Enemy Number One: The United States of America in Soviet Ideology and Propaganda, 1945–1959 by Magnúsdóttir Rósa (review)

Abstract

SEER, 98, 2, APRIL 2020 384 was not a genocide by the UN Convention, because no evidence shows Soviet leaders’ intent to eliminate the Kazakhs as an ethnic group. She does assert that the famine matches Lemkin’s definition. Yet Lemkin’s concept included the destruction of the national identity of the victims (Lemkin, pp. 79–94). Cameron argues that Soviet policies supported the development of Kazakh national identity: going ‘to extraordinary lengths’ to make the Kazakhs a nation, with Kazakh participation (pp. 11–12), and as a result nationality became central to Kazakh identity (pp. 170–72). The regime did stop Kazakh nomadism but aimed to replace it with large US-style ranches and other aspects of Chicago’s meat-packing industry (p. 98). In addition, Cameron documents small-scale revivals of nomadism in the following decades and persistence of traditional social relations in Kazakh kolkhozy. These events were the opposite of Lemkin’s concept of genocide, yet Cameron omits them in her discussion. Cameron also documents that Soviet officials helped famine victims: sending medical personnel to inoculate some 200,000 Kazakhs during the epidemics in 1933 (p. 166), sending personnel to the steppe to rescue abandoned children and place them in orphanages (pp. 155, 169), and other actions. While these measures were belated and insufficient, they need to be understood in the context of a famine that affected most of the USSR, towns as well as villages. State food supplies were stretched thin; they dropped whole urban groups from the rationing system. The state provided relief, albeit similarly inadequate, to many rural areas. She quotes officials who admitted that they could have saved more people (p. 163), but she also shows that many officials reversed policies and attempted to save lives. The fact that the famine ended in 1934 partly as a result of officials’ ‘new attention’ to the crisis during 1933 (pp. 164–67) suggests that Cameron’s description of the regime’s ‘lack of intent’ to kill Kazakhs is an understatement. Despite these issues, The Hungry Steppe presents a detailed and illuminating history of rural Kazakhs in a long period of crisis based on a wide array of revealing Soviet and Kazakh sources. Department of History Mark B. Tauger West Virginia University Magnúsdóttir, Rósa. Enemy Number One: The United States of America in Soviet Ideology and Propaganda, 1945–1959. Oxford University Press, OxfordandNewYork,2019.xi+240pp.Illustrations.Notes.Bibliography. Index. £47.99. Inthisshortbook,RósaMagnúsdóttir,associateprofessoratAarhusUniversity, shows in detail how the ‘Soviet authorities attempted to control, contain, and REVIEWS 385 appropriate images of the United States’ (p. 2), but eventually failed in their ‘chaotic and ineffective propaganda mission’ (p. 12) during the Stalin and Khrushchev eras. In the first part (‘Stalin’s Script for Anti-Americanism’), Magnúsdóttir describes the anti-American propaganda campaigns mounted after the war, as part of the larger anti-cosmopolitan campaign and the anti-intellectual campaigns that dominated the Soviet Union in the last years of Stalin’s rule. Magnúsdóttir depicts how the Soviet authorities tried to monitor American sources of information, such as the journal Amerika or radio station Voice of America, or to limit cultural encounters organized by VOKS (the Soviet AllUnion Society of Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries) and Intourist (the state joint-stock company for foreign tourism). She rightfully concludes that these attempts to limit interest in the United States actually backfired, doing more harm than good to the Soviet Union. The second part of the book (‘Khrushchev and the Discourse of Peaceful Coexistence’) deals with the evolution of the Soviet approach and message on America after Stalin’s death. The most important changes were renewed cultural exchanges and foreign tourism that began in 1955. Magnúsdóttir describes in detail the visit to the US of a delegation headed by Boris Polevoi, a Pravda correspondent who clearly realized that Soviet knowledge was no longer up to date — if it ever was. Another experiment that had unexpected consequences for Soviet propaganda was the 1957 Moscow Youth festival (actually inspired by the Warsaw festival of 1955). Three years later, the Soviet cultural administration had plenty of evidence to conclude that...