlia mitinga, sozyvaemogo VOKSom 23 noiabria 1930 g. v
TsEKUBU,” GARF f. 5283, op. 1, ed. khr. 139, l. 16, 29).
52. “Zapiski o polozhenii i rabote [VOKS],” not signed, 1931, GARF f. 5283, op. 1, d. 158, ll.
100–101; “V. Pokrovskii, Upolnomochennyi VOKS v Leningrade. Predsedateliu VOKS
t. Petrovu,” 8 February 1931, ibid., op. 1a, d. 189, l. 23; “Protokol udarnoi komissii ot
26.XI [1931],” ibid., op. 1, ed. khr. 139, ll. 33–35.
53. See GARF f. 5283, op. 1, d. 158, l. 100; ibid., d. 100, l. 119.
54. See Katerina Clark, “The Travelling Mode and the Horizon of Identity,” chap. 4 of
Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture,
1931–1941 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011).
55. “Doklad referenta po tsentral'noi Evrope – t. Livit-Levent [sic], 17 iiulia 1929 g.,” GARF f.
5283, op. 6, d. 57, ll. 96–103, here l. 99ob. In a number of documents, Levent-Livit’s name
was written as Livit-Levent.
56. Needless to say, Piscator, who lived in the Soviet Union from 1931–36, did not see him-
self as a mere asset; he hoped his Soviet and Comintern engagements would influence the
Soviet Union in a “reciprocal process.” See Lynn Mally, “Erwin Piscator and Soviet Cultural
Politics,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 51, 2 (2003): 236–253, quotation 237.
57. “Zasedanie Predstavitelei sektsii nauchnykh rabotnikov v VOKS 7 dekabria 1928,”
GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 91, l. 92; untitled plan for VOKS work, Biuro referentury,
November 1929, ibid., op. 1, ed. khr. 124, ll. 18–19, quotation l. 19ob; “Proizvodstevennyi
plan raboty VOK v Tsentral'noi Evrope na 1929 god,” ibid., op. 6, d. 129, ll. 135–138,
quotation l. 135ob.
58. Katerina Clark, “The Author as Producer: Cultural Revolution in Berlin and Moscow
(1930–1931),” chap. 1 of Moscow, the Fourth Rome.
59. Indeed, the attempt to place Soviet articles abroad originated with “providing service”
for friendship societies’ journals. Counter-propaganda remained a consistent motiva-
tion over the years, GARF f. 5283, op. 1., d. 47, l. 91, 96, 113–115; “Otchet po kampanii
VOKS protiv interventsii za period s 20 noiabria po 20 ianvaria s. g. [1930],” ibid., ed. khr.
139, l. 109; “Otchet o rabote VOKS 1 iiulia 1929–1 marta 1930 g.,” GARF f. 7668, op.
1, d. 215, ll. 1–71, here l. 33; Kiseleva, 59–61. In her examination of VOKS materials in
France in the late 1920s, Stern showed that outlets included a range of scholarly and cul-
tural periodicals and specialist journals, as well as publishing houses and the communist
l’Humanité. Ludmila Stern, Western Intellectuals and the Soviet Union, 1920–1940: From
Red Square to the Left Bank (London: Routledge, 2007), 94–97.
60. The above is based on Herta Wolf, Glauben machen: Über deutschsprachige Reiseberichte aus
der Sowjetunion (1918–1932) (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 1992), 225–256, quotation 230.
61. Wolf, “USSR in Construction,” chap. 2, esp. 80–82.
62. “Protokol Sekretariata VOKS,” 18 May 1926, GARF f. 5283, op. 1, d. 62, ll. 3–6.
63. O. D. Kameneva, “V Otdel Pechati TsK VKP(b),” 22 March 1928, ibid., op. 1a, ed. khr.
118, ll. 42–43.
64. Shubin (NKID Otdel pechati i informatsii) to O. D. Kameneva, no date, 1928, GARF f.
5283, op. 1, ed. khr. 63, l. 90; E. Levin (fi rst secretary of Soviet embassy in Rome) to F. N.
Petrov, 10 July 1930, ibid., op. 1a, d. 145, l. 49.
N o t e s 19 8 –2 0 5 359
65. J. Calvitt Clark III, Russia and Italy Against Hitler: The Bolshevik-Fascist Rapprochement
Against Hitler (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991); Pier Giorgio Zunino, L’ideologia del
fascismo: Miti, credenze e valore nella stabilizzazione del regime (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1985),
322–44; I. A. Khorman, “Dogovor o druzhbe, nenapadenii i neitralitete SSSR i Italii 2
sentriabria 1933,” in Rossiia i Italiia: XX vek, vyp. 3, ed. N. P. Komolova, et al. (Moscow:
Nauka, 1998), 71–96.
66. On various Italo-Soviet cultural contacts in 1930, see GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 145, l. 23,
l. 26, l. 38, l. 41, l. 51. In 1933, the VOKS representative in Italy was TASS correspondent
Viktor Kin, who resigned after VOKS repeatedly was late for or backed out of agreements
and did not reimburse him for expenses. See Kin’s letter from 5 September 1933 and his
resignation letter, ibid., d. 210, l. 12, l. 24.
67. Ralph A. Reynolds, “Social Hygiene in Soviet Russia,” Journal of Social Hygiene 16, 8
(November 1930): 465–482, here 478–479; Isidor Amdur (head of Anglo-American
Sector of VOKS) to Dr. Ralph Reynolds, 1 October 1931, GARF f. 5283, op. 3, d. 187,
l. 122. Reynolds also kept VOKS informed about his similar 24 September 1930 Nation
article on the “Doctor in Soviet Russia.”
68. O. A. Merritt-Hawkes to Amdur, 18 August 1932, GARF f. 5283, op. 3, ed. khr. 325, l.
3; Louis Anderson Fenn to Amdur, 28 September 1932, ibid., ll. 5–7; Amdur to Fenn, 9
October 1932, ibid., l. 4; Amdur to “Mrs. Mernitt-Hawkes” [sic], no date, ibid., l. 2.
69. Niels Erik Rosenfeldt, The “Special” World: Stalin’s Power Apparatus and the Soviet System’s
Secret Structures of Communication, 2 vols. (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press,
2009), 1: esp. 192–223.
70. “Polozhenie o referenture V.O.K.S. fevral' 1929,” GARF f. 5283, op. 1, ed. khr. 123, l. 1;
“Protokol zasedaniia Biuro Pravleniia sovmestno s Biuro OVS [Otdel vneshnykh sviazi],”
28 December 1930, ibid., d. 193, l. 2.
71. For example, “Dvukhnedel'nyi otchet No. 2 Sektora Tsentral'noi Evropy s 16-go po 31
dekabria 1932 g.,” GARF f. 5283, op. 1, ed. khr. 219, ll. 15–23; “Dvukhnedel'nyi otchet
No. 3 Sektora Tsentral'noi Evropy s 15-go po 31 ianvaria 1933 g.,”, ibid., ll. 8–15.
72. I. Korinets (Acting Director of VOKS) to V. M. Molotov, 13 May 1927, GARF f. 5283,
op. 1a, d. 97, l. 68; Leonid Krasin and Kameneva letters to the Politburo, no exact date,
early 1926, ibid., d. 42, ll. 17–22, 32–34; Kameneva, “V komissiiu Vneshnykh Otnoshenii
TsK VKP,” 2 June 1926, RGASPI f. 17, op. 85, d. 38, l. 3. The Orgburo approved VOKS
organization of the Frankfurt musical exhibition on 20 May 1927 (GARF f. 5283, op. 1a,
d. 97, l. 70). For high-level concern in 1922 that traveling Soviet artists would fall under
the influence of émigrés, see the correspondence among Lunacharskii, the NKID, and
INO OGPU in AVP RF f. 082, op. 5, d. 50, p. 10, ll. 1–5.
73. Wolf, “USSR in Construction,” 24.
74. Karl Schlögel, “Moskau in Paris,” chap. 12 of Terror und Traum: Moskau 1937 (Munich:
Carl Hanser Verlag, 2008), 267–79, quotation 271; Ivan Maiskii, Dnevnik diplomata:
London 1934–1943, 2 vols. (Moscow: Nauka, 2006), 1:180. For another major case, see
Anthony Swift , “The Soviet World of Tomorrow of the New York World’s Fair, 1939,”
Russian Review 57 (July 1998): 364–379.
75. O. D. Kameneva, “V APO TsK VKP(b),” 17 January 1928 (on 10th anniversary of October
exhibitions), GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 118, ll. 5–7; I. I. Ionov, “Vystavka v S.A.S.Sh.,”
sent to VOKS and the Central Committee, 18 January 1928, ibid., ed. khr. 104, ll. 2–11;
Zam. Pred. VOKS L. Cherniavskii, “V Komissiiu sovetskogo kontrolia tov. Shneersonu,”
7 January 1937 (on small exhibitions and political control); “Plan sovetskogo otdela
Mezhdunarodnogo vystavki knigopechatanii dlia slepykh,” ibid., d. 276, l. 28.
76. V. N. Polovtsevaia to O. D. Kameneva, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, ed. khr. 43, ll. 26–29;
“Russian Posters. Appeals to People to be Clean,” Westminster Gazette, 18 May 1925
(ibid., l. 30). For clippings of press reviews of a German Society of Friends exhibition in
1928, see GARF f. 5451, op. 13a, d. 239, ll. 33–34.
77. I. I. Ionov, “Vystavka v S.A.S.Sh.,” ll. 2–11 (cited above).
78. F. N. Petrov, “Tov. Ugarovu. OGPU,” 30 May 1930, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 145, l. 22;
Petrov, “Inostr. Otdel. AOMS,” 19 May 1930, ibid., l. 21; Petrov to comrade Kristi (direc-
tor of Tret'iakov Gallery), 29 April 1930, ibid., l. 13 (see also ibid., l. 12, l. 18).
360 Notes 2 0 5 – 2 1 5
79. GARF f. 5283, op. 1, d. 158, ll. 47–75; ibid., op. 1a, d. 145, l. 2; ibid., l. 21.
80. “Otdel SSSR Na Trekhgodichnoi Vystavke v Montse,” translated into Russian from Il
Popolo di Roma, 16 September 1930, AVP RF f. 010, op. 1, p. 1, d. 20, ll. 2–3.
81. Iosif Stalin, “O zadachakh khoziaistvennikov,” Sochineniia, vol. 13 (Moscow: Politizdat,
1953), 38–39.
82. On this strategy, see Harris, “Encircled by Enemies,” 529.
83. The term comes from Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: The West in the
Eyes of Its Enemies (New York: Penguin Press, 2004).
Chapter 6
1. David Caute, The Fellow-Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism, rev. ed. (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 154.
2. Lev Trotskii, “Literaturnye poputchiki revoliutsii,” in Literatura i revoliutsiia (Moscow:
Izdatel'stvo ‘Krasnaia nov',’ 1923), 40–83.
3. For just one example, see GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, ed. khr. 118, l. 46.
4. T. F. Evans, “Introduction: The Political Shaw,” and “Shaw as a Political Th inker, or the
Dogs that Did Not Bark,” in Shaw and Politics, ed. Evans (University Park: Penn State
University Press, 1991), 1–21, 21–26, quotations 21, 22.
5. George Bernard Shaw, Shaw: An Autobiography 1856–1898, ed. Stanley Weintraub
(Toronto: Max Reinhardt, 1969), 115, 129, 132; Paul A. Hummert, Bernard Shaw’s
Marxian Romance (Lincoln: Max Reinhardt, 1969), 14.
6. Quoted in Evans, “Shaw as a Political Th inker,” 26–28; see also Shaw, The Intelligent
Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1984),
373–374, 380, 441.
