>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. ^M00:00:05 [ Silence ] ^M00:00:24 >> Thank you for joining us today. For those of you who don't know what the center for the book is, where the section of the library that promotes books reading, libraries and literacy and we do this nationwide not only here in Washington but through our state centers for the book. We have a state center in every state. We even have one in the Virgin Islands and that's how we spread our message across of books and reading. Another thing we do is we play an important role in the national book festival. We invite the authors and we organize the program and I invite you to this year's book festival which is September 22nd and 23rd on the National Mall. Before we get started, I just need to tell you a few things. We're going to be recording today's event for a later webcast, so if you decide to ask a question of the author, you will be part of our webcast. I also need to ask if you could please turn off all your electronic devices. Our webcast are available at Read.gov and we have more than 200 author discussions on the site. You can also read about our programs on Facebook. We're at facebook.com/booksandbeyond. Also, I want to let you know that the author's books are for sale here in the back of the room at a discount and the author will be signing following the presentation here in the front of the room so it's another chance to ask the author any questions you might have about his work. Sometimes people ask us how we determine, how we do these books and beyond since, you know, there are millions and millions of books out there. How do we decide which ones to do and really the major criteria that we have is we want the author's books to be based on collections here at the Library of Congress and that's really the major way we do this. And we're very lucky that a lot of the divisions that we work with and cosponsor these programs would bring us these authors to us for having these events. And today I want to thank our cosponsor, the European Division which is headed by Georgette Dorn. And also with us today is Harry Leich who is a Russian Area Specialist in the division and he's been doing this since 1987, Harry is responsible for collection development, reader service and special projects relating to Russia in the former Soviet Union. So please join me in welcoming Harry Leich. ^M00:02:43 [ Applause ] ^M00:02:48 >> Thank you very much. I'd like to welcome you on behalf of the European Division and I want to make a very brief introduction of Professor Michael David-Fox, the author of the book being presented today. Since fall of last year, he's been associate professor in the Department of History and the Edmond A. Wall School of Foreign Service here at Georgetown University here in town. From 1995 till late 2011, he was at the University of Maryland at College Park. And also with their central European Russian and Eurasian study center. He has a doctorate from Yale University, Department of History also, two Master's Degrees from Yale University. He's published extensively books, articles, he's edited a number of book length collections of essays on Russia and the former Soviet Union and made a very large number of presentations at meetings and conferences. So without further ado, let me introduce Professor David-Fox. ^M00:04:03 [ Applause ] ^M00:04:08 >> Thank you Harry. And it's really a pleasure to present this book here at the Library of Congress because so much of it was researched and written at this library. And as I said in the preface of the book, the strengths of the Library of Congress has holdings both in Russian and Soviet periodicals and books but also in European--on the European side, not to mention the Slavic reference collection of the European reading room, the work conditions and Doctor Leich's wonderful staff at the European reading room made this probably the single best place in the world to work on this particular study. ^M00:04:55 [ Pause ] ^M00:05:02 I want to start with the cover image from my book. This poster was made by the Soviet foreign travel agency "Intourist" shortly after it was created in 1929, this poster dates from the next year 1930 to attract travelers from the Unites States and Britain to the Soviet Union. And in it, you see the images of communism. You see the red flag over the Kremlin, you see the rising sun but this are combined with a reindeer sleigh, a camel with a Muslim prayer tower suggesting both the expense of the Soviet Union and a certain exoticism connected to it in the eyes of Western visitors. So you see them from the far Arctic north to the Central Asia. And so this Soviet poster was appealing both to the political factor in attracting visitors but also through this certain exoticism associated with the east. What the French historian, Francois Furet referred to as the myth of communism. One of the great myths of the twentieth century was incredibly flexible in the sense of that the image that people saw was very different to depending on the eyes of the beholder and for different elements of the evolving Soviet system and the allure of both Russian and Soviet culture could appeal to really a startlingly broad array of foreigners. And in political terms, they included foreign communist, socialist of many stripes, liberals and even some nationalist and factious on the far right of the political spectrum which are not part of my story today but are discussed in a lot of detail in the book and I'd be happy to talk about them if we have time in the questions. But like my point now is that the Soviet cultural diplomacy took great advantage of this broad appeal during its height in the 1920s and 1930s. This is an image of the grandio celebration of the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw on the occasion of his 75th birthday in the same hall of columns in Moscow where the Moscow purged trials took place a half decade later. For me, it's a big--a key problem that Western intellectual sympathy for the Soviet experiment