In Stalin’s Moscow

Abstract

‘Terrific and terrifying’ — these were the words of Richard Bernaschek, Austrian left social democrat and Linz regional commander of the Schutzbund (his party’s paramilitary organization), reporting in 1934 on his visit to the Soviet Union.¹ The American engineer Zara Witkin used very similar terms, recalling in his memoir a ‘Russia, land of horror and hope’,² while the Austrian writer and arts journalist Hugo Huppert more expansively evoked ‘a vastly creative, massively disappointing yet inspiring revolutionary process’.³ Western communists’ accounts of their experience of the Soviet Union are full of such contrasts and ambivalences. All had had great expectations of that ‘longed-for’ land, eagerly and impatiently awaiting the day of departure, feeling ‘almost mad with joy’ at the sight of the border railway station of Negoreloe and waving ‘as if possessed’ at the Red Army soldiers, before suffering disappointment on arrival in Moscow:⁴ this is a pattern to be found everywhere in memoirs and autobiographies. The long and arduous trek to the Soviet Union was a journey to the land of hope, the passage of the border a profoundly happy arrival ‘home’ — these are the figures that organise the recollections of these travellers to the Soviet Union. Like clichés in general, these topoi represent not realistic descriptions but widely current and ready-to-hand cognitive and perceptual schemata. In some cases, such language can come across as propagandistic exaggeration in its compulsive enthusiasm, as for example in a pamphlet published by the Austrian communist youth organization in 1937, in which a Young Communist recalled his sleepless night and commented: ‘Never have I felt so joyful and excited as on my journey to the Soviet Union’.⁵