7. Beatrice Webb, “GBS and Mussolini,” in A. M. Gibbs, ed. Shaw: Interviews and
Recollections (Iowa City: University Press of Iowa, 1990), 354; Shaw, “Preface, On the
Rocks: A Political Comedy. 1933,” in Too True to Be Good, Village Wooing, and On the
Rocks: Three Plays (New York: Dodd, Mead and Col, 1934), 180; H. M. Geduld, “Bernard
Shaw and Adolf Hitler,” The Shaw Review 4, 1 (January 1961): 11–20.
8. Hummert, 164.
9. Hummert, xii, 40, 199–200.
10. Geduld, “Bernard Shaw and Adolf Hitler,” 11.
11. T. F. Evans, “Myopia or Utopia? Shaw in Russia,” in Shaw Abroad, ed. Rodelle Weintraub
(University Park: Penn State University Press, 1985), 128; F. N. Petrov (Pred. VOKS),
circular letter, 16 March 1930, GARF f. 5283, op. 3, ed. khr. 325, l. 1.
12. The most detailed reconstruction is in Harry M. Geduld’s introduction to Shaw, The
Rationalization of Russia, ed. Geduld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964),
9–32.
13. J. P. Wearing, ed. Bernard Shaw and Nancy Astor (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2005), xvi, xxi, 29–31.
14. H.W.L. Dana, “Shaw in Moscow,” The American Mercury 25, 99 (March 1932): 343–352,
here 344.
15. Untitled speech by Bernard Shaw, 26 July 1931, GARF f. 5283, op. 12, d. 328, ll. 8–9.
16. “Vecher v kolonnom zale doma Soiuzov v chest' Bernarda Shou v den' ego semidesiatip-
iatiletiia. 26 iiulia 1931 goda,” GARF f. 5283, op. 12, d. 328, ll. 2–7; Lunacharskii, “K
priezdu Bernardu Shou,” RGASPI f. 142, op. 1, d. 152, ll. 9–10.
17. Arosev to Stalin, 31 July 1931, RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, ed. khr. 695, l. 60; Arosev returned to
the topic after Shaw’s ardently pro-Soviet U.S. radio address on 11 October 1931, Arosev
to Stalin, 21 October 1931, ibid., l. 90. Shaw’s Times articles from 13 and 20 August are in
Bernard Shaw, Agitations: Letters to the Press 1875–1950, ed. Dan H. Laurence and James
Rambeau (New York: Frederick Unger Publishing Co., 1985), 267–277; on Potemkin vil-
lages and famine, 287; on forced labor, Evans, 133; Hummert, 159.
18. Sergei Dinamov, “Bernard Shou posle poseshcheniia SSSR,” in Bernard Shou [Shaw],
Izbrannye proizvedeniia, trans. Mikhail Levidov (Moscow-Leningrad: Gosizdat khudo-
zhestvennoi literatury, 1933): 3–5; Aleksandr Deich, “Bernard Shou,” in Shou [Shaw],
N o t e s 21 5 –2 2 0 361
35. “Zasedanie Inostrannoi komissii SSP SSSR 29-go maia 1936 g.,” RGALI f. 631, op. 14, d.
5, ll. 2–34.
36. Elizabeth Papazian, chap. 1 of Manufacturing Truth: The Documentary Moment in Early
Soviet Culture, 1921–1934 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009); Maria
Gough, “Radical Tourism: Sergei Tret'iakov at the Communist Lighthouse,” October, no.
118 (Fall 2006): 159–178; Clark, “Germanophone,” 535, and Clark, Moscow, the Fourth
Rome.
37. B. Ia. Frezinskii, “Kniga vremeni i zhizni,” in Il'ia Erenburg, Pis'ma 1908–1967, 2 vols., ed.
Frezinskii, vol. 2: Na tsokole istoriii . . . Pis'ma 1931–1967 (Moscow: Argaf, 2004), 5, 8. The
best biography of Ehrenburg remains Joshua Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties: The Life and
Times of Ilya Ehrenburg (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999, orig. 1996).
38. “Rech' na pervom vsesoiuznom s"ezde sovetskikh pisatelei,” in Il'ia Erenburg, Sobranie
sochinenii v vos'mi tomakh, vol. 4: Ocherki, Reportazhi, Esse 1922–1939 (Moscow:
Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1991), 567–578, quotation 570.
39. Coeuré, “Comme ils disent SSSR,” 63, 64, 67; on Ehrenburg and Kol'tsov as antagonists
and mutual denunciations and complaints among the Westernizers, see Maksimenkov,
“Ocherki,” 330.
40. Karl Schlögel, Berlin, Ostbahnhof Europas: Russen und Deutsche in ihrem Jahrhundert
(Berlin: Siedler Verlag, 1998), chap. 5, quotations 112, 123.
41. Sabine Dullin, Hommes d’influences: Les ambassadeurs de Staline en Europe 1930–1939
(Paris: Payot, 2001), 182–204, esp. 185; Dullin,”Les ambassades soviétiques en Europe
dans les années 1930,” Communisme, no. 49–50 (1997): 17–28.
42. “Arosev, Alekandr Iakovlevich,” 1931 autobiography for Society of Old Bolsheviks,
RGASPI f. 124, op. 1, ed. khr. 80, ll. 4–14; Ol'ga Aroseva and V. A. Maksimova, Bez grima
(Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Tsentrpoligraf, 1999), 12.; A. Chernobaev, V vikhre veka (Moscow:
Moskovskii rabochii, 1987), 166.
43. Having survived the Purges, like Ehrenburg, Maiskii also pushed de-Stalinization for-
ward during the Th aw. Robert D. English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev,
Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000),
91, 283 n. 192.
44. A. O. Chubar'ian, “Predislovie,” in Ivan Mikhailovich Maiskii, Dnevnik diplomata:
London 1934–1943, 2 vols. (Moscow: Nauka, 2006), 1: 6.
45. Neal Wood, Communism and British Intellectuals (London: Victor Gollancz, 1959), 31,
43–47.
46. Maiskii, Dnevnik, 1: 410–411.
47. The Diary of Beatrice Webb, 4: 301, 349, 363.
48. Maiskii, Vospominaniia, 194.
49. Maiskii, Dnevnik, 1: 93, 202–203, 410.
50. Arosev, diary entry of 4 June 1935, in Aroseva and Maksimova, Bez grima; for more on
Arosev, see Michael David-Fox, “Stalinist Westernizer? Aleksandr Arosev’s Literary and
Political Depictions of Europe,” Slavic Review 62, 4 (Winter 2003): 733–759.
51. Application to Society of Old Bolsheviks, prob. 1931, RGASPI f. 124, op. 1, ed. khr. 80,
ll. 6, 14; Nikolai Trachenko, “Sled na zemle,” introduction to Arosev, Belaia lestnitsa:
Roman, povesti, rasskazy (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1989), 8.
52. Arosev, diary entry of 6 March 1935, in Aroseva and Maksimova, Bez grima, 73.
53. Arosev, diary entries of 6 August 1933, 24 October 1933, 9 December 1933, December
1935 (no day), in Aroseva and Maksimova, Bez grima, 48, 61, 72; on Stalin as aziat, 37.
54. Arosev to Stalin, 12 March 1929, RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, ed. khr. 695, ll. 2–4 (the italicized
phrase is in capital letters in the orig.); Arosev to Stalin, 3 March 1934, ibid., ll. 107–108;
Arosev to Stalin, 23 May 1931, ibid., ll. 56–57.
55. Aroseva and Maksimova, Bez grima, 84.
56. Arosev, diary entry of 7 January 1935, in Aroseva and Maksimova, Bez grima, 68. For
similar sentiments toward Shaw and other British intellectuals after a London meeting,
see entry from 18 June 1935, 70.
57. “Stenogramma doklada A. Ia. Aroseva, ‘O vstrechakh i besedakh s vidneishimi pred-
staveiteliami zapadno-evropeiskoi intelligentsii,” 4 May 1935, RGALI f. 631, op. 14, ed.
N o t e s 2 2 6 –2 31 363
khr. 3, ll. 1–24, quotations l. 17, l. 21. Arosev was a member of the pravlenie (administra-
tion) of the Foreign Section.
58. “Stenogramma doklada A. Ia. Aroseva,” quotations l. 16, l. 22; Arosev, entries of 24
September 1934 and 18 June 1935, in Aroseva and Maksimova, Bez grima, 65, 70.
59. Arosev, diary entry of 26 September 1934, in Aroseva and Maksimova, Bez grima, 65.
60. Arosev, Besedy i vstrechy s nashimi druz'iami v Evrope (Moscow, 1935), 13, 31–32, and
passim (quotation 38).
61. The last of these meetings was with the anti-fascist writers from Republican Spain, Rafael
Alberti and Maria Teresa León, in March 1937 (Maksimenkov, “Ocherki,” 279. For a full
list of Stalin’s visitors, see “Alfavitnyi ukazatel' posetitelei kremlevskogo kabineta I.V.
Stalina,” Istoricheskii arkhiv, no. 4 (1998): 16–203.
62. On these points, see Erik van Ree, “Heroes and Merchants: Stalin’s Understanding of
National Character,” Kritika 8, 1 (2007): 41–65; Roy Medvedev, “European Writers on
their Meetings with Stalin,” Russian Politics and Law 42, 5 (Sept.–Oct. 2004): 78–92.
63. Medvedev, “European Writers,” 91.
64. “Beseda s nemetskim pisatelem Emilem Liudvigom, 13 dekabria 1931 g.,” in Stalin,
Sochineniia, vol. 13 (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1951), 104–123.
65. Ibid. 121.
66. David Brandenberger, “Stalin as Symbol: A Case Study of the Personality Cult and its
Construction,” in Stalin: A New History, ed. Sarah Davies and James Harris (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005): 257–259; G. B. Kulikova, “Iz istorii formirovaniia
kul'ta lichnosti Stalina (A. Barbius i sozdanie biografi i ‘otsa narodov’ v nachale 1930-x
gg.,” Otechestvennaia istoriia, no. 6 ((2006), 98–99.
67. Ian [Jan] Plamper, Alkhimiia vlasti: Kul't Stalina v izobrazitel'nom iskusstve (Moscow:
NLO, 2010), sections on “Stalin’s Modesty,” 185–208; the above remarks also draw on
Yves Cohen, “The Cult of Number One in an Age of Leaders,” Kritika 8, 3 (Summer 2007):
597–634. See also Balász Apor, et al., eds. The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships:
Stalin and the Eastern Bloc (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), and Klaus Heller and
Jan Plamper, eds., Personality Cults in Stalinism / Personenkulte im Stalinismus (Gött ingen:
V&R unipress, 2004).
68. Henri Barbusse, Staline: Un monde nouveau vu à travers un homme (Paris: Flammarion,
1935); Cohen, 603–604. Unwanted yet democratic adulation by a still backward peo-
ple became the standard explanation given to foreigners and anti-fascists, such as Lion
Feuchtwanger in 1937, who were troubled by the all-pervasive Soviet celebration of the
leader.
69. On the ratification of plans for Barbusse’s 1927 reception, “Otdel po priemu inostrant-
sev VOKS"a. Otchet o priezde i prebyvanii v Moskve Anri Barbiussa v techenii 10 i 11
sentiabria 1927 g.,” RGASPI f. 495, op. 95, d. 22, ll. 152–156; see also VOKS report on
Barbusse, 26 June 1928, GARF f. 5283, op. 8, ed. khr. 62, l. 155–156; Henri Barbusse to
O. D. Kameneva, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, ed. khr. 118, l. 175. On the feud between Barbusse
and MORP, see Stern, chap. 3, esp. 56–65; on good relations between Barbusse and
VOKS, 149–153. MORP att acks peaked in early to mid-1932; see, e.g., “Zadachi Soiuza
revoliutsionnykh pisatelei Frantsii,” Literatura mirovoi revoliutsii, no. 2 (1932): 59–65;
Bruno-Iasenskii, “Monde. Directeur: Henri Barbusse,” in ibid., 66–67.
70. A. Barbius, “K voprosu o perevodakh,” Vestnik inostrannoi literatury, no. 8 (August 1928):
131–132.