also corresponded to the height of Stalin's political violence in the 1930s and how does one explain this? I found it useful to think both of our push factors driving Western visitors towards the Soviets and of course in this era, the greatest of those push factors were the great depression and the rise of fascism, but also of pull factors. Many of them connected to the unique scale and nature of Soviet cultural diplomacy. The Shaw Jubilee was the first great Soviet celebration of a Western intellectual and I should say that in the Interwar Period, the Soviet focus was above all on visitors from central and Western Europe and the United States. In other words those who are the Soviets considered from countries of the advanced west and in terms of the focus of Soviet cultural diplomacy in this era, these were the countries which the Soviet Union wanted most to influence in terms of influencing public opinion. Now, we've known about in terms of the Shaw Jubilee, we've known for a long time what the influence of this was on Bernard Shaw himself impressed in radio addresses to large audiences on--upon his return home, he repudiated charges of Soviet force labor, lack of democracy, the existence of famine in the Soviet country side. But I would ask you to think about the importance of such events for the Soviets themselves, how did the unique Soviet system set up to receive foreigners and the methods used to convince them influence the rapidly emerging communist system at home? Until the opening of the former Soviet archives after 1991, what we knew about these visits was largely based on the post talk writings of the foreign visitors themselves rather than what they did or said or the records that they left inside the country. ^M00:10:14 The Soviet side of the interaction, we knew something about it but it remained largely a black box and that in particular since is much of what I was able to research in Russian archives addresses that that angle is what I'd like to highlight today. And on the most general level I should say that what I tried to do in this book showcasing the great experiment was to explore this great topic of Russia in the west which is so applicable to other periods of Russian history to focus on it for the earliest Soviet period and for the Stalin--prewar Stalinism using the reception of foreign visitors as a kind of prism. And I set out to capture or restore a certain international dimension to the emergence of the Soviet system that went beyond foreign policy and to treat this episode of foreign visitors who flooded the country and I'll say more about the numbers in a bit but to treat it as a genuinely transnational story to delve into both sides. Now, let me turn for a moment from the international to the domestic, from the external to the internal and continue with this 1928 image. At the center is Maxim Gorky, the writer closely aligned with the Bolsheviks from before the revolution who went into European immigration after the revolution in the early 1920s, after a falling out with Lennon. This photo was snapped just after--shortly after he returned to the USSR to become assume the mantel of one of the chief architects of Stalinism in culture. Now, the smiling fellow in the back there was only slightly less influential although we're not--so much later period, that's Anton Makarenko who with Gorky's patronage which started in earnest also about--just about the time this photograph was taken begun his rise to become the dominant pedagogue of the Stalin period. The children surrounding them are members of Makarenko's Gorky Commune near Kharkov. And Makarenko had already been appointed to run the Dzerzhinsky Commune in 1928, also near Kharcov, one of five so-called Children's Labor Communes that were run by the Soviet Secret Police. Now, why connect Western visitors in the Interwar Period with this group of communards drawn from former juvenile delinquents and homeless waifs? The answer is that this Secret Police Communes especially the Dzerzhinsky Commune and one in the town of Bolshevik just outside of Moscow became perhaps the best known model institutions that showcased this great experiment as it was often called at the time to foreign visitors. And these places are what I call the sites of socialism. And I'm going to argue that this opens up unexplored avenues of investigation, meaning that when we put our attention on this model sites. Specifically, I'm going to make the case that the unprecedented lengths that the Soviets went to win over the outside world had unanticipated consequence--consequences on the internal development of the Soviet System. This is the French communist writer, Henri Barbusse in a Moscow factory with the obligatory leather of trench coat making a speech with a slogan in Russian above him in 1927. Around this time he became the first major western intellectual to have a personal audience with Stalin. He also toured the Bolshevik Secret Police Commune calling it "A little republic inside a big one" and this phrase became somewhat famous inside the USSR and among the communards themselves. What Barbusse meant by this was at the showcases and model institutions displayed to foreign visitors such as this Secret Police Communes or microcosms. They embodied soviet socialism in miniature. Barbusse's Soviet teachers I would argue had found an apt pupil because he was putting his finger on the crux of a new methodology for presenting the sites of socialism to foreigners. The model, it was claimed by guides and translators and all those who showed this sites to foreigners. The model was representative. If not exactly today, then it was representative of what the future would become for heralded what would then be prevalent under socialism. So officials, cultural officials involved in cultural diplomacy, guides and translators called this methodology cultural show. The word for those of you who know Russian is [foreign language]. It's one of this sort of new speak acronyms that was prevalent in the early Soviet period. What you