Showcasing the Great Experiment - Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921-1941

Showcasing the Great Experiment provides the most far-reaching account of Soviet methods of cultural diplomacy innovated to influence Western intellectuals and foreign visitors. Probing the declassified records of agencies charged with crafting the international image of communism.

List of contents

• Preface


• Introduction: "Russia and the West" in a Soviet Key


• Chapter 1: Cultural Diplomacy of a New Type


• Chapter 2: Going West: Soviet "Cultural" Operations Abroad


• Chapter 3: The Potemkin Village Dilemma


• Chapter 4: Gorky's Gulag


• Chapter 5: Hard-Currency Foreigners and the Campaign Mode


• Chapter 6: Stalin and the Fellow-Travelers Revisited


• Chapter 7: Going East: Friends and Enemies


• Chapter 8: Rise of the Stalinist Superiority Complex


• Epilogue: Toward the Cultural Cold War


• Notes


• Bibliography of Archival Collections


• Index

About the author

Michael David-Fox is Associate Professor in the Department of History and School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He is the author of Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918-1929 and a founding editor of Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History.

Summary

Showcasing the Great Experiment provides the most far-reaching account of Soviet methods of cultural diplomacy innovated to influence Western intellectuals and foreign visitors. Probing the declassified records of agencies charged with crafting the international image of communism.

Additional text

David-Fox has produced a deeply researched and original book that invites readers to rethink or revisit some big historiographical questions: continuity and change across the dividing line of 1917, the nature and origins of Stalinism, and the connection between internal and external factors in national development. Of obvious interest to historians of modern Russia, this book will also be read with great benefit by scholars interested in cultural, political, and transnational history.

Product details

• Authors: Michael David-Fox, Michael (Professor of History David-Fox, David-Fox Michael
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 12.02.2014
• EAN: 9780199376421
• ISBN: 978-0-19-937642-1
• No. of pages: 416
• Dimensions: 152 mm x 229 mm x 28 mm
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > Regional and national histories; European History, HISTORY / Europe / General, POLITICAL SCIENCE / International Relations / Diplomacy, 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000, Diplomacy, Far-left political ideologies and movements, c 1919 to c 1939 (Inter-war period), c 1918 to c 1939 (Inter-war period), Former Soviet Union, USSR (Europe), USSR, Soviet Union, Marxism & Communism, POLITICAL SCIENCE / World / Russian & Soviet, HISTORY / Russia / Soviet Era