71. Medvedev, “European Writers,” 78
72. “Kratkoe izlozhenie Besedy s tov. Barbiussom ot 16.IX.27,” RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, ed.
khr. 699, ll. 2–10, quotations l. 6.
73. Barbusse to Stalin, 20 November 1929, RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, ed. khr. 699, l. 21–22.
74. Henri Barbusse, Voici ce qu’on a fait de la Géorgie (Paris: Flammarion, 1929), 127–128.
75. “Svidanie tov. Stalina s Anri Barbiussom,” 5 October 1932, RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, ed. khr.
699, ll. 35–41.
76. Lev Mekhlis to Stalin, 4 November 1932, RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, ed. khr. 699, l. 60 (Stalin’s
response is handwritten on the letter); see also Mekhlis to Stalin, 6 May 1932, ibid., ll.
27–28.
364 Notes 2 3 2 – 2 3 8
77. Barbusse to Münzenberg (in French and Russian translation), RGASPI f. 558, op. 11,
ed. khr. 699, l. 63, 64; Kul'tprop TsK to Sekretariat t. Stalina, 8 December 1932, ibid.,
l. 61; additional correspondence on Barbusse’s meeting with and biography of Stalin,
l. 55, ll. 71–72, ll. 84–85. Barbusse had defended the Monde publications of articles by
Victor Serge and Madeleine Paz in May 1932 (Stern, 62). For his correspondence with
Münzenberg, see Kulikova, “Iz istorii,” 102.
78. “Nabrosok stsenariia” for Barbusse fi lm with the possible titles: Creators, Builders,
Saviors, New People (Tvortsy, Stroiteli, Spasiteli, Novye Liudi), RGASPI f. 558, op. 11,
ed. khr. 700, ll. 8–17; Kulikova, “Iz istorii,” 102–103.
79. V. S. Lel'chuk, “Beseda I.V. Stalina s angliiskim pisatelem G. Uellsom (dokumenty, inter-
pretatsiia, razmyshleniia),” in Istoricheskaia nauka na rubezhe vekov, ed. A. A. Fursenko
(Moscow: Nauka, 2001): 345, citing transcript of interview with Mints in the author’s
personal archive.
80. Plamper, Alkhimiia vlasti, chap. 1.
81. A. I . Stetskii to Henri Barbusse, 29 September 1934, RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, ed. khr. 699,
ll. 124–125; Barbusse, Staline, quotations 21, 36; Sophie Coeuré, La grande lueur a l’Est:
Les français et l’Union soviètique 1917–1939 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1999), 233–35. For
the Glavlit prohibition on the import of the 13 June 1935 issue of Monde, see RGASPI f.
558, op. 11, ed. khr. 700, l. 123.
82. Stetskii to Barbusse, ll. 124–125; Barbusse, Staline, 43, 189, 192, 201.
83. VOKS report on Barbusse by Iu. Mazel', Sept. 1927, RGASPI f. 495, op. 95, d. 22, ll. 152–
156, quotation l. 153; Barbusse, Staline, 87, cited in Coeuré, La grande lueur, 235; Stetskii,
“Predislovie,” in Anri Barbius, Stalin: Chelovek, cherez kotorogo raskryvaetsia novyi mir, ed.
and trans. Stetskii (Moscow: n.p., 1936), ix, x.
84. Mikhail Kol'tsov, “Barbius o Staline,” in Anri Barbius, Iunost' Stalina (Otryvok iz knigi
“Stalin”) (Moscow: Molodoi kommunar, 1935), reprinted from Pravda, 5, 7; Barbusse,
Staline, 6.
85. Lel'chuk, 336, 339, 344, 346; Leonid Maksimenkov, “Ocherki nomenklaturnoi istorii
sovetskoi literatury: Zapadnye pilgrimy u stalinskogo prestola (Feikhtvanger i drugie).
Chast' II,” Voprosy literatury, no. 3 (2004): 303–304.
86. H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography: Discourses and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary
Brain (Since 1866) (New York: Macmillan, 1934), 626, 562, 563; Wells, After Democracy
(London: Watt s, 1932).
87. “Stalin and Wells: A Comment by Bernard Shaw,” New Statesman and Nation, 3 November
1934, 613; for confi rmation of Shaw’s judgment, see Wells, Experiment in Autobiography,
689. The text of the conversation is in I. V. Stalin, Beseda s angliiskim pisatelem G. D.
Uellsom (Moscow: Partizdat TsK VKP(b), 1935), and in English in New Statesman and
Nation, 27 October 1934.
88. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, 684, 689.
89. “Glava iz knigi g. Uel'sa ‘Opyt avtobiografi i' posveshchennaia ego poslednei poezdke v
SSSR,” RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, d. 792, ll. 122–46; Radek to Stalin, 9 November 1934,
ibid., l. 121.
90. Arosev to Stalin, 30 July 1934, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 255, l. 70; Lel'chuk, 350.
91. Kaganovich to Stalin, 24 September 1934, in Oleg Khelvniuk, et al., eds., Stalin i
Kaganovich: Perepiska 1931–1936 gg. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2001), 495, 496 n. 5; Radek
to Stalin, 9 November 1934, l. 121; Lel'chuk, 351.
92. Fisher, 27–29.
93. The unedited version, which has never been published, is: “Beseda t. Stalina s Romen
Rollanom. Perevodil razgovor t. A. Arosev. 28.VI.sg [1935],” with handwritten addition:
“ne dlia pechati,” RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, ed. khr. 775, l. 1–16, here l. 13; for Rolland’s
opening statement, see Rolland, Voyage à Moscou (juin–juillet 1935), ed. Bernard
Duchatelet (Paris: Albin Michel, 1992), 127. An appendix to Voyage contains an “offi-
cial” transcript of the discussion with Stalin, which was edited by Stalin personally and
then sent to Rolland when he was visiting with Gorky; Rolland made a few more changes.
Historians in the past have referred only to the sanitized variants in French and Russian.
I have argued elsewhere that while the variations of the text need to be compared, the
N o t e s 2 3 8 –2 4 4 365
unedited version is the most revealing, and it is here that Rolland appears most worship-
ful of Stalin. See Michael David-Fox, “The ‘Heroic Life’ of a Friend of Stalinism: Romain
Rolland and Soviet Culture,” Slavonica 11, 1 (2005): 3–29.
94. Romain Rolland to Maxim Gorky, 10 August 1931, in Correspondance entre Romain
Rolland et Maxime Gorki (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 1991), 243; “Beseda t. Stalina
s Romen Rollanom,” l. 4; Romain Rolland and Gandhi Correspondence (Letters, Diary
Extracts, Articles, Etc.) (New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and
Broadcasting, 1976), 163–230; Fisher, 29–31.
95. Rolland, Voyage, 133; quotation in Fisher, 255. Goethe was the key icon in the
Germanophone anti-fascist culture of the period.
96. Arosev, diary entry of 7 January 1935, in Aroseva and Maksimova, 67–69; 1935 letter
from Rolland to J.-P. Samson cited in Duchatelet, Romain Rolland, 321–322.
97. Arosev to Stalin, 29 June 1935, GARF f. 5283, op. 1, d. 276, ll. 71–72.
98. “Beseda t. Stalina s Romen Rollanom,” ll. 2, 3, 4.
99. Valentin Berezhkov, Kak ia stal perevodchikom Stalina (Moscow: Dem, 1993), 177.
100. “Beseda t. Stalina s Romen Rollanom,” l. 8; Rolland to Gorky, 28 March 1931, in
Correspondance, 225; Gorky to Rolland, 1–2 August 1933, in M. Gor'kii i R. Rollan.
Perepiska (1916–1936) (Moscow: Nasledie, 1995), 273.
101. “Pis'mo Romen Rollana tovarishchu Stalinu,” 20 June 1935, RGALI f. 631, op. 11, d. 283,
l. 13. See also, for example, Rolland to Platon Kerzhentsev, 4 April 1936, RGASPI f. 631,
op. 14, ed. khr. 729, l. 19.
102. “Beseda t. Stalina s Romen Rollanom,” l. 3, 13; Gorky to Rolland, 29 August 1935 and
12 September 1935, in M. Gor'kii i R. Rollan, 313–315; Duchatelet, Romain Rolland, 315;
Liudmilla Stern, Western Intellectuals, 27–28.
103. Rolland to Stalin, 1 October 1935, RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, ed. khr. 775, l. 120; Rolland
to Stalin 27 December 1935, ibid., ll. 125–130; Gor'kii to Stalin, 8 July and 29 August
1935, ibid., ed. khr. 720, l. 80, 82–83; Bukharin quoted in G. B. Kulikova, “Pod kon-
trolem gosudarstva: Prebyvanie v SSSR inostrannykh pisatelei v 1920–1930-x godakh,”
Otechestvennaia istoriia, no. 4 (2003), 52. On Bukharin’s interrupted meeting with Gide,
see Caute, 105.
104. Rolland, Voyage, 142–43, 161, 182, 199, 284; Fisher, 248–249; Duchatelet, 317–325.
105. Rolland, Voyage, 137–139; Fisher, 236; Duchatelet, 322.
106. RGALI f. 631, op. 14, d. 74, l. 91; Coeuré, La grande lueur, 26; Michel Vovelle, “1789–1917: The
Game of Analogies,” in The Terror, vol. 4 of The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern
Political Culture, ed. Keith Michael Baker (Tarrytown, N.Y.: Pergamon, 1994), 349–378; Eva
Oberloskamp, Fremde neue Welten: Reisen deutscher und französischer Linksintellektueller in
die Sowjetunion 1917–1939 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2011), chap. 5, section B.
107. Rolland to Mariia Kudasheva, 18 September 1929, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 129, l.
120–121.
108. See Rolland to Gorky, 20 July 1933, in Correspondance, 312.
109. “Inostrannaia komissiia. Frantsiia. Biograficheskie svedeniia o frantszuskikh pisate-
liakh,” RGALI f. 631, op. 14, ed. khr. 716.
110. “Beseda t. Stalina s. Romen Rollanom,” l. 15; Rolland, Voyage, 133, 246.
111. As noted by Jeff rey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from
Revolution to Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 149.
112. “Stat'i sovetskoi pechati o prazdnovanii 70-letiia so dnia rozhdeniia R. Rollana,” RGALI f.
631, op. 14, ed. khr. 735. Arosev’s article “Romen Rollan (k 70-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia)”
was published in Pravda Vostoka and many other newspapers on 29 and 30 January 1936.
113. “70 let Romen Rollanu. Torzhestvennyi vecher v bol'shom zale konservatorii,”
Komsomolskaia Pravda, 30 January 1936, in RGALI f. 631, op. 14, ed. khr. 735, l. 17; “V
Bol'shom zale konservatorii,” program of 29 January 1936, ibid., op. 11, d. 283, l. 63.
114. Mikhail Apletin to Mikhail Kol'tsov, 8 December 1935, RGALI f. 631, op. 11, d. 283, l. 76,
see also l. 75; on the album, ibid., op. 14, ed. khr. 729, ll. 55–56.
115. Fisher, 256–257, quotation 257; Duchatelet, 324.
116. François Hourmant, Au pays de l’avenir radieux: Voyages des intellectuels français en URSS,
à Cuba et en Chine populaire (Paris: Aubier, 2000), 166.
366 Notes 2 4 4 – 2 4 8
117. With his view of communism as the great myth of the twentieth century, François Furet
bucked this tendency by suggesting its flexible ability to appeal to vastly different figures.
Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, trans.
Deborah Furet (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999).
118. Arthur Koestler, untitled essay in The God that Failed, ed. Richard Crossman (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2001, orig. 1949), 15.
119. For example, see Lee Congdon, Seeing Red: Hungarian Intellectuals in Exile and the
Challenge of Communism (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001), 3.
120. Caute, 264–284.
121. Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals and Politics (New York: NYRB, 2001), 200–
202. Having pointed out the failures of other all-encompassing theories of intellectuals
and communism, Lilla then provides one of his own, which might be called the psycho-
logical explanation: intellectuals are by nature inclined to abandon moderate self-control
and embrace tyranny, thus giving in to “a drive that could become a reckless passion”
(214).