need to realize is that the first influx of non-communist foreigners, starting in the early 1920s, came to a place--places that were racked by devastation, by hunger, by shortages and it's estimated that their up to 7 million homeless waifs in the early 1920s inside the Soviet Union. Many of whom roamed around the urban areas and gangs so first impressions were a real problem for Soviets and there was no way that these conditions could be entirely concealed. Model sites played the most important role in the Soviet reception of foreign visitors and part because they involved a strategy for the reeducation of the foreigners as much as anyone else. Soviet guides, developed methods for teaching the foreign visitors to perceive the kernels of the glorious future in the harsh present. But model building was not all about foreign consumption. Here you see the architectural modernism of the Dzerzhinsky Commune in the 1930s named after the founder of the Soviet Secret Police, the Cheka. Why was Dzerzhinsky who was notorious for carrying out the red terror interested in saving homeless children in the early 1920s. Most of the literature has assumed that these model sites shown to visitors or [foreign language] villagers, facades erected to do dupe naive western intellectuals. But in this case, in the case of--and no others, foreigners did not visit the secret police communes for several years until several years after they were founded. They arose out of an entirely domestic context. During the term to the new economic policy in the early--in 1921, the secret police, the Cheka lost control over almost all the prison camps or concentration camps as they were known. Camps then went to its chief rivals, the commiserates of justice and the interior after those agencies promoted themselves to the party leadership as champions of reeducation which was very strong ethos in Soviet penal policy at the time, and of economic self sufficiency. So by founding these children's communes, the secret police, the Cheka which was renamed the--in the '20s OGPU the communes burnished the secret police's credentials in both those areas. The areas of reeducation and economic self sufficiency because the communes were devoted to rehabilitating seemingly the most difficult cases, homeless children, drug users and juvenile delinquents and teaching them skilled profitable traits. For example, the Dzerzhinsky Commune produced the first Soviet camera, the FED, which closely resembled the German Leica. This is a picture from the Commune and the FED I should say was known--those were the initials of Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Secret Police. So the Secret Police played a large role in the communist from the start. And more broadly, designing models for domestic purposes was a key strategy of Soviet state building after about 1918. The Bolsheviks were revolutionary modernizers with totalizing aspirations of transformation but very scarce resources. ^M00:20:01 So the revolution also sparked a flurry of experimentation and prototypes of all different kinds of merged school, model schools, farms, factories, scientific and medical institutions and so on. It was only later around the mid-1920s that a select handful of these models, I call them showcases were groomed specifically for foreign eyes such as showcase prisons and even then most of these and I would include the Dzerzhinsky and Bolsheviks communes among them, they still played important domestic roles within the Soviet Union. The first foreigner to visit the Bolsheviks commune near Moscow in 1925 turned out to be William Creswick, an enterprising journalist from the US left liberal magazine, The Nation. It's a rather incredible story but the officials in charge of Soviet cultural diplomacy learned to appreciate the communes importance only from the publicity stemming from Creswick's account in The Nation. In 1926 then the Soviet press took up the topic and by the time Gorky arrived in 1928, the Bolshevik commune was becoming a standard part of the itineraries of the most important foreign visitors. So international interest and domestic significance, mutually reinforced one another and the result was that this communes in some ways became more privileged than any elite boarding school in the west. For example, Bolshevik sponsored a youth orchestra and choir led by conservatory musicians. It had tennis courts, an elite sport in the west and according to such foreign luminaries as John Dewey, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, it had a rather fun chef. The party's chief theoretician [inaudible] delivered lectures there. The first Soviet full length sound film, Nikolai X, 1931 masterpiece. In English it's called a road to life, in Russian [foreign language] was a parable about the power of the environment to transform human beings and it was directly based on these communes. The actors went and studied the children and so forth. One thing that stunned the nation's Creswick and other foreign visitors was the lack of guards and walls. A point to which I will return presently but for the first time now after the opening of the archives, we can compare the image of one of these sites of socialism, these showcases as presented to foreign visitors with the internal documentation on the history of the institution from within the Soviet Union and I should say that for both the Soviets and the visitors, the communes had a great ideological resonance. They appeared to confirm the power of the environment to shape the new man. But they're most Bolshevik or Soviet features that is to say productive labor and the making of new proletarians was less important for many non-communist guests and their relevance for social welfare measures and penal reform and other things that influenced non-communist sympathizers. So the narrative about the power of the Soviet environment presented to foreign visitors centered around the trust shown to the communards, the voluntary nature of commune membership and complete self governance by the