Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941 by Michael David-Fox (review)

The “pilgrimage” of interwar travellers to the Soviet Union is a notorious phenomenon in the political and intellectual history of the 20th century. Until recently, the historiography in the field has been dominated by books researched during the Cold War, including works by Sylvia Margulies, David Caute, and particularly Paul Hollander’s Political Pilgrims (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981) which appeared in its fourth edition in 1998. Michael David-Fox is one among a number of scholars, including David C. Engerman and Ludmila Stern, who in recent years have been using Soviet sources to revisit the experiences of Westerners in the Soviet Union. Showcasing the Great Experiment, based on extensive mining of the massive archive of the All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad (voks), provides a nuanced portrait of visits to the Soviet Union but, further, explores these visits in the context of a larger web of cultural relations between the USSR and the West – a web that exerted influence in both directions.

Many ideas in the West about Russia and Russian ideas about the West predated the 1917 revolution but persisted in the Soviet period with new complexities. To some Westerners, Russians were a backward race, a primitive and exotic “other.” Bolsheviks could, in this view, be seen as heroic, intellectuals pulling the Soviet Union unwillingly into modernity. Quirks of the “Russian soul” could be offered as explication for the brutality and repression of the regime. To the Soviets, the attraction of the industrial modernity associated with the West was great but this attraction was balanced against xenophobia, class-based suspicions about bourgeois intellectuals, and fears of capitalist aggression. In the Soviet era, a novel twist on traditional Russian attitudes towards the West was the idea that Soviet communism would not merely “catch up” to the West, but surpass it. Under Stalin, great pains were taken to have foreign visitors confirm that this superiority had, in fact, been achieved.

Judgements about superiority and inferiority – made both by and about foreigners in the Soviet Union – recur frequently in Showcasing the Great Experiment. David-Fox claims that his “approach throughout has been to detect, trace, and interrogate the expressions of superiority and inferiority that were at the heart of the interwar pilgrimage.” (25) Fortunately, the book does much more than this. The “superiority/inferiority” trope is certainly a relevant one – whether David-Fox is writing about the peculiar appeal of the Soviet Union to a number of Germans on the far right (an extraordinary relationship that is the focus of much of a chapter) or to British Fabians or to Paul Robeson – but the nature and motivations of the sentiments are so various as to make it a weak organizing principle to tie a wide-ranging book together. The range and specificity of Showcasing the Great Experiment is its major strength; David-Fox conscientiously avoids sweeping generalizations (contra, for example, Hollander’s thesis about “utopia-seeking” intellectuals alienated from their own society) and roots each of his examples and cases in rich historical context both inside and outside the Soviet Union.

One of David-Fox’s contributions is his analysis of voks and its officials. Created in 1925, largely through the efforts of Olga Kameneva, Leon Trotsky’s sister, voks became “at best a modest, mid-level force in power-political terms within the party state.” (41) Nevertheless David-Fox’s close study reveals much about the politics and inner workings of the Soviet bureaucracy. voks’ intersection and interactions with other agencies included a strained and occasionally hostile relationship with Intourist, the profit-oriented Soviet tourist company; a separate spheres arrangement with branches of the Comintern (voks focused principally upon notable non-Communist Party cultural and scientific figures, the Comintern on Party members and the working class); and a constant dialogue with the secret police. Because of the nature of voks’ work, key figures in the organization such...