122. See Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union,
China, and Cuba, 1928–1978, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); Robert
Conquest, “The Great Error: Soviet Myths and Western Minds,” in Conquest, Reflections
on a Ravaged Century (New York: Norton, 2001), 115–149; Stéphane Courtois, intro-
duction to Courtois, et al., Le livre noir du communisme. Crimes, terreur, répression (Paris:
Robert Laffont, 1997). For the charge of treason, see Stephen Schwartz, Intellectuals and
Assassins: Writings at the End of Soviet Communism (London: Anthem Press, 2000), 9–17,
80, 139.
123. Oberloskamp, Fremde neue Welten; David C. Engerman, Modernization from the Other
Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003); Sheila Fitzpatrick and Carolyn Rasmussen, eds.,
Political Tourists: Travellers from Australia to the Soviet Union in the 1920s–1940s (Carlton,
Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2008).
124. Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1992), 149, 205–226; by contrast, Oberloskamp, Fremde neue Welten,
found a notable commitment to universal Enlightenment ideals among French Left intel-
lectual commentators of the interwar period.
125. Daniel Soyer, “Back to the Future: American Jews Visit the Soviet Union in the 1920s and
1930s,” Jewish Social Studies 6, 3 (2000): 124–59, quotation 129; see also Lewis S. Feuer,
“American Travelers to the Soviet Union 1917–32: The Formation of a Component of
New Deal Ideology,” American Quarterly 42, 2, part 1 (Summer 1962): 119–49, on this
point 121.
Chapter 7
1. See, most recently, Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick, eds., Beyond Totalitarianism:
Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009);
A. V. Golubev, “Esli mir obrushitsia na nashu Respubliku”: Sovetskoe obshchestvo i vneshnaia
ugroza (Moscow: Kuchkova pole, 2008).
2. The phrases come from Alan Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heiddegger, Foucault,
Derrida (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), and Stephen Kotkin, “Modern
Times: The Soviet Union and the Interwar Conjuncture,” Kritika 2, 1 (2001): 111–164.
In Schmitt’s key passage on the friend-enemy distinction—“the high points of politics
are simultaneously the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized
as the enemy”—he approvingly points to Lenin’s attacks against “bourgeois and western
capitalism.” Carl Schmitt , The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2007), 67. Interestingly, Schmitt’s concept of friend, much
like the Bolsheviks’, was generated out of his idea of enemy (Tracy B. Strong, “Foreword:
Dimensions of the New Debate around Carl Schmitt ,” in ibid., xxiv).
3. M. Zhivov, “Druz'ia i vragi o SSSR (ot sostavitelia),” in Glazami inostrantsev 1917–1932,
ed. L. Gasviani (Moscow: Gosizdat khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1932), xiii–xxxi.
N o t e s 2 4 8 –2 52 367
16. For an important recent work centering on Scheringer, see Timothy S. Brown, Weimar
Radicals: Nazis and Communists between Authenticity and Performance (New York:
Berghan Books, 2009).
17. Hoppe, 88 and chaps. 5 and 8, esp. 184–188, 291–297, 311, 263.
18. Rosenfeldt, The “Special” World: Stalin’s Power Apparatus and the Soviet System’s Secret
Structures of Communication, 2 vols., trans. Sally Laird and John Kendal (Copenhagen:
Museum Tusculanums Forlag, 2009), 1: 205–216; see also E. A. Gnedin, Iz istorii otnosh-
enii mezhdu SSSR i fashistskoi Germaniei (New York: Khronika, 1977): 23–28.
19. “Girshfel'd. Berlin, 27 oktiabria 1932. NKID 2-i Zapadnyi Otdel – t. Sheininu,” copies to
Krestinskii and VOKS, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 196, ll. 193–195.
20. “Ibid., l. 193, 193 ob.
21. Ibid., l. 193.
22. Girshfel'd to F. N. Petrov, 5 February 1932, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 196, ll. 156–158;
Girshfel'd to Lerner (VOKS), 18 November 1932, AVP RF f. 082, op. 15, d. 28, p. 27, l. 204.
On Harnack’s KPD affi liation, see B. Lange and A. N. Dmitriev, “Rabochee ob"edinenie
po izucheniiu sovetskogo planovogo khoziastva (Arplan),” in Sovetsko-germanskie nauch-
nye sviazi vremeni Veimarskoi Respubliki, ed. E. I. Kolchinskii (St. Petersburg: Nauka,
2001): 197–206, here 205.
23. My discussion of Arplan membership below is based on the “Mitgliederliste” sent by
Friedrich Lenz to VOKS in summer 1932: GARF f. 5283, op. 6, d. 172, l. 190. Th is docu-
ment represents the fi rst fully reliable confi rmation of the organization’s members.
24. Lukàcs, “An die Kaderabteilung der Komintern,” 1941, RTsKhIDNI f. 495, op. 199, d.
181, ll. 49, 49a, published by Reinhard Müller in Mitelweg 5, 5 [no. 36] (1996): 66–70;
see also Lange and Dmitriev, “Rabochee ob”edinenie,” 205; A. N. Dmitriev, “K istorii
sovetsko-germanskikh nauchnykh i politicheskikh sviazei nachala 1930-x gg.: Arplan
(nemetskoe obshchestvo po izucheniiu sovetskogo planovogo khoziaistva),” in Nemsty v
Rossii: Problemy nauchnykh i kul'turnkykh sviazei (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2000),
258, 263, 265.
25. Dupeux, “National-bolchevisme,” 428–463.
26. For a full-length treatment of Niekisch’s ideological evolution, see Michael David-Fox,
“A ‘Prussian Bolshevik’ in Stalin’s Russia: Ernst Niekisch at the Crossroads between
Communism and National Socialism,” in David-Fox, “Crossing Borders: Modernity,
Ideology, and Culture in Soviet Russia,” forthcoming book, Pitt sburgh University Press.
The principal studies of Niekisch are Uwe Sauermann, Ernst Niekisch und der Revolutionäre
Nationalismus (Munich: Bibliothekdienst Angerer, 1985); Sauermann, Ernst Niekisch
zwischen allen Fronten (Munich: Herbig Aktuell, 1980); Birgit Rätsch-Langejürgen, Das
Prinzip Widerstand: Leben und Wirken von Ernst Niekisch (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1997);
and Michael Pitt wald, Ernst Niekisch: Völkische Sozialismus, nationale Revolution, deutsche
Endimperium (Cologne: PapyRossa Verlag, 2002). Niekisch also figures prominently in the
major studies of German National Bolshevism: Schüddenkopf, National-bolschewismus;
Dupeux, “National-bolchevisme”; Dupeux, ed., La “Révolution conservatrice,” and he is ana-
lyzed comparatively in Stefan Breuer, Anatomie der konservativen Revolution (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaft liche Buchgesellschaft , 1982).
27. Quotations are from Ernst Niekisch, “Der Fünfjarhplan,” Widerstand, no. 6 (1930): 197,
199. See also Sylvia Taschka, Das Russlandbild von Ernst Niekisch (Erlangen and Jena:
Palme & Enke, 1999).
28. Jeff rey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the
Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 72.
29. Koenen, 342–343; Rätsch-Langejürgen, Das Prinzip Widerstand, 173–80. Two members
of Arplan from Heidelberg, Giselhert Wirsing and Ernst Wilhelm Eschmann, were also
politically on the far Right, the fi rst close to Die Tat and the second to the Nazis.
30. “Spravka o deiatel'nosti Arbplana [sic] i Soiuza rabotnikov umstvennogo truda v
Germanii, podgotovlennnaia D. Lukachem dlia otdela kadrov IKKI,” in Besedy na
Lubianke: Sledstvennoe delo Dërda Lukacha. Materialy k biografii, ed. Reinhard Müller
and Ia. G. Rokitianskii, 2nd rev. ed. (Moscow: Institut slavianovedeniia RA N, 2001):
118–120; Klaus Mehnert, “Memorandum über die ‘Arbeitsgemeinschaft zum Studium
N o t e s 2 5 5 –2 61 369
der sowjet russischen Planwirtschaft ,’ 8 January 1932,” in Gerd Voigt, Russland in der
deutschen Geschichtsschreibung 1843–1945 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1994): 381–382.
31. “Dnevnik t. Girshfel'da. Berlin, 30-go aprelia 1932,” GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 196,
l. 182–83; Girshfel'd to Petrov, 25 April 1932, AVP RF f. 082, op. 15, d. 28, p. 71, ll.
95–98.
32. “Shuman. Zav. Otdelom Tsentral'noi Evropy [VOKS]. Tov. Girshfel'du.
Upolnomochennomu VOKS v Germanii,” 19 March 1932, AVP RF f. 082, op. 15, d. 28, p.
71, l. 37. See ll. 10, 22.
33. Girshfel'd, “V sektor tsentral'noi Evropy VOKS,” 29 February 1932, AVP RF f. 082, op.
15, d. 28, p. 71, l. 32.
34. For example, see “Linde. Upolnomochnoe predstavitel'stvo v Germanii. Pred. VOKS tov.
Petrovu. Berlin,” 1 July 1932, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 196, l. 125.
35. E. O. Lerner (Zam. Pred. VOKS) to Girshfel'd, 16 December 1932, AVPR RF f. 082, op.
15, d. 28, p. 71, ll. 214–215; “Zav. 2-m Zapadnym otdelom (Shtern). Referent (Sheinan).
V kollegiiu NKID,” 16 November 1932, ibid., ll. 207–208; Shtern and Stroianker to
Girshfel'd, 27 April 1932, ibid., l. 68.
36. D. T. Shtern, “Zam. Pred. Gos. Planovoi Komissii—tov. Mezhlauku,” AVP RF f. 082, op.
16, d. 33, p. 76, ll. 1–2.
37. “G. Timm. Zav. Sektorom Tsentral'noi Evropy [VOKS]. NKID Zav. Vtorym Zap.
Otdelom t. Shtern,” 3 January 1932, GARF f. 5283, op. 6, d. 172, l. 23; F. N. Petrov to
Girshfel'd, 17 May 1932, AVP RF f. 082, op. 15, d. 28, p. 71, l. 89; V. I. Mezhlauk to Petrov,
11 May 1932, ibid., l. 88.
38. Girshfel'd to Sheinin, 27 October 1932, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 196, ll. 193–195; Lange
and Dmitriev, 204–6; Dmitriev, “K istorii,” 262–266.
39. “Otdel pechati NKID. Zav. (Umanskii). Otvet. referent (Muronov). Tov. Vinogradovu,
Berlin,” 3 September 1932, AVP RF f. 082, op. 15, d. 28, p. 71, l. 173; O.V. Klevniuk, et al.,
eds., Stalin i Kaganovich: Perepiska, 1931–1936 gg. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2001), 196 n. 9.
40. Ernst Niekisch, Erinnerungen eines deutschen Revolutionärs, vol. 1 (Cologne: Verlag
Wissenschaft und Politik, 1974): 217.
41. Kaganovich to Stalin, 3 August 1932, in Stalin i Kaganovich, ed. Khlevniuk, et al., 259,
304. The editors note that Hitler’s growing power did not elicit significant commentary
from Stalin, who was preoccupied with internal Soviet upheavals and wished to avoid an
open breach with Germany. See also Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) i Komintern, 666–667. On
Niedermayer, see Hans-Ulrich Seidt, Berlin, Kabul, Moskau: Oskar Ritter von Niedermayer
und Deutschlands Geopolitik (Munich: Universitas Verlag, 2002). The Soviet embassy
in Berlin was highly interested in Reventlow in 1932 and pursued contacts with him
(Hoppe, 315, 315 n. 131).
42. Hoppe, 311–315.
43. Arplan, Protokolle der Studienreise nach der Sowjet-Union vom 20. August bis 12. September
1932 (Berlin: n.p., 1932), sec. 2, no pagination.