children themselves. In fact the transformation of these homeless delinquents and inter-future factory directors, skilled crafts people, a number of them became university graduates, was a remarkable achievement that did effectively suggest the power of the environment. It was just that that environment took the form of a potent, illiberal form of group socialization. These communes were developing like many Soviet institutions and party cells and organs of communist discipline in the 1920s, affective techniques of self discipline or you might think about horizontal, mutual, surveillance. Keeping tabs on your neighbor and this was ironic given that the secret police, their organizer was the prime locust for a kind of vertical top-down punishment and surveillance and Soviet society but this other kind of discipline, keeping tabs on your neighbors was developing on the grass roots level of the collective or the kolektive [inaudible] and after [inaudible] canonical writings of the 1930s, the collective came to be considered in the Soviet Union as the basic unit of Soviet Society and [inaudible] because writings themselves were based on the Gorky and Dzerzhinsky communes. Now I mentioned there were no guards or walls at these places. None were needed. What I discovered after some digging was that the children were selected personally by the commune director. They came from prisons and camps and juvenile detention centers with fairly harsh and sometimes very harsh conditions and they were selected as those who were deemed amenable to re-education so that they would, you know, be cooperative and the disciplinary system relied on a kind of elite group placed below the director. The so-called [inaudible] or active cadres and in the end, the threat of expulsion by the group from this new life of rather extraordinary privilege was a very potent spur for the children to alter behavior so in other words it was precisely the exceptionalism of the commune that allowed it to function effectively. [Inaudible] were thrown back into the juvenile prisons and this uniqueness or singularity of these model institutions was precisely the opposite of what Barbusse had called attention to in Soviet cultural diplomacy had claimed that they were microcosms. So the display of sites to visitors was based on the approval of the sites and a certain selectivity there but foreigners were not taken to only a handful of showcases. The archives contained lists of hundreds of approved model sites that were routinely presented by agencies dealing with foreigners. One of the main sources for my own work was the huge archival record left by the Soviet all union society for cultural ties abroad, which was the chief organ of Soviet cultural diplomacy and known by its Russian acronym VOKS and its mission was just sort of take charge of presenting Soviet culture and to deal with those classified as members of the intelligencia. It's such a large collection that it took me 8 trips and two years of work to look through it at least relatively systematically. On the founder of VOKS until 1929, Olga Kameneva was the sister of Trotsky and the wife of [inaudible] bureau member Lev Kamenev. So she was very well-connected to the old Bolshevik leadership in the early years. She was educated in barren so she could act as a sort of polished madam Kameneva to visiting foreigners but she insisted on certain things that shaped the evolution of Soviet cultural diplomacy. The importance of tailoring each visit to the interests, cultural level, professional profile and politic--political outlook of each visitor so it's kind of Leninist flexibility there and she was a major proponent of maintaining close relations with Western intellectuals in the hopes that it would have a positive affect on the Soviet Union itself. Now one thing I found out from the VOKS archive was that VOKS had a constantly changing list of approved sites to which foreigners were taken. In 1930-31, it listed over 300 so-called objects of show, meaning sites and these ranged from kindergartens and top schools to specialized medical and scientific institutions from model collective farms after collectivization to model factories and prisons to workers housing and apartments. I should mention that many of the so-called industrial giants, the great industrial projects or the five-year plan were launched and formulated with the eyes of the outside world in mind and that even Moscow itself came to be showcased as a model city. Virtually, the minute that it began to be reconstructed as such around 1930. So how then did the foreign visitors react when they were inside the country? ^M00:30:01 One of my more--I'd say note worthy findings from reports of VOKS guides and translators and from the unpublished writings of the visitors including when they were inside the country was that the reactions of foreigners to these sites of socialism were decidedly mixed. A remarkably large number its true, that's sort of the received version that many were just completely naive and duped and they were a remarkably large number willing to accept the idea that these model sites were microcosms representative if not of the country today then of socialism tomorrow. But others were skeptical or openly hostile. The French writer Andre Gide who was perhaps the best known french intellectual to become a fellow traveler in the 1930's visited the Bolshevik commune in 1936. This was part of what became a famous tour. He became the most celebrated Soviet sympathizer to publicly repudiate the Stalinist order. And when he get--went to commune, Gide was regaled by the communards about their rebirth as new people. It was a very common trope starting in the early 1930's. But to him it sort of was an unpleasant reminder of religious converts. And in his book he wrote to convey what they were saying to him "I was a sinner, I was unhappy, I did evil but now I understand I am saved, I am happy." Now, the case of Gide illustrates some of my conclusions about the interwar visitors. We're talking about