Michael David-FOX. Showcasing the Great Experiment

Michael David-Fox's book offers the first comprehensive analysis of Soviet cultural diplomacy in the interwar period since the opening of previously inaccessible Soviet archives. This work should be considered in the wider context of the current scholarly task: the reconceptualization of Soviet and international history in the new post-Soviet (post-Sovietological) era. However, the topic of the book goes far beyond the disciplinary boundaries of Soviet history. In the end, as David-Fox argues, “inventing Eastern Europe was inseparably dependent upon the reciprocal process of inventing Western Europe” (p. 18). David-Fox's book skillfully combines Soviet and international, political and institutional, and cultural and intellectual histories. Biographical sketches of famous visitors to Stalinist Russia (among them Theodore Dreiser, Romain Rolland, George Bernard Shaw, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Andre Gide, Henri Barbusse, Louis Aragon, Gyorgy Lukacs, and Lion Feuchtwanger) and stories of their visits are interwoven with the book's broad historical narrative, but the author refers to them only when the archives reveal new facets to already well-known stories. The book also examines in detail the role of those whom the author calls “Stalinist Westernizers”: Olga Kameneva, Alexander Arosev, Maxim Gorky, Ilya Ehrenburg, Ivan Maiskii, and Mikhail Koltsov.

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