Description

During the 1920s and 1930s thousands of European and American writers, professionals, scientists, artists, and intellectuals made a pilgrimage to experience the "Soviet experiment" for themselves. Showcasing the Great Experiment explores the reception of these intellectuals and fellow-travelers and their cross-cultural and trans-ideological encounters in order to analyze Soviet attitudes towards the West.

Many of the twentieth century's greatest writers and thinkers, including Theodore Dreiser, Andre Gide, Paul Robeson, and George Bernard Shaw, notoriously defended Stalin's USSR despite the unprecedented violence of its prewar decade. While many visitors were profoundly affected by their Soviet tours, so too was the Soviet system. The early experiences of building showcases and teaching outsiders to perceive the future-in-the-making constitute a neglected international part of the emergence of Stalinism at home. Michael David-Fox contends that each side critically examined the other, negotiating feelings of inferiority and superiority, admiration and enmity, emulation and rejection. By the time of the Great Purges, these tensions gave way to the dramatic triumph of xenophobia and isolationism; whereas in the twenties the new regime assumed it had much to learn from Western modernity, by the Stalinist thirties the Soviet order was declared superior in all respects.

Drawing on the declassified archival records of the agencies charged with crafting the international image of communism, David-Fox shows how Soviet efforts to sell the Bolshevik experiment abroad through cultural diplomacy shaped and were, in turn, shaped by the ongoing project of defining the Soviet Union from within. These interwar Soviet methods of mobilizing the intelligentsia for the international ideological contest, he argues, directly paved the way for the cultural Cold War.

Features

• One of the first full-length transnational studies written in the Russian-Soviet field
• This book is the result of extensive archival research in formerly secret Soviet archival collections
• Opens up a neglected international dimension to the formation of the Soviet system and the origins of Stalinism

Reviews

"A nuanced and informed account of a fascinating and contradictory era in Soviet cultural relations with the West. The book shows how Soviet suspicion of the West in Stalin's time coexisted with an almost obsessive attention to Western opinions of the Soviet Union and a deep desire to win the admiration of Western intellectuals." --Sheila Fitzpatrick, University of Chicago

"Michael David-Fox has brought valuable new light to the USSR's campaign to gain the esteem of distinguished foreign visitors between the two world wars. Using recently opened Soviet archives, he explores the inner debates of the Communist bureaucracy about the uses of 'showcasing' and of modern 'Potemkin villages.' David-Fox also lucidly demonstrates how this propaganda drive affected Soviet domestic policy." --David Caute, author of The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War

"A fascinating work of real historical imagination and enormous erudition. Using the visits of high-profile foreigners to Russia from 1921 to 1941 as a lens, David-Fox explores Russia's attitude toward the 'West' on the ground and in the mind. He tells his story from the perspective of Russia, of 'the West,' and of the space between." --Susan Gross Solomon, Munk School for Global Affairs, University of Toronto

"A nexus of domestic and international histories, this remarkable book treats the relationships between Western left intellectuals and Stalin's elites as a defining episode of the twentieth century. David-Fox leaves no doubt that the Soviet Union--even at the height of Stalinist madness--can be understood only as a part of European, Western history." --Vladislav Zubok, Temple University

Product Details

416 pages; 15 halftones; 6-1/8 x 9-1/4; ISBN13: 978-0-19-979457-7ISBN10: 0-19-979457-X

About the Author(s)