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Showcasing the Great Experiment - Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921-1941 (Paperback)
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Showcasing the Great Experiment - Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921-1941 (Paperback)
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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.
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