44. “Anmeldungen zur Reise nach der UdSSR,” 14 July 1932, GARF f. 5283, op. 6, d. 172,
l. 209; ibid., l. 171–172. A Dutch branch of Arplan opened in Amsterdam, which had
more than thirty largely scholarly members and was represented in the delegation by its
founder, the economist H. Frijda.
45. H. Timm, untitled report in German, GARF f. 5283, op. 6, d. 172, l. 171–176; see also
“Otchet po delegatsii Arplana, pribyshei v Leningrad 23/VIII i vyekhavshei v Moskvu
26/VIII,” signed V. Pokrovskii, GARF f. 5283, op. 6, d. 172, l. 143.
46. Arplan, Protokolle, sections 3 and 4.
47. Matt hias Heeke, Reisen zu den Sowjets: Der ausländische Tourismus in Russland 1921–1941
(Münster: Lit Verlag, 2003), 240.
48. “M. Liubchenko. Pred. Vseukrainskogo Obshchestva kul'tsviazi. Tov. Lerneru. Zam.
Pred. VOKS. 8 avgusta 1932 (Kharkiv),” AVP RF f. 082, op. 15, d. 28, p. 27, l. 187. As
noted in Chapter 3, Witkin visited the sovkhoz Verbliud a few months earlier, in May
1932, with disastrous impressions.
49. Ibid., l. 187 ob.
50. Ibid., l. 187 ob, ll. 186–187.
370 Notes 2 6 1 – 2 6 6
51. “Bericht der ‘Arplan’-Delegation über die Reise in der Sowjet-Union vom 23 August
bis 12. September 1932,” written by Dr. ing. Kelen, Privatdozent an der Technischen
Hochschule, Berlin, GARF f. 5283, op. 6, d. 172, l. 66–121, here l. 74, 119–120. See also
“Priem delegatsii ‘Arplana’ v VOKS,” Pravda, 6 September 1932; Untitled Arplan declara-
tion, signed by Friedrich Lenz, AVP RF f. 082, op. 15, d. 28, p. 17, l. 185.
52. Friedrich Lenz to H. Timm, 10 November 1932, GARF f. 5283, op. 6, d. 172, l. 52–54.
53. Lenz and Harnack to Lerner (VOKS), 2 October 1932, GARF f. 5283, op. 6, d. 172, l.
63.
54. “Biulleten' ne dlia pechati No. 39 Inostrannoi informatsii Tass, 9/11–33. List No. 15.
‘Antisovetskii doklad fon-Gofmanstal’,’ ” Berlin, 2 November 1932, ibid., l. 11.
55. “Perevod s gollandskogo stat'i iz tsentral'nogo organa Gollandskoi sotsialisticheskoi-
demokraticheskoi partii “Khet Folk,” late 1932, AVP RF f. 082, op. 15, d. 28, p. 71, l.
217–26; H. Frijda, “Vier Jaren Sovjet-Economie,” De Telegraaf (Holland), 3 November
1932, GARF f. 5283, op. 5, d. 203, l. 6; letters from Dutch Society of Friends and Frijda,
November 1932, ibid. l. 30–35.
56. “Wir sind alle krank und hungern . . . ,” Sport Zeitung, 28 December 1932, GARF f. 5283,
op. 6, d. 172, l. 11.
57. David Caute, The Fellow-Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism, rev. ed. (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 137.
58. Caute, 101–106; Rachel Mazuy, Croire plutôt que coire? Voyages en Russie soviétique (1919–
1939) (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2002), 159; Alan Sheridan, André Gide: A Life in the Present
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), xv–xvi; Frederick John Harris,
André Gide and Romain Rolland: Two Men Divided (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 1973), 132.
59. The best work on Gide’s entourage is, regrett ably, unpublished: Florence Louisa Talks,
“André Gide’s Companions on his Journey to the Soviet Union in 1936: Jacques Schiff rin,
Eugène Dabit, Louis Guilloux, Jef Last and Pierre Herbart” (Ph.D. diss., University of
Warwick, 1987).
60. Sheridan, xii, 473, 477; “Romanskaia komissiia MORP (svodka No. 3). Frantsuzskaia
komissiia. Sotsial-fashizm pytaetsia umalit' znachenie zaiavlenii Andre Zhida,” 14
February 1933, RGALI f. 631, op. 14, d. 714, ll. 3–4.
61. André Gide, Afterthoughts: A Sequel to Back from the U.S.S.R, 2nd ed., trans. Dorothy
Bussy (London: Martin Secker and Warburg, Ltd, 1937), 9, 11.
62. André Gide, Return from the USSR, trans. Dorothy Bussy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1937), 42.
63. Ibid., 38 n. 1.
64. Sheridan, 375–379, 626.
65. On intellectuals’ reactions to Soviet treatment of homosexuality, in the context of
European approaches, see Eva Oberloskamp, Fremde neue Welten: Reisen deutscher under
französischer Linksintellektueller in die Sowjetunion 1917–1939 (Munich: Oldenbourg,
2011): chap. 3, sec. B. For the counter-example of Benjamin’s att raction not to the
notion of sexual liberation but liberation from sexuality, see Evgenii Bernshtein, “ ‘The
Withering of Private Life’: Walter Benjamin in Moscow,” in Everyday Life in Early Soviet
Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside, ed. Christina Kiaer and Eric Naiman (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2006): 217–229.
66. Monique Nemer, Corydon Citoyen: Essai sur André Gide et l’homosexualité (Paris: Gallimard,
2006): 266–283, quoting diary entry of 21 June, 1931 (267). See also Caute, 101–102.
67. Evg. Gal'perina, “Put' Andre Zhida,” in “Ino. Komissiia. Frantsiia. Stat'i sovetskoi pechati
o prebyvanii v SSSR Andre Zhida. Vyrezki iz gazet. 11 iiulia 1936–1937,” RGALI f. 631,
op. 14, d. 734, ll. 1–4.
68. Talks, 59–60, 431; Sheridan, 445, 484, 505.
69. Pierre Herbart, En U.R.S.S. (Paris: Gallimard, 1937), 22, 27–28; Talks, 441.
70. Talks, 330 (quotation), 347, 517–518, 366–367; C. J. Greschoft , ed., André Gide. Jef Last.
Correspondance, 1934–1950 (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1985). Much later,
Last published Mijn Vriend André Gide (Amsterdam: Van Ditmar, 1966), which discussed
their sexual encounters in Morocco and the USSR.
N o t e s 2 6 6 –2 71 371
Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet
Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), chap. 4.
90. Reinhard Müller, “Exil im ‘Wunderland’ Sowjetunion - Maria Osten (1908–1942),”
Exil: Forschung, Erkenntnisse, Ergebnisse 27, 2 (2007): 73–95; Müller, “Erschossen
im Wunderland: Maria Osten (1908–1942). Exil in der Sowjetunion, in Spanien und
Frankreich,” chap. 1 of his from his forthcoming book “Stalinismus und Exil: Biographien
im Kontext des Terrors.” On the German-language publications in Moscow, see Katerina
Clark, “Germanophone Intellectuals in Stalin’s Russia: Diaspora and Cultural Identity in
the 1930s,” Kritika 2, 3 (2001): 529–551.
91. Some were published in Sovetskie arkhivy, no. 4 (1989): 55–63; the others are contained
in GARF f. 5283, op. 1, d. 334; op. 5, d. 745; op. 8, dd. 290, 292.
92. “2-i Zapadnyi Otdel [VOKS]. LION FEIKHTVANGER. Pisatel'. Germaniia,” 22
December 1936, GARF f. 5283, op. 1, ed. khr. 334, l. 6.
93. “2-i Zapadnyi otdel. Lion Feikhtvanger—pisatel', Germaniia,” 16 December 1936,
GARF f. 5283, op. 1, ed. khr. 334, l. 9.
94. Feuchtwanger, Moscow 1937, introduction and conclusion.
95. “Lion Feikhtvanger—pisatel'. Germanii. II-i Zapadnyi Otdel,” report by Karavkina,
29 December 1936, GARF f. 5283, op. 1, d. 334, l. 1; Karavkina report of 15 December
1936, GARF f. 5283, op. 8, d. 290, l. 11; Hartmann, “Abgründige Vernunft ,” 157; Stern,
“Moscow 1937,” 83; Pischel, 115–116.
96. Karavkina reports on Feuchtwanger, 22 December 1936, GARF f. 5283, op. 1, ed. khr.
334, l. 6; 24 December 1936, ibid., l. 5; 27 December 1936, ibid., l. 3.
97. Karavkina report of 29 December 1936, l. 1. For more of Feuchtwanger’s complaints and
disparaging comments on Soviet living standards, as quoted by Karavkina, see Stern,
“Moscow 1937,” 80–81.
98. Feuchtwanger, Moscow 1937, 171, 172; idem, “Estet o Sovetskom Soiuze,” Pravda 30
December 1936; “Der Ästhet in der Sowjetunion,” Das Wort, no. 2 (1937): 86–88; the
discrepancies are discussed by Hartmann, “Abgründige Vernunft ,” 163 n. 68.
99. Hartmann, “Abgründige Vernunft ,” 164–165, citing diary of Austrian émigré Hugo
Huppert, who reported on a Union of Writers speech by Vsevolod Vishnevskii on 30
January 1936.
100. “Zapis' besedy tovarishcha Stalina s Germanskim pisatelem Lionom Feikhtvangerom,”
8 January 1937, RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, d. 820, ll. 3–22, here ll. 10–11; Feuchtwanger,
Moscow 1937, 93. The text of Feuchtwanger’s interview with Stalin (published in full in
Maksimenkov, “Ocherki,” 249–270) is likely an edited and partial version circulated
among Soviet leaders in preparation for possible publication, which was never autho-
rized. See Anne Hartmann, “Lost in Translation: Lion Feuchtwanger bei Stalin 1937,”
Exil: Forschung, Erkentnisse, Ergebnisse 28, 2 (2008): 5–18.
101. Feuchtwanger, Moscow 1937, 8, 108; Karavkina report of 28 December 1936, GARF f.
5283, op. 1, ed. khr. 334, l. 2; Lion Feikhtvanger, “Schast'e byt' sovetskim uchitelem,”
International'naia literatura, no. 2 (1937): 252–253.
102. “2-i Zapadnyi otdel. LION FEIKHTVANGER. Pisatel'. Germaniia,” report by Karavkina
of 19 December 1936, GARF f. 5283, op. 1, ed. khr. 334, l.7; The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov
1933–1949, ed. Ivo Banac (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 44, 51.
103. Feuchtwanger, Moscow 1937, 134–135, 152–153; on Radek, see B. Ia. Frezinskii, Pisateli i
sovetskie vozhdi: Izbrannye siuzhety 1919–1960 godov (Moscow: Ellis Lak, 2008), 148, 150.
104. Stern, “Moscow 1937,” 92, 94–95.
105. Anne Hartmann, “Lion Feuchtwanger, zurück aus Sowjetrussland: Selbstzensur eines
Reisebericht,” Exil 29, 1 (2009): 16–40; “Ot izdatel'stva,” in Lion Feikhtvanger, Moskva 1937:
Otchet o poezdke dlia moikh druzei (Moscow: Gosizdat khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1937).
106. Maximenkov and Barnes, n. 8.
107. Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers,
2001), 65.
108. For one example that deserves to be better known, see the book on Czechoslovak diplo-
mat Josef Girsa by V. A. Shishkin, Rossiia v gody ‘Velikogo pereloma' v vospriiatii inostran-
nogo diplomata (1925–1931 gg.) (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 1999).
N o t e s 2 7 7–2 8 2 373
109. Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie, “Editor’s Introduction to Part III,” in The Diary of
Beatrice Webb, vol. 4, 1924–1943: The Wheel of Life, citing surviving, unpublished entries
from Beatrice’s 1932 “Russian Tour” notebook, 275.
110. David Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the
Romance of Russian Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).
