Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921-1941

· Oxford University Press
eBook
448
Halaman
Memenuhi syarat
Rating dan ulasan tidak diverifikasi  Pelajari Lebih Lanjut

Tentang eBook ini

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, André 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.

Tentang pengarang

Michael David-Fox is Professor in the Department of History and School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He is the author of Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918-1929 and a founding editor of Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History.

Beri rating eBook ini

Sampaikan pendapat Anda.

Informasi bacaan

Smartphone dan tablet
Instal aplikasi Google Play Buku untuk Android dan iPad/iPhone. Aplikasi akan disinkronkan secara otomatis dengan akun Anda dan dapat diakses secara online maupun offline di mana saja.
Laptop dan komputer
Anda dapat mendengarkan buku audio yang dibeli di Google Play menggunakan browser web komputer.
eReader dan perangkat lainnya
Untuk membaca di perangkat e-ink seperti Kobo eReaders, Anda perlu mendownload file dan mentransfernya ke perangkat Anda. Ikuti petunjuk Pusat bantuan yang mendetail untuk mentransfer file ke eReaders yang didukung.