approximately 100,000 foreign writers, artists, intellectuals what you might call political tourists who made this Soviet tour in the interwar years. I hope after my book at least it will no longer be possible to talk about all of them as a single or homogenous group. There were many more critical stances that remained unpublished or in Soviet archives. And that means that far more self censorship took place than previously imagined. But one crucial point about Gide is that he traveled with his own non-Soviet entourage of foreign writers and dissident foreign communist. There was a group of 6 of them some of whom knew the Russian language and Soviet conditions who had been living inside the Soviet Union. And this meant that in his case he was able to avoid the often extensive and long term influence of those Bolshevik intellectuals and diplomats whom I call mediators who often extensively cultivated the most important foreign intellectuals. Gide's experiences on the ground interacted with his intellectual trajectory in an unusual way. He was drawn to communism like for example Malraux or others through the antechamber of anti-colonialism. He had gone through guided tours in Chad and Francophone, Africa. And that had taught him that different--how different things looked when you viewed things as he put it from the window of the Governor's car and what they looked on the ground. And although he was not overly political before the 1930's Gide possessed an unusual form of civic courage and Gide's 1924 dialogue which was called Corydon. He marshaled arguments from a wide array of disciplines to push for the recognition of the naturalness of homosexuality. Gide was according to his biographer Alan Sheridon "The first series made the made first series attempt by a homosexual to defend the practice of homosexuality to the general public." So for Gide he equated the sexual intolerance of Bourgeois Society with political and intellectual and artistic conformity. And this shaped his attraction to the Russian revolution and to communism in the first place. He was gearing up during his visit to complain directly to Stalin about the 1934 Soviet Law criminalizing male homosexuality which he and his circle discussed extensively. And needless to say Stalin who was not known for his tolerance declined to receive him in the middle of his visit when he reached Moscow. So it was at this moment in the middle of his journey that Gide's illusions of influence were dashed and he took the decision to break with the Soviet's. And these illusions of influence were crucial for the leading fellow travelers or friends of the Soviet Union as they were called inside the Soviet Union. So that in this sense Gide's--the Gide case is the exception that proves the rule. Now, I've been talking a lot about cultural diplomacy and just for a minute I want to step back to say a few words about that the history of cultural diplomacy and how the Soviet version fits in. Because I think that just as the Bolshevik Revolution inaugurated new chapters in the history of for example poster art or mass festivals. I would argue that the nature of the new regime and the way that they attempts to influence foreign visitors crystalized in the early 1920's innovated a novel form of cultural diplomacy. Cultural diplomacy emerged in the late 19th century and especially during World War I in parallel with the birth of modern propaganda. As it emerged especially in France and Germany cultural diplomacy was a branch of foreign policy. You can define it as allocating resources within foreign ministries in an attempt to influence foreign public opinion as a tool of foreign policy using the realm of culture including the use of cultural figures, cultural exchanges and so on. But because of the way it emerged from the early 1920's in the Soviet Union when the Soviet Union was isolated internationally and foreigners were already on their own accord flocking there at least sympathizers were the enterprise of Soviet cultural diplomacy featured a uniquely important domestic component involving the reception of foreign visitors that I have been talking about in these presentation the presentation of these model sites of socialism. There's another distinctive feature of the early Soviet Union the Bolshevik's aspire not merely to alter public opinion to change people's views but to transform the world views at least transform those they influence. They did not therefore localize cultural diplomacy as a sub-field or branch of foreign policy. It was taken out of the realm of conventional diplomacy and migrated from having been an auxiliary tool of international relations to an integral part of the drive to build socialism. And this explains the uniquely important domestic component involving the presentation of these model sites. So in theory at least any Soviet citizen who met a foreigner who talked to a foreigner would act as an agent of the new regime. So it attempted to bring all of Soviet's Society into the effort to spread a favorable view of the Soviet Union. And my book argues that this Soviet mobilization of society for this international ideological contest directly pave the way for the cultural Cold War. Now, let me--finally we come to the unanticipated consequences of this whole story for the Soviet's themselves. Gorky whom I began with return to the Soviet Union from his villa in Sorrento, Italy in 1928 and 1929 forging his path with the Stalin Revolution. And as he did so he took a remarkable tour very well publicized and [inaudible] and elsewhere. He went around to these model sites of socialism around the Soviet Union almost as if he were a foreign notable coming from abroad. But he also visited one place where no foreigners were allowed, Solovki in the far north, one of the prison camps that was retained by the Soviet Secret Police. I mentioned that in the turn to the--to NEP in 1921. They were deprived of these camps. They retained the Solovki in the monastery which had been turned into a camp. They retained that throughout the 