Stalinist Westernizer? Aleksandr Arosev's Literary and Political Depictions of Europe

Abstract

This article examines variegated depictions of Europe and the west produced in the 1920s and 1930s by Aleksandr Iakovlevich Arosev, an Old Bolshevik cultural official, writer, and diplomat. Arosev traveled and worked in many parts of Europe in the prewar emigration, in the 1920s and early 1930s as Soviet ambassador to Prague and other European capitals, and during the years of the Popular Front as head of the All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad (VOKS). The discussion refracts a much asked question—what new sources say about attitudes toward the Soviet system—through a new prism, depictions of the outside world. Although Arosev's personal diary and unpublished reports on cultural diplomacy with European fellow-travelers suggest an often startling degree of admiration and affinity for the west, higher levels of hostility are expressed in his literary output, mass-produced pamphlets, and especially his letters to Iosif Stalin. Interpreting these disjunctures, David-Fox argues that Arosev took advantage of tensions within Soviet ideology to craft depictions of Europe for different audiences. Until his execution in 1938, it was not impossible for Arosev to be both a Stalinist and a westernizer, but the combination was perilous, painful, and difficult to sustain.