American visitors to USSR, 1930s, 40s and 50s

[Brewer, Michael]

Alina,

I think the texts by Americans may still be valuable.  Many of these people
lived in Soviet Russia for many years and certainly got to know Soviet
citizens well enough to get some sense of how they were perceived by them.


Another strategy would be to collect a list of some of the Americans that
spent time in Soviet Russia during these times (there look to be a couple
good dissertations on this "Angels in Stalin's paradise : Western reporters
in Soviet Russia" could be good for a list of correspondents and "American
radicals and Soviet Russia, 1917-1940" or "American observers in the Soviet
Union : 1917-1933" for others).  You could then peruse autobiographical
works by Soviet figures that may have come in contact with them (or that you
found did come into contact with them from reading the works by Americans
who lived there).  I remember running across some less than complementary
perceptions of our now Librarian of Congress James Billington in researching
Varlam Shalamov and Nadezhda Mandel'shtam (who met him in Mandel'shtam's
"kitchen"). Unfortunately, Soviet books are not well known for their
indexes, but newer editions or translations of these works might have them
and help speed up the process.

I would think that you would find quite a bit in autobiographical works by
writers (Pasternak, Erenburg, Paustovskii, Kataev?), film or theater
directors, scientists or historians (Likhachev comes to mind) or engineers,
etc.  Most of these would probably have been published in 1960s or later (so
their perceptions may have been altered by time), but I think they could
still be valuable

Anyway, I'm not sure this is a complete dead end.

mb

Michael Brewer
German & Slavic Studies and Media Arts Librarian
University of Arizona Library, A210
1510 E. University
P.O. Box 210055
Tucson, AZ 85721-0055
Fax 520.621.9733
Voice 520.621.9919
brewerm at u.library.arizona.edu


-----Original Message-----
From: Alina Israeli [mailto:aisrael at AMERICAN.EDU]
Sent: Friday, March 12, 2004 2:25 PM
To: SEELANGS at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] American visitors to USSR, 1930s, 40s and 50s

>If you just peruse Worldcat (or your own library catalog) for the subject
>heading
>
>Soviet Union Description and Travel
>

But that's not what Susan's student wants (see below). She wants to know
how the Soviets reacted to Americans who came to visit during Stalin's time
(of all times!). I doubt such info exists, unless someone wrote a memoir
after the fact acknowledging clandestine meetings with Americans when such
meetings were deadly.

There were two groups of Americans that came to the S.U. during those
years: left-leaning immigrants, mostly Jews, occasionally by-racial couples
who had a hard time of it in the US (and boy did they get stuck in the SU,
I knew at least three such families), and the second group were American
communists who were coming to get instructions from the HQ. I forget the
name of the head Communist and his common law wife, who came on one such
visit with their son, jovially put him up in the "detskij dom" (orphanage)
- communists' paradise in their estimation - and went about their communist
business. When the time came to leave SU to go back home they were told
that they could not take their son since he spoke Russian, so they left him
there for good. I believe his new Russian name was Tixomirov, and he became
a scientist. Then of course there were some performers, Paul Robeson, for
ex., a frequent visitor to the" land of freedom".

Considering that Soviet citizens interested in self-preservation should
have done their utmost not to meet foreigners, it's not very likely that
they committed to paper information that could cause their destruction.


>>Hello,
>>A student of mind would like to write about Soviet citizens' impressions
of
>>American visitors to the Soviet Union in the 30s, 40s and 50s.  Could any
>>of you recommend some memoirs or other texts that she could use?
>>Thank you very much.
>>Susan Kresin


__________________________
 Alina Israeli
 LFS, American University
 4400 Mass. Ave., NW
 Washington, DC 20016

 phone:    (202) 885-2387
 fax:      (202) 885-1076

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
                    http://seelangs.home.comcast.net/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
                    http://seelangs.home.comcast.net/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------