1920's and Solovki then was became a model of a very different kind. ^M00:40:02 At this conjuncture when Gorky returned in the late '20's it become the prototype for the [inaudible] Gulag. This was where the secret police innovated a new 4 profit model of exploiting forced labor for the industrialization drive. And as the result of this turn during the 5 year plan, Gorky actually arrived in the far north during a catastrophic downturn in camp conditions. He then trumpeted Solovki's humanistic reeducation through labor to the rest of the world as if the forced labor camp at Solovki were the child's labor commune in Bolshevik. And so he added his prestigious voice to an international Soviet Campaign to cover up mounting reports of forced labor, torture, hunger and other atrocities. Incredibly however despite truly horrific conditions at this camp the old Soviet's stress on rehabilitation had preserved a set of cultural institutions at the camp. There was a theater. There was an orchestra. There were prisoner publications. There were relatively uncensored and not coincidentally there was another well appointed secret police commune for homeless children. The extensible purpose of Gorky's visit to Solovki was to transfer children from Solovki to Bolshevik. Here you see Gorky second from the right here the great proletarian writer as he became known sitting off for the island fortress with his secret police entourage. Now it's crucial to realize that Gorky had a grand aesthetical ideological vision of his own. He wasn't just interested in white washing the charges of forced labor. He wanted to go--although that was crucial for his arrangement with Stalin. And when he approved of the camp conditions they fired off a telegram to Stalin saying that Gorky had written these praise in the camps book. But Gorky had gone for additional reasons of his own living abroad in Europe in the 1920's. He had become intimately aware of these new methods of presenting model sites to foreigners as the future reality. Gorky wanted them to inspire a Soviet domestic audience. For him, heroic feats would represent the heroism of the new Soviet man and help create the unity of purpose of a secular religion and that's indeed what Gide had perceived. In other words, Gorky wished to write about Solovki not as it was but as it should be. And to invest the present with what he called in this writings of the time with a higher truth, the truth of the socialist future. This became the crops of his contribution to the emerging Soviet doctrine of socialist realism. In the 1930's, socialist realism become even more than the hegemonic aesthetic doctrine. It encapsulated an entire mode of representing life as it should be not as it was that defined Stalinist ideology as well as Stalin's culture. So what I've tried to establish is that the external and the internal dimensions of this developing Soviet System were linked. A method of cultural diplomacy presenting model sites to foreigners as microcosms of the future had then boomeranged back to influence the core of Stalinism. The children's labor communes and here I'm concluding did not only provide the means for Gorky to establish a kind of official fantasy of rehabilitation of the forced labor--in the forced labor camps of the gulag and this notion that they were involved in humane rehabilitation remain the official orthodoxy until [inaudible] emptied the camps starting in 1955. But it's also true that the healthy well feed children of the Ukrainian secret police communes the ones near [inaudible] were on display to selected visitors during the astoundingly successful cover up of Stalin's terror famine of 1932-33 which hit Ukraine the hardest and left historians now say at minimum 3 to 4 million people dead. Here you see George Bernard Shaw again the Fabian grand old man of socialism. Here on the left second from the left in an outdoor banquet in 1931 after his tour of the Bolshevik commune. Shaw ridiculed notions of hunger and shortages wittily boasting that the Soviets had become "Sound Fabians and are on the way to becoming complete Shavians." So to conclude the example of Gorky redirecting methods of cultural show to develop socialist realism is an example of what I call boomerangs. International initiatives that came back to influence the Soviets at home with unexpected consequences. In this case, the results could not have been more consequential. And so I would argue and this is particular to the field of Soviet history that the founding 2 generations of Soviet historians constructed basically internalist grand narratives of the development of the Soviet system. And I hope that my book will contribute to the conclusion that much is to be gained by reinserting the international dimension into an analysis of the evolution of the Soviet system, thank you. ^M00:46:16 [ Applause ] ^M00:46:23 >> You have time for questions? >> Yes. >> Okay, we have time for a few questions. >> I thank you, that was a wonderful topic. But I was I wondering if you could speak a bit more to the so called exceptionalism [inaudible] specifically was this exceptionalism [inaudible] that consciously kept secret from the doctrine visitors or is something that perhaps wasn't interpreted as such by the [inaudible]. >> I think that, you know, there were a numerous--there were numerous strategies and especially in the beginning in the mid 20's they weren't as centralized as they later became. They later published starting in--with their advent of Stalinism which really represents a more kind of controlled cultural system. They really started publishing books on how to present these sites. But my impression is that they did not focus attention on their exceptionality. In fact they stressed that the opposite that they were microcosms. Yet if someone challenged them and said look, you know, I've seen other places and these places have much better conditions or they would raise questions about it. They would say, "Yes, these are what the future will look like." And that was the crux of