Abstract
The emergence of a Soviet cultural diplomacy in the 1920s was hardly predictable. Bolsheviks’ propaganda for ‘world revolution’ reduced the image of Soviet Russia to one of Leninist-proletarian victory, while the rejection of diplomatic tradition and a distrust of artists and intellectuals precluded any commitment to cultural action abroad. This article explores how, when and why a Soviet cultural diplomacy developed. It focuses on two episodes related to the famine of 1921, including, based on new archival evidence, the First Exhibition of Russian Art in Berlin in October 1922. The exhibition's spectacular success paved the way for Soviet cultural diplomacy that moved away from overtly communist propaganda in order to address Western avant-garde literary and artistic milieus.
Highlights
In 1967, at the very moment when Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’ was about to freeze, Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to London in the 1930s, published the memoirs considered to be the first account of the Stalin-Litvinov-era diplomacy
This study throws light on how and why, so unlikely a thing as Soviet cultural diplomacy emerged. It reflects on these questions by focusing on the unexpected dynamics behind the First Exhibition of Russian Art in Berlin, which opened in October 1922 to great public acclaim
Before we look more closely at the origins of Soviet cultural diplomacy, it is relevant to consider the state of Bolshevik diplomacy and its relations with regards to the Western world.[10]
Summary
The emergence of a Soviet cultural diplomacy in the 1920s was hardly predictable. Bolsheviks’ propaganda for ‘world revolution’ reduced the image of Soviet Russia to one of Leninist-proletarian victory, while the rejection of diplomatic tradition and a distrust of artists and intellectuals precluded any commitment to cultural action abroad. The unexpected success of the Berlin exhibition left an important legacy and proved a turning point in the Soviet cultural offensive toward Western societies and non-communist public opinion It shook up Bolshevik dogmas and opened them to foreign practices of propaganda. Histoire de la diplomatie culturelle soviétique durant l’entre-deux-guerres and Michael David-Fox’s Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941.7 Concerning the period covered by the present study, both historians acknowledge the crucial impact of the 1921 famine on the Bolshevik project of world revolution and on the cultural offensive launched at non-communist, ‘imperialist’ public opinion abroad. The article opens with an appraisal of the specific condition of early Bolshevik diplomacy – split as it was between the revolutionary call of the Communist International (Comintern) and a state conventional foreign policy – and the consequences of this duality for the evolution of the specific diplomatic culture versus revolutionary class propaganda
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