About a question mark
Was it Sidney Webb?—?co-founder of the London School of Economics, animator of the Fabian Society and one of the founding thinkers of the Labor Party?—?who removed the question mark from the 1941 second edition of his book on the USSR (written with wife Beatrice) Soviet Communism: A new civilization? (1935, Italian edition of Einaudi of 1950). In other words, the question is closed: Soviet Russia is a new civilization.
We are in the middle of the Stalin era, with the Moscow trials, the mass deportations in continuity with the extermination of the kulaks of the years 1929-1933. A recent study by Sergej Kropacev and Evgenij Krinko, The decline in population in the USSR from 1937 to 1945: entities, forms, historiography (Italian translation by Francesca Volpi, goWare publisher) reaches the following conclusions: from 1929 to 1953, excluding the years of war, the victims of the repressions were 19,5-22 million, of which no less than a third were sentenced to be shot or died in concentration camps and in exile.
It will be as Gramsci says that "every revolutionary movement is romantic, by definition", it will be due to the crisis of the liberal democracies after World War I, or to the defeat of the reformist parties, the fact is that an important part of the Western intelligentsia, of which Webb were an excellence, ended up succumbing to the myth of Soviet Russia.
The shining image of the USSR and the Soviet myth have nourished entire generations in every place on the planet. Among the few photos that George Bernard Shaw, the greatest public intellectual of his time, kept on the fireplace of his home was a portrait of Stalin and to his left that of Lenin. Fintan O'Toole, author of Judging Shaw, told the story of the crush on Stalin of the Irish intellectual who had made skepticism the foundation of his worldview . The New York newspaper, unlike the Russian press and the Kremlin, gave ample space to this anniversary by setting up, in the op-ed area of the newspaper, a special space entitled "Red Century" where dozens of essays were welcomed and contributions from scholars and specialists in Russian history and politics.
Back to a fundamental study
Here too, a book by Marcello Flores, The Image of Soviet Russia, is finally available to the general public of history and politics enthusiasts. The West and the USSR of Lenin and Stalin (1917–1956), p. 550, 18,99 euros (ebook 9,99), goWare publisher. It is a unique and irreplaceable book, the result of a long process that analyses, through vast documentation, how Western eyes have measured themselves with the reality of Soviet Russia under Lenin and Stalin.
The reason for this new publication of The Image of Soviet Russia, on the other hand, lies precisely in the fact that there have been very few contributions on this subject, which makes it still useful to re-propose it on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the Russian revolution. Studies on the Russian revolution, on the Soviet Union, on Lenin and Stalin, have made giant strides in the last quarter of a century, i.e. since the final crisis of communism and the collapse of the USSR: historiography has been completely renewed , the accessible documentation has multiplied in an impressive way, the testimonies have been repeated and a large part of the production hidden and censored in the years of communism has been made available.
On the other hand, the discourse regarding the Western gaze on the USSR, on the revolution, on its immediate and long-term outcomes is different, which has remained a largely unexplored topic, if we exclude some splendid but isolated contributions (Sophie Coeuré, La grande lueur à l'Est: Les Français et l'Union sovietique, Seuil, Paris, 1999; Sophie Coeuré and Rachel Mazuy, Cousu de fil rouge. Voyages des intellectuels français en Unione Sovietiques, CNRS, Paris, 2012; Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Ex-periment.Cultural Diplomacy & Western Visitors to the Soviet Union 1921–1941, Oxford University Press, New York, 2012). Fortunately, the book Marcello Flores is back, of which we offer you the introduction.
A long-lasting myth… his?despite
of the USSR, interest in this country was very limited. In about ten years it became the object of almost daily attention from the mass media, and the dynamism Gorbachev impressed on Soviet history had completely reversed the stagnation of the Brezhnevian era.
This work is the result of a long-term research, initially aimed at examining the American image of the USSR in the years of the first five-year plan, and then extended to the broader theme of the attitude of the West towards the Russia of Lenin and of Stalin. Indeed, it was in the approximately thirty years dominated by the figure of the Georgian dictator that the myth of the USSR was created in the West which, having reached its peak in the mid-1956s, found its final moment after ups and downs in XNUMX. Obviously, it did not completely disappear, and the fascination that the space exploits of Sputnik and Jurij Gagarin exerted throughout the world proved it beyond any doubt.
However, it was a myth that had now taken the downward slope, that had exhausted its resources and was incapable of renewing itself. Although partly linked to the myth of October, which spread in the West almost simultaneously with the news of the Russian revolution, the myth of Lenin's and Stalin's Russia was a new fact: for the characters it assumed but also for the dimension, the diffusion, the social groups it involved.
A bipartisan myth
As will be clear from the outset, the countries of the democratic West, France, England and the United States were privileged. The liberal political system that managed to survive in the interwar years in these countries allowed all political tendencies?—?from revolutionary to reactionary, from radical to conservative?—?to measure themselves against the experience of the USSR without being suffocated, conditioned only by themselves and by the historical events of the period.