conflating the future with the present which I think is a key move in Soviet culture and ideology because they didn't--that was a realistic argument. You could, you know, potentially, you know, be well informed about the fact that these are not representative but still subscribe to the belief that in the future the Soviet State had committed or produced these sites and would produce more in the future. So there's a big difference between long term visitors and short term visitors. I think people like Shaw who came in and out in a few weeks were more willing to just take it on face value and say, these are, you know, he basically said the entire Soviet Penal System has no walls or guards. And, you know, which was, you know, complete misunderstanding. But--but those who were there, they were foreign residents for much longer periods. They had to marshall other arguments and the argument about the long term future became crucial for the whole enterprise. Other questions? Yes please. >> Well, why did the [inaudible] history important today than [inaudible]? >> Why is it important today, well-- >> [Inaudible] correction, Lion Feuchtwanger 1937 was in Soviet Union. >> Yes, Feuchtwanger was--is a key figure in my book and I have a whole section on his visit. In fact he was brought in, in response to Gide's visit of '36. And it was a rather--you know, he had for him Feuchtwanger anti fascism trumped every other consideration. So he actually attended the Moscow trials and wrote a very curious book Moscow 1937 which contained some of the same reservations that Gide had had but ultimately in the end he decided the Soviet fight against fascism was more important to him. And he basically endorsed, you know, did what he was expected to do. And that the visit was extensively prepared in that respect. So he was one of the most high profile visitors. And--but I would say why--you know, why is this--I often get this question from people inside Russia. ^M00:50:02 First of all, I think that academic fields don't have borders necessarily. There's an international group of scholars working on Soviet history from many countries that have tradition of Russian studies. We have a great one here and they work reading one another's books. My book is going to be translated into Russian so hopefully it will have an impact there. But the other reason I would say is that this cultural diplomacy, the Soviet innovation of mobilizing not just--not just using diplomacy in the conventional sense but mobilizing opinion at home, mobilizing intellectuals at home for a great ideological contest abroad. This was picked up by the United States starting in the late 1940's and they were--United States was a late comer to cultural diplomacy. The division of cultural and educational affairs was founded only in 1928. And when the Cold War stated there was a great alarm that the Soviet Union had which had done so much more in this area and there was attempt to, you know, counter Soviet efforts. And so that's how the Cold War connection comes in and I have an epilogue tracing this evolution, how it sort of the interwar experience and the way it was apprehended both by American politicians and by ex-communist intellectuals who became influential in the '40's, you know, set the stage for the cultural Cold War. >> How long do this children's commune last especially in [inaudible] propaganda? >> Thank you for asking that, I didn't get a chance to talk about the end. But it was really the great purges because some of the secret police patrons, Yagoda and Grabinski and other lesser known figures were purged as a result of the so called [foreign language] became the key figure in the Soviet Secret Police. You know, the--and so these figures have been so closely connected to the communes that the communes were shut down and at this point the number of foreign visitors in '37 because of the terror comes to a trickle and is interrupted of course by the war. So there's a real hiatus and difference between what emerges during and after the war. Although I would argue that the legacy of the interwar period played a big role. But in terms of this--this communes specifically they were turned for example into, you know, they turned them into factories and, you know, the Dzerzhinsky, one continued--made cameras. The one in Bolshevik was a sporting goods factory but they were abolished as communes. But what's interesting is that the graduates had become so important in Soviet society that they kept the memory alive even though it was taboo topic and when Communism collapse in '91they came out with all these documents that they had preserved. And I actually--that's how I was I was able to research this history of those communes because of those people had preserved. They had alumni meetings which were kind of quasi, you know, prohibited. And they kept the--the memory of it alive but so that's a very interesting story. >> Yes sir. >> As reminded of [inaudible] meeting with Robert Frost [inaudible] I was wondering what extent was the--[inaudible] was Soviet government successful in getting dissidents to produce this narrative [inaudible]. >> Well, I think that you really had, you know, in the 20's especially. You didn't really have so much dissidents because there was a greater--one thing there was an immigration and even deportation of intellectuals were considered incompatible. But there was, you know, not a certain rigid--certain rigid form of Sovietization had not yet occurred. But what I think is interesting is that the Soviet's realized that their own intelligence here was a great asset and started to involve them in cultural diplomacy. So when people like Theodore Dreiser the American writer visited in 1927 he met Stanislavski, the theater director. He met top communist officials like--intellectuals like Buharan. He met all sorts of the sort of creme de la creme of the Soviet cultural lead and Eisenstein the film maker. So it made a great impression on him and the fact that they were starting in the late 20's the Soviet's put a great