“sheep without a shepherd,” a terrible fate for a country in which “there were simply too few brains per square mile.”12 Slightly more generously, the American ambassador David Francis told the State Department that the Bolsheviks might be just what Russia needed: strong men for a people that do not value human life and “will obey strength … and nothing else.”13 To allay fears of domestic revolution the American government deported over 200 political radicals in December 1919 to the land of the Soviets on the Buford, an old ship dubbed “the Red Ark.” The virus of Bolshevism seemed pervasive, and powerful voices raised fears of international subversion. The arsenal of the Right included the familiar weapon of anti-Semitism. In early 1920, Winston Churchill told demonstrators that the Bolsheviks “believe in the international Soviet of the Russian and Polish Jews.”14 Baron N. Wrangel opened his account of the Bolshevik revolution with the words “The sons of Israel had carried out their mission; and Germany’s agents, having become the representatives of Russia, signed peace with their patron at Brest-Litovsk.”15
Western reading publics, hungry for news and analyses of the enigmatic social experiment underway in Soviet Russia, turned to journalists and scholars for information. The philosopher Bertrand Russell, who had accompanied a delegation of the British Labour Party to Russia in 1919, rejected Bolshevism for two reasons: “the price mankind must pay to achieve communism by Bolshevik methods is too terrible; and secondly, … even after paying the price I do not believe the result would be what the Bolsheviks profess to desire.”16 Other radical dissenters included the anarchist Emma Goldman, who spent nearly two years in Bolshevik Russia only to break decisively with the Soviets after the repression of the Kronstadt mutiny in March 1921.17
The historian Bernard Pares (1867–1949) had begun visiting Russia regularly from 1898, and reported on the beginnings of parliamentarianism in Russia after 1905. As British military observer to the Russian army he remained in the country from the outbreak of World War I until the early days of the Soviet government. After service as British commissioner to Admiral Kolchak’s anti-Bolshevik White government, Pares taught Russian history at the University of London, where he founded The Slavonic Review in 1922 and directed the new School of Slavonic Studies. A friend of the liberal leader Pavl Miliukov and supporter of constitutional monarchy in Russia, by the 1930s Pares had become more sympathetic to the Soviets and an advocate of Anglo-Russian rapprochement. Like most of his contemporaries, Pares believed that climate and environment shaped the Russians. “The happy instinctive character of clever children,” he wrote, “so open, so kindly and so attractive, still remains; but the interludes of depression or idleness are longer than is normal.”18 In part because of his reliance on the concept of “national character,” widely accepted among scholars, journalists, and diplomats, Pares’s influence remained strong, particularly during the years of the Anglo-American-Soviet alliance. But with the coming of the Cold War, he, like others “soft on communism,” was denounced as an apologist for Stalin.19
In the United States the most important of the few scholars studying Russia were Archibald Cary Coolidge (1866–1928) at Harvard and Samuel Northrup Harper (1882–1943) of the University of Chicago. For Coolidge, the variety of “head types” found among Slavs was evidence that they were a mixture of many different races, and while autocracy might be repugnant to the “Anglo-Saxon,” it appeared to be appropriate for Russians.20 After working with Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration (ARA) during the famine of 1921–22, he concluded that the famine was largely the result of the peasants’ passivity, lethargy, and Oriental fatalism, not to mention the “stupidity, ignorance, inefficiency and above all meddlesomeness” of Russians more generally.21 The principal mentor of American experts on the Soviet Union in the interwar period, Coolidge trained the first generation of professional scholars and diplomats. One of his students, Frank Golder (1877–1927), also worked for Hoover’s ARA and was an early advocate of Russia’s reconstruction, a prerequisite, he felt, for ridding the country of the “Bolos.” Golder went on to work at the Hoover Institution of War, Peace, and Revolution at Stanford University, building up important collections of documents that make up the major archive for Soviet history in the West.22
Samuel Harper, the son of William Rainey Harper, the President of the University of Chicago, shared the dominant notions of Russian national character, which for him included deep emotions, irregular work habits, apathy, lethargy, pessimism, and lack of “backbone.”23 Harper was a witness to Bloody Sunday in 1905 and, like his friend Pares, a fervent defender of Russian liberals who eventually succumbed to the romance of communism. Russians may have been governed more by emotion and passion than reason, he argued, but they possessed an instinct for democracy. In 1926, he accepted an assignment from his colleague, chairman of the political science department at Chicago, Charles E. Merriam (1874–1953), arguably the most influential figure in American political science between the wars, to study methods of indoctrinating children with the love of the state. Russia, along with fascist Italy, was to be the principal laboratory for this research. Merriam was fascinated with the successes of civic education in Mussolini’s Italy, while other political scientists saw virtues in Hitler’s Germany.24 For Merriam, creating patriotic loyalty to the state was a technical problem, not a matter of culture, and the Soviet Union, which had rejected nationalism and the traditional ties to old Russia, was a “striking experiment” to create “de novo a type of political loyalty to, and interest in a new order of things.”25 In The Making of Citizens (1931), he concluded that the revolution had employed the emotions generated by festivals, the Red Flag, the Internationale, and mass meetings and demonstrations effectively to establish “a form of democratic nationalism.”26
To study what they called “civic education,” something akin to what later would be known as “nation-building,” Harper and Merriam traveled to Russia together in 1926. Guided by Maurice Hindus, an influential journalist sympathetic to the Soviet experiment, Harper visited villages where he became enthusiastic about the Bolshevik educational program. Impressed by Soviet efforts to modernize the peasantry, he supported their industrialization drive.27 This led eventually to estrangement from the State Department specialists on Russia with whom Harper had worked for over a decade. In the mid-1930s, he wrote positively about constitutional developments in the USSR, and his 1937 book, The Government of the Soviet Union, made the case for democratic, participatory institutions in the Soviet system. His book appeared the very same year that Stalin’s show trials reached their zenith, carrying away the Communist elite whom the dictator saw as potential political threats. Harper rationalized the Moscow trials and never publicly criticized Stalin. When Harper defended the Nazi–Soviet Pact of 1939 as a shrewd maneuver, students abandoned his classes and faculty colleagues shunned him. Only after the Soviets became allies of the United States in 1941 did he enjoy a few twilight years of public recognition, even appearing with Charlie Chaplin and the poet Carl Sandburg at a mass “Salute to our Russian Ally.”28
Seeing the Future Work
Through the interwar years, the Soviet Union offered many intellectuals a vision of a preferred future outside and beyond capitalism. Contained within the hope and faith in the USSR and communism, however, were the seeds of disillusionment and despair. Writers made ritualistic visits to Moscow and formed friendships with other political pilgrims. In November 1927, novelist Theodore Dreiser accepted an invitation to tour the USSR, and his secretary remembered an evening at the Grand Hotel with Dorothy Thomas, Sinclair Lewis, Scott Nearing, and Louis Fischer, followed by a visit to New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty.29 By the early 1930s, many “Russianists” had moved decisively to the left. The sociologist Jerome Davis, who taught at Dartmouth and Yale, advocated recognition of the USSR and was ultimately fired from Yale for condemning capitalism.30 Paul Douglas, a distinguished University of Chicago labor economist, enthusiastically but mistakenly predicted that Soviet trade unions would soon overtake the Communist Party as the most powerful institution in the country.31 Robert Kerner, a Russian historian at the University of Missouri, gave up what he had called “racial metaphysics” (he said he