111. The Diary of Beatrice Webb, vol. 4, 374–375, 380; Webbs, Soviet Communism, 2: 567–571.
112. “Fashistskoe srednevekov'e,” Internatsional'naia literatura, no. 3 (1933): 140–141.
113. Trude Rikhter, “Kul'turnaia politika natsional-sotsializma,” Internatsional'naia litera-
tura, no. 3 (1933): 109–117, quotations 109, 115; Ernst Otval't, “Fashistskaia kul'tura,” in
ibid., no. 2 (1936): 140–143. On the Soviet Image of Nazi Germany, see Katerina Clark
and Karl Schlögel, “Mutual Perceptions and Projections: Stalin’s Russia in Nazi Germany
– Nazi Germany in the Soviet Union,” in Beyond Totalitarianism, 422–438.
114. “Bert Brekht,” in RGALI f. 631, op. 14, ed. khr. 399, l. 5; Katerina Clark, “The Author
as Producer: Cultural Revolution in Berlin and Moscow,” unpublished paper presented
at the Workshop on New Approaches to Russian and Soviet History,” University of
Maryland, May 2003.
115. Michael Scammel, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century
Skeptic (New York: Random House, 2009), 88–98, quotation 97; Sandra Goldstein, “Red
Days: Intellectuals and the Failing Gods,” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte
24 (1995): 157–178; Lee Congdon, Seeing Red: Hungarian Intellectuals in Exile and the
Challenge of Communism (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001), 8–10.
116. Shaw, The Rationalization of Russia, 76–77, 111–112.
117. Shaw, “On the Rocks: A Political Comedy. 1933,” in Too True to be Good, Village Wooing
and On the Rocks: Three Plays (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co, 1934), 177.
118. Quoted in Paul A. Hummert, Bernard Shaw’s Marxian Romance (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1973), 178; on Shaw’s treatment of violence in this period, 175–178.
119. Richard Griffiths, Fellow-Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany
(London: Constable, 1980), esp. 4, 153, 157, 167, 204; Alastair Hamilton, The Appeal of
Fascism: A Study of Intellectuals and Fascism 1919–1945 (New York: Aron Books, 1971).
120. Griffiths, 3. For a penetrating analysis of a left-right conversion, see Michael B.
Loughlin, “Gustav Hervé’s Transition from Socialism to National Socialism,” Journal of
Contemporary History 36,1 (2001): 5–39.
121. On Britain, Griffiths, esp. 110–113, 124, 227, 273, 377; on France, Hamilton, esp.
240–244.
122. Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1988): 75.
123. “A. Ia. Arosev. Sekretariu TsK VKP(b) – tov. Zhdanovu. Kul'tprop TsK VKP(b) – t.
Stetskomu,” 21 June 1934, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 255, ll. 43–44; report on visits of
Italian Fascist cinematographers, 27 June 1932, ibid., op. 8, d. 112, ll. 43–44; on Céline,
see Hamilton, 232–234.
124. David Carroll, “Literary Fascism or the Aestheticizing of Politics: The Case of Robert
Brasillach,” New Literary History 23, 3 (1992): 691–726; Céline quoted in Hamilton,
234.
125. Karl Radek, “Intelligentsiia i oktiabr' (predislovie),” in Glazami inostrantsev, xi, echoing
Stalin’s phrase rehabilitating the “bourgeois specialists” in the context of foreign intellec-
tuals. On the Soviet bid to replace the United States and Palestine as an “ideological vater-
land” among American Jews, see Daniel Soyer, “Back to the Future: American Jews Visit
the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s,” Jewish Social Studies 6, 3 (2000): 124–159.
126. Kate A. Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between
Black and Red, 1922–1963 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Allison Blakely,
Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought (Washington, D.C.: Howard
University Press, 1986), chap. 7; Joy Gleason Carew, Blacks, Reds, and Russians: Sojourners
in Search of the Soviet Promise (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008), chap. 9.
127. Lewis S. Feuer, “American Travelers to the Soviet Union 1917–32: The Formation of a
Component of New Deal Ideology,” American Quarterly 42, 2, part 1 (Summer 1962):
119–149, quotation 121.
128. Blakely, 84, 98, 100–101; Baldwin, 207.
374 Notes 2 8 2 – 2 9 0
129. Untitled report, 26 July 1935, GARF f. 5283, op. 3, ed. khr. 655, l. 4.
130. “Pol' Robson i zhena. I. A. Amdur,” 23 July 1935, GARF f. 5283, op. 3, ed. khr. 65., l. 5.
Robeson was consistently praised as a great and loyal Soviet friend by VOKS, the Soviet
embassy in Washington, and the London Society of Friends, in which he was active: see
“Beseda s Pol' Robson,” 23 May 1937, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 371, l. 51; D. Chubakhin,
fi rst secretary of Soviet embassy in USA, to head of VOKS Anglo-American Sector
Kislova, 15 March 1940, in ibid., op. 2a, d. 4, l. 102.
131. Robeson met with ethnographers in Leningrad in January 1935: GARF f. 5283, op. 3, ed.
khr. 655, ll. 7, 8, 15; on the particular appeal of Soviet nationalities policy for Robeson,
see Baldwin, 210–211.
132. “E. P. Liberman, ‘Otchet o rabote s Chekhoslovatskim prof. Needly,’ ” no earlier than 13
June 1935, GARF f. 5283, op. 1, d. 298, l. 110.
Chapter 8
1. André Gide, Return from the U.S.S.R, trans. Dorothy Bussy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1937), 31–33.
2. “SSSR—moguchaia industrial'naia derzhava,” “Pod znamenem internatsional'noi soli-
darnosti,” and “Nasha rodina,” in Sputnik agitatora, no. 19 (October 1938): 38–39, 45–47,
and no. 13 (July 1938): 13, respectively; Raisa Orlova, Memoirs, trans. Samueli Cioran
(New York: Random House, 1983), 81.
3. See Anna Krylova, Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), chap. 1.
4. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary times. Soviet Russia
in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999),184; Catriona Kelly, Refining
Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture, and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001), 232.
5. Ilya Ehrenburg, Memoirs: 1921-–1941, trans. Tatiana Shebunina (New York: Grosset and
Dunlap, 1966), 26.
6. György Péteri, “Nylon Curtain: Transnational and Transsystemic Tendencies in the
Cultural Life of State-Socialist Russia and East-Central Europe,” Slavonica 10, 2 (2004):
113–123, quotation 119.
7. David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of
Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2002), 5. Brandenberger, however, also noted the contradictory and multiple ten-
dencies of the mid-1930s.
8. Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution
of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), esp.
introduction, chaps. 1 and 5; Clark developed the term “great appropriation” in “From
Production Sketches to ‘World Literature’: The Search for a Grander Narrative,” paper
presented at the Wissenschaft skolleg zu Berlin, June 2010.
9. See, for example, the numerous country reports in GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 278; on
Austria, l. 32.
10. Isidor Amdur, “Memorandum,” no exact date, 1935, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 278, ll.
66–67; “Osnovnye meropriiatiia po Chekhoslovakii,” 1935, no exact date, ibid., l. 25. On
Intourist, see B. E. Bagdasarian, et al., Sovetskoe zazerkal'e: Inostrannyi turizm v SSSR v
1930–1980-e gody (Moscow: Forum, 2007), 47.
11. “Rabota Anglo-Amerikanskogo otdela,” GARF f. 5283, op. 1, d. 278, ll. 71–75; Josephine
Smith to VOKS, 18 October 1935, AVP RF f. 69, op. 23, d. 5, papka 76, l. 74; “Peace and
Friendship with the USSR. National Week and Congress, December 7 and 8” (brochure),
ibid., ll. 75–77.
12. On MORP, see esp. chaps. 3 and 4 of Ludmila Stern, Western Intellectuals and the Soviet
Union, 1920–1940: From Red Square to the Left Bank (London: Routledge, 2007); for
examples of its extensive monitoring of foreign-language press and cultural periodicals
after 1932 as a sign of professionalization, see RGALI f. 631, op. 14, ed. khr. 715; ibid., op.
14, ed, khr. 1; ibid., op. 11, d. 1, ll. 2–18, 19–23.
N o t e s 2 9 0 –2 9 5 375
13. On these points, see Anne Hartmann, “Literarische Staatsbesuche: Prominente Autoren
des Westens zu Gast in Stalins Sowjetunion (1931–1937),” in Die Ost-West-Problematik in
den europäischen Kulturen und Literaturen, ed. Helena Ulbrechtova and Siegfried Ulbrecht
(Dresden: Niesse Verlag, 2008), 229–275, here 237–239.
14. Boris Frezinskii, Pisateli i sovetskie vozhdi: Izbrannye siuzhety 1919–1960 godov (Moscow:
Ellis Lak, 2008), 280–282.
15. Ehrenburg to Stalin, 13 September 1934, Il'ia Erenburg, Pis'ma 1908–1967, 2: 134–139;
Boris Frezinskii, “Il'ia Erenburg i Nikolai Bukharin,” Pisateli, 156–216, esp. 176–178,
282–283; Joshua Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996), 134–136. On the Comintern, see
Jonathan Haslam, “The Comintern and the Origins of the Popular Front, 1934–1935,”
Historical Journal 22, 3 (1979): 673–91, and Haslam, “Comintern and Soviet Foreign
Policy, 1919–1941,” in The Cambridge History of Russia, vol. 3: The Twentieth Century, ed.
Ronald Grigor Suny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 650–651.
16. Ehrenburg to Stalin, 13 September 1934. For the manner in which Ehrenburg linked his
foreign communist critics with the discredited approach of domestic cultural militants,
see “Otvet F. Fernadesu Armesto,” International'naia literatura, no. 1 (1933): 121–122.
17. Ehrenburg to Stalin, 13 September 1934; Kaganovich to Stalin, 28 September 1934;
Kaganovich to Stalin, 3 October 1934, in Stalin i Kaganovich: Perepiska. 1931–1936
gg., ed. O. V. Khlevniuk, et al. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2001), 718–719, 502–503, 509;
Rubenstein, 134–136.
18. Pascal Ory, La belle illusion: Culture et politique sous le signe du Front populaire 1935–1938
(Paris: Plon, 1994), 184–195; Frezinskii, “Mezhdunarodnoe antifashistskoe pisatel'skoe
predstavlenie v 3-x aktakh (prodiuser I. Stalin),” Pisateli, 273–475 (a second International
Writers Congress was held in Valencia and Madrid in 1937).
19. Politburo resolution in Andrei Artizov and Oleg Naumov, eds., Vlast' i khudozhestvennaia
intelligentsiia. Dokumenty TsK RKP(b) - VKP(b) – VChK-OGPU-NKVD o kul'turnoi poli-
tike. 1917–1953 gg (Moscow: Demokratiia, 1999), 279; Zasedanie Inostrannoi Komissii
SSP SSSR 29-go maia 1936 g.,” RGALI f. 631, op. 14, ed. khr. 23, ll. 2–34; Stern, Western
Intellectuals, 8, 82.
20. Arosev, “Sekretariu TsK VKP(b) tovarishchu Stalinu. Dokladnaia zapiska. O propagande
sovetskoi kul'ture zagranitsei i razvitie raboty VOKS,” 3 May 1935, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a,
d. 276, ll. 72–83; “Ukreplenie i rasshirenie sviazei VOKS"a,” 1935, no exact date, ibid., ll.
57–70; “Proekt dokladnoi zapiski v Politbiuro o VOKS"e,” 11 June 1936, ibid., d. 308, ll.
59–64; on the dacha in Peredel'kino, ibid., ll. 132–133.
21. “Spisok deiatelei, aktivno rabotaiushchikh v oblasti kul'turnogo sblizheniia s SSSR,”
late 1935, no exact date, GARF f. 5283, op. 1, d. 278, l. 10–11; “Spisok inostrantsev dlia
priglasheniia v SSSR,” 20 August 1936, ibid., op. 1a, d. 308, ll. 103–10. A professional
breakdown of foreigners for whom VOKS “provided service” in ten months in 1935 shows
the largest group (205) to be artists and writers, followed by pedagogues (117), scholars
(108), and physicians (102). By contrast, there were, for example, far fewer engineers (31),
economists (14), or architects (6). Ibid., op. 1, d. 278, l. 12.