deal of pressure on Soviet intellectuals to play a role here. And this affects certain figures who are not sort of orthodox party members by any means like Pasternak and Babel who are, you know, involved in the writers union commission for meeting foreigners. So I think that, you know, on the one hand the Soviet Union was quite successful in applying pressure but also mobilizing its own intellectuals for this. On the other hand there's a whole story that I really could not even hint out here is what Soviets got unofficially from these interactions. And I would argue that they played their official roles. They had a lot of pressure on them to do so. But it also was a very meaningful interaction for them as well as for them Western intellectuals. And this played a role I think, you know, some of these things had to go underground a bit under the Stalin period but they reemerged again with the [inaudible] as, you know, [inaudible] children really shows in the beginning of it very eloquently. Yes? >> Here we have evidence in 1938 that there was--I guess they call it an auto factory outside of Moscow where children were locked for the summer or maybe for a longer periods of time, and they were playing and they were in other words the children were sent there and it looked to me as though inside in a house rule is what you're talking about. Did they--they took some of these camps and others. We were made to believe that these children were children of the workers at the auto factory. So the big complex then, these guests were brought in and they stayed there for [inaudible]. >> Well, what I would say is that when foreigners were brought in in that period, as I said they weren't necessarily--they showcases or, you know, set up specifically for foreigners which is what the notion of [inaudible] villages suggested. It was just a facade but to be presentable to foreigners would probably be have to be a precondition for bringing delegations of foreigners there. The way the Soviets system worked was that the economic system, the factories had attached to them all the welfare institutions like Sanatoria Camps so on. And so it's not unrealistic to think that an auto factory would have its own, you know, institutions like that. And, you know, Katrina Kelly has written this monumental book called Children's World which is a history of childhood and children's institutions in the Soviet Union. What I took away from that book was really the remarkable variety of children's homes and schools. A lot of it depended on the local people and the local directors. But conditions varied so they were not all, you know, they varied wildly and some were pretty good and some were horrendous. It's fair to say that all well such institutions outside the capitals were fairly strapped for resources. And therefore, you know, economically it was very, very difficult in the 20's and 30's. But Kelly really shows that there was a variation. >> What archives did you use over there and difficult to access? >> Well, I started off with the VOKS fund which is in the state archive of the Russian Federation. And that is a fairly and I call model archive. It's working for foreigners that it's open. I was working there before and I--they had posted a list of declassified collections. And that's where I saw that the VOKS secret the secret part of the VOKS collection which every major collection had a secret part that was shown not to all but the very few people that it was being declassified in the late 1990's. So that's actually where I started to work with because you had interesting Soviet documents can very bureaucratic and dull. And these had notes from foreigners, interactions on a--you know, personal letters. It was a different kind of documentation and I started working with that. But as I moved expanded and start to look at the range of institutions that were connected to the reception of foreign visitors the union of writer's foreign commission was extremely important in 1930's that's in another archive the [inaudible], the cultural archive. There's the trade unions were instrumental in visits by workers delegations, you know, every May 1st and Revolution Day this worker's delegations that were brought in and they were important aspect of cultural diplomacy and there was a foreign or external commission there. ^M01:00:12 And, you know, I worked in the party archive with the Stalin collection which had just been declassified. And I worked in the archive of the--in the part former party archive is the collection of the common term which was very important in all of these. But the most difficult archive all of those archives were, you know, they presented certain challenges but were remarkably accessible for most of the period that I worked in. The one that's really not easy to work in is the ministry of the foreign policy archive which belongs not to the Russian archival systems [foreign language] but belongs to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And it much harder to get in there, I was very fortunate to get a lot of good material there hut they certainly cut me off at a certain point. So that's why I would say studies of Soviet really good studies of Soviet Foreign Policy are more difficult to write because those according to the Foreign Ministry it affects the prestige of the Russian state even though it was a different regime. And they keep more of a tight lid on Foreign Policy documents. KGB archives are in the time that worked not accessible but in the 90's a number of published documents and documentary collections came out which were very helpful because the Secret Police as you can see played a big role in this whole story. But that I would say is the biggest lacuna that's left in our study of Soviet history if someday those documents become accessible there will be many more books to be written, so. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you very much. [Applause] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. 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