Stalinist Cosmopolitanism

It has long been common practice to see Western metropolises like Paris and New York as competing centers of global modernism, as capitals in the “world republic of letters.” Katerina Clark’s magisterial Moscow, the Fourth Rome presents an alternate mapping of world culture, with the Soviet Union emerging as another potential center, one beyond capitalist bounds. This is a formidable task, given Clark’s focus on the 1930s rather than the 1920s. Few would dispute Bolshevik claims to worldliness in the earlier decade—the topic of her 1995 Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution—which witnessed the heyday of the Soviet avant-garde and Third International. Not so with the 1930s, typically regarded as a time of terror and retreat—with avant-gardism giving way to socialist realism, and with dreams of international revolution overshadowed by Stalinist realpolitik. By this dominant account, the 1930s marked Moscow’s abandonment of worldly, utopian aspirations—its turn inward in the name of “socialism in one country” amid heightening Russian nationalism.

Clark does not dispute that the 1930s marked various disillusioning retreats. Rather, her project is to “integrate a rather neglected international dimension into the overall interpretation of Stalinism” (6)—in short, to draw connections between Stalinist culture and the rest of the world, particularly Western Europe. One goal here, of course, is to correct the historical record—to counter the simplified view of Stalinist culture as merely autarkic and totalitarian. Clark shows that, as the Kremlin abandoned avant-garde iconoclasm and centralized state power, Moscow remained “a center for a transnational intellectual milieu” (25). Socialist realism and Stalinist architecture emerged not simply from official decrees, but from cultural currents circulating across East and West. I specify some of these currents below, but Clark’s connection between Moscow of the ’30s and the competing cultural centers of Paris and Berlin undergirds the broader, more provocative takeaway from this study: that lurking in current discourses of transnationalism and cosmopolitanism is a largely forgotten Soviet legacy—tucked away in the now underused, Comintern-inflected internationalism. Ultimately, this is a book not just about the Stalinist ’30s, but an effort to bring the Soviet Union back into models of our globalized, post-Soviet world.

Clark goes about this task partly by following the travels and trajectories of four Soviet intellectual adventurers—filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and writers Ilya Erenberg, Mikhail Koltsov, and Sergei Tretiakov. Clark calls these figures “cosmopolitan patriots,” who pushed for engagement with non-Soviet culture even as they remained committed to the Soviet state. Throughout the book, Clark resolves this seeming contradiction by emphasizing the ambiguity of cosmopolitanism—the fact that one could be “driven by a desire to interact with the cultures and intellectuals of the outside world” (5) but do so from the vantage of a particular nation. For instance, she shows Tretiakov—the futurist writer who advocated the journalistic writing technique known as the literature of fact—in 1930 Berlin, where he was sent by an official organization to assist with propaganda efforts. However, he also used the opportunity to acquaint himself with members of the German leftist avant-garde—many of whom (most prominently Bertolt Brecht) he later hosted in Moscow. A more unexpected example of cosmopolitan patriotism comes in the form of Eisenstein’s exoticist embrace of Chinese writing, which in 1935 he described as “a unique model for how, through emotional images filled with proletarian wisdom and humanity, the great ideas of our great land must be poured into the hearts and emotions of the millions of nations speaking different languages” (201). That is, Eisenstein saw Chinese as a formula for the advancement of Soviet cultural hegemony, and Clark describes how he arrived at this view in part by attending Chinese actor Mei Lanfang’s 1935 performances and lectures in Moscow—which also occasioned Brecht’s “first published formulation of his theory of alienation” (192)—as well as by his exposure to Lucien Lévy-Brühl’s La...