22. Arosev to A. A. Andreev, 11 June 1936, GARF f. 5283. op. 1a, d. 308, l. 58; Arosev, “Proekt
dokladnoi zapiski v Politbiuro TsK VKP(b) o VOKS"e,” ibid., ll. 59–64, quotation l. 59;
Arosev to Stalin, 7 June 1935, ibid., d. 276, ll. 134–38, quotation l. 37. On portrayals
of Soviet culture in this period as the culmination of the great European tradition and
Moscow as capital of world civilization, see Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome, chap. 5.
23. Erika Wolf, ed., Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip: The 1935 Travelogue of Two Soviet
Writers Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov (New York: Princeton Architectural Press and Cabinet
Books, 2007), 26; A. I. Mikoian to L. M. Kaganovich, no later than 17 September 1936,
in Sovetskoe rukovodstvo: Perepiska 1928–1941 gg. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1999), 346–
349, quotation 346; A. Ia. Arosev to Stetskii, Dinamov, and Zhdanov in the Central
Committee’s Kul'tprop, 25 May 1934, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 255, ll. 27–29, quotations
l. 27. On the broader Russian-American cross-cultural context, often conditioned by
fascination from afar, see, inter alia, Aleksandr Etkind, Tolkovanie puteshestvii: Rossiia i
Amerika v travelogakh i intertekstakh (Moscow: NLO, 2001).
376 Notes 2 9 5 – 2 9 9
24. Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Master of the House: Stalin and His Inner Circle, trans. Nora Seligman
Favorov (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 139–142; Marc Jansen and Nikita
Petrov, Stalin’s Loyal Executioner: People’s Commissar Nikolai Ezhov, 1895–1940
(Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2002), 24–25, 28, 32–34, 40–41. In 1935 Ezhov’s
efforts in this campaign were successfully rebuffed by Jenö Varga, head of the Institute of
World Economics and World Politics (38–39). On “Yagoda’s eclipse within his own bai-
liwick by Yezhov,” see J. Arch Gett y and Oleg Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the
Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999),
275, and on “growing tensions” in 1935, chap. 4.
25. Th is is the argument in Carola Tischler, Flucht in die Verfolgung: Deutsche Emigranten
im sowjetischen Exil 1933 bis 1945 (Münster: LIT, 1996): 87–91; on Intourist, see
Bagdasarian, et al., Sovetskoe zazerkal'e, 67; Shawn Salmon, “To the Land of the Future: A
History of Intourist and Travel to the Soviet Union, 1929–1991” (Ph.D. diss., University
of California at Berkeley, 2008), 108.
26. Brandenberger, National Bolshevism, 49.
27. Julian Graff y, “The Foreigner’s Journey to Consciousness in Early Soviet Cinema: The
Case of Protozanov’s Tommi,” in Insiders and Outsiders in Russian Cinema, ed. Stephen
M. Norris and Zara M. Torlone (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 1–22;
Josephine Woll, “Under the Big Top: America Goes to the Circus,” in ibid., 68–80; GARF
f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 276, l. 82.
28. A. Arosev, “Sekretariu TsK VKP(b) tov. Ezhovu,” 5 May 1936, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d.
308, l. 42; on Keynes, A. Ia. Arosev, “Zam. Zav. Otdela Kul'turno-Prosvetitel'noi Raboty.
TsK VKP(b) t. A. I. Angarovu,” 11 August 1936, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 308, l. 85.
29. Leonid Maksimenkov, Sumbur vmesto muzyki: Stalinskaia kul’turnaia revoliutsiia 1936–
1938 (Moscow: Iuridicheskaia kniga, 1997), 60–66, 83, and passim.
30. Maksimenkov, Sumbur, 88–112, 158, 160–162.
31. Platon Kerzhentsev to V. M. Molotov, “O VOKSe,” 2 March 1937, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a,
d. 342, l. 22; Arosev to N. K. Antipov, Zam. Pred. Sovnarkoma, 10 March 1937, ibid., ll.
23–25.
32. The phrase comes from the subtitle of Maksimenkov’s Sumbur vmesto muzyki.
33. Arosev to Ezhov, no exact date, prob. May 1936, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 308, l. 47. On
the Central Committee as the main “instance” controlling cultural diplomacy during its
heyday in the 1930s, see A. V. Golubev, “. . . Vzgliad na zemliu obetovannuiu”: Iz istorii
sovetskoi kul'turnoi diplomatii 1920–1930-x godov (Moscow: Institut istorii RA N, 2004),
127.
34. Arosev to Ezhov, December 1935 (no day, from Paris), GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 324, l. 31;
Arosev to Stalin (from Paris), RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, ed. khr. 695, l. 161; interview with
Ol'ga Aroseva, Moscow, 16 October 2003.
35. Arosev to Stalin, 4 August 1936, RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, ed. khr. 655, ll. 162–166.
36. Similarly, as the Cold War and Zhdanov periods began in 1947, a campaign to tighten
secrecy wreaked havoc on routine administration (Yoram Gorlizki, “Ordinary Stalinism:
The Council of Ministers and the Soviet Neopatrimonial State, 1946–1953,” Journal of
Modern History 74 [December 2002]: 721–722).
37. In 1935, Glavlit approved nineteen VOKS officials to use “banned” foreign literature, but
it prevented VOKS from expanding its activities in producing restricted reports (svodki)
on Western cultural life. “Proekt organizatsii ezhednevnykh informsvodok VOKS"a,” 2
December 1934, GARF f. 5283, op. 1, d. 277, ll. 28–29; Zam. Pred. VOKS N. Kuliabko to
V. M. Volin, Glavlit, ibid, op. 1a, d. 283, l. 5; Glavlit to VOKS, 23 September 1935, ibid., l.
22; “Spisok sotrudnikov VOKS"a, imeiushchikh pravo pol'zovat'sia zapreshchennoi ino-
literaturoi,” 1935, no exact date, ibid., l. 35.
38. Arosev, “Rasporiazhenie po VOKS,” 4 July 1935, GARF f. 5283, op. 1, d. 277, l. 2.
39. “Otchet Otdela Mezhdunarodnogo knigoobmena,” GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 91, ll.
62–73.
40. “Dokladnaia zapiska o kontrole nad inostrannoi literaturoi, postupaiushchei v VOKS.
Nachal'niku Glavlita Ingulovu S.E. ot Nachal'niko Ino. Sektora Glavlita Barshchevskogo,”
16 December 1935, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 283, ll. 36–42.
Notes 299–30 4 377
41. Zam. Pred. VOKS N. Kuliabko to V. M. Volin, Glavlit, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 283, l. 5;
“Prikaz No. 40,” (Glavlit), ibid., d. 292, l. 11. Disruptions in VOKS’s work due to Glavlit
continued in 1936: GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 307, l. 28.
42. “Zav. Sekretnoi Chast' iu VOKS Kuresar. V Spetsotdel GUGB NKVD. Tov. Evdokimovu,”
8 January 1936, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 307, ll. 3–4.
43. “BRIO Pred. VOKS L. Cherniavskii. V Spetsotdel GUGB NKVD t. Sharikovu,” 9 April
1936, ibid., l. 86; see also “Zav. Sekretnoi Chast'iu VOKS Kuresar. V Spetsotdel GUGB
NKVD. Tov. Evdokimovu,” 28 January 1936, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 307, l. 19.
44. On Nazi book-burnings as an originary moment for pan-European anti-fascist culture,
see Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome, chap. 4.
45. “Akt” (Glavlit), 29 March 1936, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 321, l. 8; ibid., l. 51; “Zav.
Sektr. Chast'iu VOKS A. Kuresar. BRIO Pred VOKS tov. Cherniavskii. Kop. Spetsotdel
GUGB NKVD t. Sharikovu,” 19 April 1936, ibid., d. 307, l. 112. At Leningrad
Communist University, book-burning operations began somewhat later than those of
the foreign materials at VOKS—aft er a late May 1936 operation to purge “Trotskyist-
Zinovievist” literature (Igal Halfi n, Stalinist Confessions: Messianism and Terror at the
Leningrad Communist University [Pitt sburgh: University of Pitt sburgh Press, 2009],
204–208).
46. GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 350, ll. 6–17; on the London book burning, see VOKS represen-
tative Grinev to Smirnov, 24 April 1938, GARF f. 5283, op. 2a, d. 2, l. 91.
47. David Priestland, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization: Ideas, Power, and Terror in
Inter-war Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 352–388; Wendy Z. Goldman,
Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin: The Social Dynamics of Repression (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), chap. 3.
48. Natal'ia Semper (Sokolova), “Portrety i peizazhi: Chastnye vospominaniia o XX veke,”
Druzhba narodov, no. 2 (1997): 115.
49. On the 1937 proverka (verification) of VOKS employees with relatives and ties abroad,
GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 350, ll. 18–19; Arosev to Nikita Khrushchev, secretary of the
Moscow party organization, 22 March 1937, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 342, ll. 41–48; see
also l. 128, l. 133; Arosev, diary entry of 15 November 1936, in Ol'ga Aroseva and V. A.
Maksimova, Bez grima (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Tsentrpoligraf, 1999), 85.
50. Aroseva and Maksimova, Bez grima, 86–90; Feliks Chuev, Sto sorok besed s Molotovym: Iz
dnevnika F. Chueva (Moscow: Terra, 1991), 420–23, quotations 420, 423.
51. Terry Martin, “The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing,” Journal of Modern History 70
(December 1998): 813–861, here 829.
52. Frezinskii, Pisateli, 148.
53. Jansen and Petrov, 108.
54. Khlevniuk, Master of the House, 173; Karl Schlögel, Terror und Traum: Moskau 1937
(Munich: Carl Hanswer Verlag, 2008), 150.
55. Here see Jörg Baberowski and Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, “The Quest for Order and
the Pursuit of Terror: Nationalist Socialist Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union as
Multiethnic Empires,” in Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared, ed.
Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009),
180–230, esp. 210–11.
56. Jansen and Petrov, 93; Sergei Zhuravlev, “American Victims of the Stalin Purges,
1930s,” in Stalinistiche Subjekte / Sujets staliniens / Stalinist Subjects, ed. Birgitte Studer
and Heiko Haumann (Zurich: Chronos Verlag, 2006), 397–414; Tim Tzouliadis, The
Foresaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia (New York: Penguin Books, 2008),
esp. 105–107.
57. “Otchet o priezde grupp inostrannykh turistov v SSSR za I-e polugodie 37 g.,” 2 September
1938, GARF f. 9612, op. 1, d. 40, l. 83; “Spravka o kolichestve inostrannykh turistov iz
Ameriki i Evropy, posetivshikh Sov. Soiuz po godam,” no earler than 1941, ibid., d. 71, l.
2; Salmon, “To the Land of the Future,” 108–110.
58. “Ispol'zovanie inostrannogo turizma v kapitalisticheskikh stranakh v tseliakh razvedki,
shpionazh i podryvnoi raboty,” no exact date, GARF f. 9612, op. 1, d. 63, ll. 238–259, esp.
257–258.
378 Notes 3 0 4 – 3 0 8
and Politburo members were informed from the contents of Kudasheva’s letters, Rolland
in the wake of his fi rst visit in 1935 had been considering a return in 1937 (RGASPI f. 558,
op. 11, ed. khr. 775, l. 123).
74. M. P. Rollan (Kudasheva) to Mikhail Apletin, 26 October 1938, RGALI f. 631, op. 14, d.
754, l. 40.