Democracy, of course, also survived elsewhere, but these were the countries whose cultural and political influence was greatest, in which the continuity and contiguity with which the problem of the USSR was experienced was most evident, whose judgment and attitude Soviet Union cared more.
An attempt was made to give space, as far as possible, also to Italy and Germany, in the awareness that the fascist experience of these countries was not comparable to that of democracies. The interest with which Mussolini's regime looked at the USSR, especially in its more left-wing fringes, is reflected in the attitude of the industrial world and in the variety and quantity of Italian travelers in the USSR.
As for Germany, it is above all in the first decade following the October Revolution that the German political and cultural world grappled with the history and reality of the Soviet Union, as evidenced by dozens of travel stories that are written after the Nazi victory , much rarer. The role of the USSR in welcoming a large colony of anti-Nazi German refugees has been mentioned, but it evidently constituted a different problem from the one at the heart of this research.
An overall fresco
The material on which my reconstruction is based could have been used in a more analytical and detailed way. I am the first to be aware that each chapter of the book, and sometimes each paragraph, would have deserved to be the subject of independent research, as indeed has happened in some cases.
However, the possibility of offering a synthetic, and therefore necessarily more incomplete, picture seemed to me to be a more interesting choice. As for not having made use of oral sources, the reasons are simple: the lack of familiarity I have with this important branch of historiography and with the methodological skills it provides in the first place; but also the difficulty of tracing them, the ambiguity of a revisited story, the disappearance of most of the protagonists of the book.
I therefore preferred to use homogeneous sources, focusing my attention on the effective changes that, publicly and historically, the image of the USSR has undergone over the space of about forty years. The attention for personal stories and for the psychology of individuals has therefore been directed to this priority interest.
I regret, of course, that I have not been able to use all the material collected, or with the breadth it deserved, especially when dealing with first-hand testimonies such as those of travellers. Also in this case the choice of an overall fresco went to the detriment of the valorisation of very rich and unfortunately often forgotten and underestimated sources. Those characters who for the reader will be nothing more than a name in the bibliography have been a very useful source of knowledge, reflection and comparison for me.
It will be evident that some witnesses are closer to me than others in terms of orientation, sensitivity, the judgment they express. These are different and sometimes opposite characters, not always attributable to a single political or cultural figure. Sympathy for them did not prevent me from also using the others, equally rich in information and suggestions, without flattening them into clichés prepackaged by today's historiography or by the judgments of the time. All the characters you meet in the course of the book have been a vehicle for questions, answers, needs, real attitudes for me. In more than one case, after all, my way of evaluating, judging, valuing and contextualizing the individual characters has changed radically in the course of my research. I therefore hope that the reader, even if he does not come to share my arguments, will be able to find in the material that I have collected sufficient substance to support his beliefs, and perhaps to call them into question.
History, an infinite puzzle
Never as in this case have I convinced myself that history is a sort of infinite puzzle, which contains in itself multiple possibilities, all partial and incomplete. The historian's goal is then to offer a point of view that is as spherical, global and coherent as possible, putting today's needs, questions and sensibilities in harmony with the complex reality of the era studied. The continuous reference to the context of that time is not a way to avoid judgments or not to take a stand, is it an attempt?—?necessary and indispensable?—?to guarantee oneself from flattening experiences that have ended and that have had of its own and unrepeatable modalities.
In this specific case, my goal was to show the breadth, depth, articulation and contradictions of the relationship between the West and the Soviet Union. The privileged filter was that of the intelligentsia, of the world of culture, undoubtedly one of the most important vehicles in amplifying perception and transmitting the image of the USSR. Writers, journalists, artists thus represent a privileged source, alongside engineers, doctors, technicians, diplomats and politicians. For this reason I have chosen to give maximum space to direct narration, making extensive use?—?for some, perhaps excessive?—?of quotations.
It was not a way to hide behind the sources, given that the selection and choice of the context in which to place them were more than sufficient to safeguard my subjectivity as a historian. Instead, it was a tiring, long, sometimes difficult job because I had to cancel, halve, forget texts whose interest grew over time. I hope that sense of the tragic and the gross, the desperate and the naïve, the cynical and perspicacious that belonged to the climate of the time has remained. Without ever claiming to let the sources and characters speak for themselves, I have tried to limit my intervention to choice, connections, selection, contextualization. The absolute protagonist of my reconstruction is not an interpretation, but a reality; a world that found in its relationship with the USSR a reflection bright and significant enough to be worth examining.
Marcello Flores taught Contemporary History, Comparative History and History of Human Rights at the Universities of Trieste (1975–1992) and Siena (1994–2016), was cultural attaché at the Warsaw Embassy (1992–1994) and is, currently, scientific director of the Ferruccio Parri National Institute in Milan.
