Red Britain: The Russian Revolution in Mid-Century Culture by Matthew Taunton

Abstract

Reviewed by: Red Britain: The Russian Revolution in Mid-Century Culture by Matthew Taunton Olivier Jacques Matthew Taunton, Red Britain: The Russian Revolution in Mid-Century Culture Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019, 320 pp. The hundredth anniversary of the Russian Revolution of 1917 rekindled the question of the significance of that major event, prompting a number of scholars and commentators to compare its impact to that of the French Revolution on Western European cultures. Published as part of the Oxford Mid-Century Studies Series, Matthew Taunton's Red Britain: The Russian Revolution in Mid-Century Culture makes a valuable contribution to the conversation by proposing that twentiethcentury British literature and culture can be understood as a range of responses to 1917, in the same way that "1789 is widely understood as the fundamental precondition for Romantic literature in Britain" (1). Taunton deploys this ambitious argument with critical attention to long-term repercussions of the Bolshevik Revolution throughout the 1920s all the way to the 1960s, with the 1930s as a center of focus. The overarching claim of the book is that the repercussions of the Russian Revolution on British culture are "best understood over a relatively long period" (4) and should be assessed within the framework of Anglo-Russian cultural and political relations, moving away from reductive Cold War binaries that oppose communist and anti-communist ideologies. Taunton frames his discussion of the Russian Revolution with reference to Fernand Braudel's call for a focus on longer-term historical structures and Wai Chee Dimock's theory of resonance to "propose an elastic, long 1917, that reaches back into the political and cultural debates of the nineteenth century, through the Cold War, and into the present" (4–5). In doing so, Taunton stretches the timeframe of the Russian Revolution even beyond Sheila Fitzpatrick's definition of the revolution "as a complex 20-year event, encompassing 'Stalin's revolution from above' of the early 1930s and the Great Purges of 1937–8" (Fitzpatrick 822). This interest in long historical changes leads the argument in original directions, especially relevant for readers interested in the 1930s and 1940s British engagement with Soviet communism. Taunton's expert readings of Arthur Koestler and George Orwell provide solid foundations for several arguments throughout the book, and each chapter brings nuanced and thoroughly researched assessments of key debates in mid-century British culture. Red Britain also offers fresh insights on the transformations of English socialism from the nineteenth century to the 1930s. Taunton explores how nineteenth-century English socialist concerns about the future and about farming were affected by the newly established Soviet state. He shows how, for instance, in Britain the "future—as a space of possibility, fantasy, and prediction—disappeared, to be replaced by a geographical entity: the Soviet Union" (13), and how the peasant-oriented cottage [End Page 379] economy socialist tradition of the nineteenth century became newly politicized as an anti-communist programme in the early 1930s in light of Stalin's collectivization of the land. The large scope of Taunton's research allows him to make connections between periods and topics rarely put side by side, as he does here by bringing together nineteenth-century futurology and cottage economy alongside mid-century presentism and Soviet farming practices. Perhaps the most important advantage of Taunton's focus on an "elastic, long 1917" (4) is freedom to explore the developments of thematic concerns over extensive periods of time, a freedom which generates innovative comparisons. The advantages of Taunton's large-scale interpretation of the timeframe of the Russian Revolution unfortunately also come with some drawbacks, the main one being that the actual revolutionary year of 1917 at times seems relegated to the backburner; stretching the timeframe of 1917 to such an extent shrouds the emancipatory hopes and ideals that were at the heart of the February and October Revolutions to make way for a conceptualization of the two revolutions as merely setting the stage for Stalinist terror, which is rather problematic considering Taunton's desire to avoid old-fashioned Cold War interpretations of the revolution. Red Britain would have also needed to explain more carefully how the revolution is to be understood alongside other forces...