75. Romain Rolland to Galya and Natasha Isaevaia (Novgorod), 26 November 1937; Mariia
Rollan [Kudasheva] to Mikhail Apletin, 27 November 1937 and 29 December 1937,
RGALI f. 631, op. 14, d. 74, ll. 98–99, 97, 104. On Rolland’s Robespierre see Bernard
Duchatelet, Romain Rolland tel qu’en lui-même (Paris: Albin Michel, 2002).
76. RGALI f. 631, op. 14, d. 22, l. 8, 13, 17.
77. “V. Iakovlev, 2-i sekretar' Polpredstva SSSR v Chekhoslovakii. 2-oi Zapadnyi Otdel
NKID tov. Vainshteinu. Pred. VOKS—tov. Smirnovu,” Prague, 19 October 1938, GARF
f. 5283, op. 2a, d. 2, ll. 154–162; Smirnov to Iakovlev, 10 March 1938, ibid., l. 24; on
Nejedlý, V. F. Smirnov to V. M. Molotov, 14 May 1939, ibid., d. 3, l. 4 (see also l. 66).
78. Walter Benjamin, “Conversations with Brecht,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms,
Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York:
Schocken Books, 1978), 217, 218–219.
79. Bertolt Brecht to Mikhail Apletin no later than 5 February 1939, RGALI f. 631, op. 11, d.
412, l. 4; Apletin to Brecht, 5 February 1939, 20 May 1939, 10 June 1939, 29 July 1939, 23
August 1939 (ibid., l. 5, 6, 9, 13, 15, see also l. 17); Brecht to Apletin, 4 July 1940, ibid., l.
20; Apletin to Brecht, 27 July 1940, ibid., l. 22.
80. For a recent intervention, see Sergej Slutsch, “Stalin und Hitler 1933–1941: Kalküle und
Fehlkalkulationen des Kreml,” in Stalin und die Deutschen: Neue Beiträge der Forschung,
ed. Jürgen Zarusky (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2006): 59–88. On shock expressed by
Soviet intellectuals, see A. V. Golubev, et al., Rossiia i Zapad: Formirovanie vneshnepolit-
icheskikh stereotipov v soznanii rossiiskogo obshchestva pervoi poloviny XX veka (Moscow:
Institut rossiiskoi istorii RA N, 1998), 199–234. For the most recent scholarship on the
Pact, see “Der Hitler-Stalin-Pakt,” special issue of Osteuropa, no. 7–8 (2009).
81. By far the largest number of books was received from the United States, but Germany
still came in second place in 1935 (more than 10,000 books received in the fi rst half of
that year). “Dokladnaia zapiska o kontrole nad inostrannoi literaturoi,” 16 December
1935, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 283, ll. 36–42. For an example of the sporadic contacts, see
“Zapis' besedy s predstavitelem ‘Doitche Gezel'shaft tsum studium osteuropas’doktorom
Shiule,” 10 June 1935, ibid. op. 6, d. 510, l. 2; see also l. 129, l. 133, l. 135, l. 145.
82. N. Pozdniakov (Berlin) to Cherniavskii (BRIO pred. VOKS), 11 March 1936, GARF f.
5283, op. 1a, d. 300, l. 3; “Rabota nemetskoi gruppy SSP,” 1934, RGALI f. 631, op. 12, ed.
khr. 2, ll. 16–28. For a compilation of newly declassified documents on Nazi-Soviet rela-
tions, see Sergei Kudriashov, ed., SSSR-Germaniia: 1933–1941 (Moscow: Vestnik Arkhiv
Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii, 2009).
83. J. Calvitt Clark III, Russia and Italy against Hitler: The Bolshevik-Fascist Rapprochement
against Hitler (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991); on the economic dimension to Soviet-
German relations, see Edward E. Ericson III, Feeding the German Eagle: Soviet Economic
Aid to Nazi Germany, 1933–1941 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1999).
84. For example, see “Otzyv o rabote Inturista v SSSR,” 1940, GARF f. 9612, op. 1, d. 62, ll.
36–37; Bagdasarian, et al., Sovetskoe zazerkal'e, 21.
85. V. A. Nevezhin, “Sovetskaia politika i kul'turnye sviazi s Germaniei (1939–1941 gg.),”
Otechestvennaia istoriia, no. 1 (1993): 18–34; “Dnevnik Press-Atashe Polpredstva SSSR v
Germanii,” 2 December 1939, GARF f. 5283, op. 21, d. 3, l. 220.
86. Orlova, Memoirs, 109.
Epilogue
1. For a similar metaphor in the later context of “public information” programs in wartime
and postwar United States, see Daniel L. Lykins, From Total War to Total Diplomacy: The
Advertising Council and the Construction of the Cold War Consensus (Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Publishers, 2003).
380 Notes 3 1 3 – 3 1 9
2. For just one example, see Ronald Grigor Suny, The Soviet Experiment: Russia, The USSR,
and the Successor States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). A major new docu-
mentary history of Soviet culture contains no international headings among its 24 chap-
ters and only a handful of documents with any sort of international dimension in its more
than 500 pages: Katerina Clark and Evgeny Dobrenko, eds., Soviet Culture and Power: A
History in Documents, 1917–1953, compiled by Andrei Artizov and Oleg Naumov, trans.
Marian Schwartz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
3. An important exception is Jon Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics
(Berkeley: University of California, 1994).
4. Katerina Clark, “Socialist Realism and the Sacralizing of Space,” in The Landscape of
Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space, ed. Clark and Evgeny Dobrenko (Seatt le:
University of Washington Press, 2003), 3–18, here 6.
5. György Péteri, “Nylon Curtain: Transnational and Transsystemic Tendencies in the
Cultural Life of State-Socialist Russia and East-Central Europe,” Slavonica 10, 2 (2004):
113–123, esp. 117–120.
6. Jan Gross, Revolution from Abroad: the Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and
Western Belorussia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 45–50, quotation 46.
7. Oleg Budnitskii, “The Intelligentsia Meets the Enemy: Educated Soviet Officers
in Defeated Germany, 1945,” Kritika 10, 3 (Summer 2009): 629–682, quotations
679–670.
8. On the Sovinformburo, see Shimon Redlich’s introduction to War, Holocaust and
Stalinism: A Documented Study of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the USSR, ed.
Redlich, comp. Ilia Altman, et al. (Luxembourg: Harwood Academic, 1995); see also
Katerina Clark, “Ehrenburg and Grossman: Two Cosmopolitan Jewish Writers Reflect
on Nazi Germany at War,” Kritika 10, 3 (Summer 2009): 607–628.
9. “Outline of Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee Goals February 5, 1942,” in Redlich, ed.,
196–197; see also 75; Jeff rey Veidlinger, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture
on the Soviet Stage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), chap. 7. On the tan-
gled publication history of the Black Book, see Harvey Asher, “The Soviet Union, the
Holocaust, and Auschwitz,” Kritika 4, 4 (Fall 2003): 886–912.
10. Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk, Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945–
1953 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 18; A. V. Golubev, et al., Rossiia i Zapad:
Formirovanie vneshnepoliticheskikh stereotipov v soznanii rossiiskogo obshchestva pervoi
poloviny XX veka (Moscow: Institut Istorii RA N, 1998), 136–144.
11. Stephen Lovell, “From Isolationism to Globalization,” chap. 9 of The Shadow of War: The
Soviet Union and Russia, 1941 to the Present (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). For a view
of Andrei Zhdanov as Stalin’s “factotum” in pursuing an “ideological war with the West”
and the anti-intelligentsia campaigns in 1946–47, see Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, 32–43.
12. “The Roberts Cables,” in Origins of the Cold War: The Novikov, Kennan, and Roberts “Long
Telegrams” of 1946, ed. Kenneth M. Jenson, rev. ed. (Washington, D.C.: United States
Institute of Peace Press, 1993), 59–60.
13. Rósa Magnúsdótt ir, “Keeping up Appearances: How the Soviets Failed to Control
Popular Att itudes toward the United States of America” (Ph.D. diss., University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2006), 134, 254 and passim.
14. Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2009), chap. 3; Magnúsdótt ir, chaps. 5–6.
15. Eleanory Gilburd, “Picasso in Th aw Culture,” Cahiers du monde russe 47, 1–2 (2006):
65–108; Pia Koivunen, “The 1957 Moscow Youth Festival: Propagating a New, Peaceful
Image of the Soviet Union,” in Soviet State and Society under Nikita Khrushchev, ed.
Melanie Ilič and Jeremy Smith (London: Routledge, 2009), 45–65; Susan E. Reid, “Who
Will Beat Whom? Soviet Popular Reception of the American Exhibition in Moscow,
1959,” Kritika: 9, 4 (Fall 2008): 855–904. On 23 July 2009, on the fi ft ieth anniver-
sary of the Sokol'niki exhibition, I attended the commemorative conference at George
Washington University, “Face-off to Facebook: From the Nixon-Khrushchev Kitchen
Debate to Public Diplomacy in the 21st Century,” whose participants included dozens of
former exhibit guides and staff .
Notes 320 –323 381
16. Lovell, chap. 9; Yale Richmond, Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron
Curtain (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003).
17. For this point I draw on Miriam Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees,
Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009); and
Anne E. Gorsuch, “From Iron Curtain to Silver Screen: Imagining the West in the
Khrushchev Era,” Imagining the West in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, ed. György
Péteri (Pitt sburgh: Pitt sburgh University Press, 2010): 153–171.
18. György Péteri, “The Oblique Coordinate Systems of Modern Identity,” in Imagining the
West, 1–12, quotation 11.
19. On reformist elites, see Robert D. English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev,
Intellectuals and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000);
on the birth of a new civic consciousness, see Zubok, Zhivago’s Children.
20. James Scott , “Authoritarian High Modernism,” chap. 3 of Seeing Like a State: How Certain
Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1998).
21. The unprecedented etatism of the Soviet new regime made this anticipation possible, just
as in Stephen Kotkin’s argument the absence of private property allowed the rapid adop-
tion of Fordist mass production on an unprecedented scale (Kotkin, “Modern Times: The
Soviet Union and the Interwar Conjuncture,” Kritika 2, 1 [Winter 2001]: 111–164). On
how the import was adapted and modified to become something distinctively new, see
Yves Cohen, “Circulatory Localities: The Example of Stalinism in the 1930s,” Kritika 11,
1 (Winter 2010): 11–45.
22. David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), quotation 3.
23. Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the
United States in Austria after the Second World War, trans. Diana M. Wolf (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 46–53.
24. Wagnleitner, 55; Zubok, Zhivago’s Children, 114; Magnúsdótt ir, 105. For other postwar
U.S. reactions to Soviet cultural diplomacy, see Frank A. Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of
Ideas: U.S. Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1981), 108, 143. More broadly on the strategies and limitations of the
U.S. effort in the Cultural Cold War, see Laura A. Belmonte, Selling the American Way:
U.S. Propaganda and the Cold War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2008).
25. Mary Nolan, “Europe and America in the Twentieth Century” (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, forthcoming), chap. on cultural diplomacy.
26. David Engerman, “The Second World’s Th ird World,” Kritika 12, 1 (2011): 183–211;
Stephen G. Marks, How Russia Changed the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2004): chaps. 8–9.
27. Jan C. Behrends, Die erfundene Freundschaft: Propaganda für die Sowjetunion in Polen
und in der DDR (Cologne: Böhlau, 2006): 160–161, 241–254; Norman M. Naimark, The
Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 411–418.
28. Vladimir Pechatnov, “Exercise in Frustration: Soviet Foreign Propaganda in the Early
Cold War, 1945–47,” Cold War History 11, 2 (January 2001): 1–27.
29. Pechatnov, 7; Magnúsdótt ir, 127 n. 63; on shift s brought about by anti-cosmopolitanism
see Ethan Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2006).
30. Nigel Gould-Davies, “The Logic of Soviet Cultural Diplomacy,” Diplomatic History 27, 2
(April 2003): 193–214.
31. The phrase comes from Marshall T. Poe, The Russian Moment in World History (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2003).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y O F A R C H I VA L
COLL ECT IONS
382
B i b l i o g ra p h y 383
385
386 Index