in his The Urge to the Sea (1942). The epitome of professional Russian history in the interwar period, Geroid Tanquary Robinson of Columbia University, was attracted to radical thought early in his life and dedicated his scholarship to a re-evaluation of the much-maligned Russian peasantry. His magnum opus, Rural Russia Under the Old Regime (1932), the first substantial historical work by an American scholar that was based on extensive work in the Soviet archives, challenged the prevalent notion of peasant lethargy and passivity. Influenced by the “New Historians” who turned to the study of everyday life and borrowed insights from the other social sciences, he worked to distinguish professional historical writing, which looked to the past to explain the present (or other pasts), from journalism or punditry, which used the past and present to project into and predict the future.
“Collectively,” writes David C. Engerman, these new professional experts on Russia—Harper, Kerner, Davis, Douglas, Robinson, Vera Micheles Dean, and Leo Pasvolsky—“offered more reasons to support Soviet rule than to challenge it.”32 They played down ideology as they elevated national, geographic, or even racial characteristics. Russia, they believed, had affected communism much more than communism Russia. The small cohort of American diplomats (George Kennan, Charles “Chip” Bohlen, Loy Henderson, and the first ambassador to the USSR, William Bullitt) who manned the new US embassy in Moscow after recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933 shared similar attitudes. Kennan reported that in order to understand Russia he “had to weigh the effects of climate on character, the results of century-long conflict with the Asiatic hordes, the influence of medieval Byzantium, the national origins of the people, and the geographic characteristics of the country.”33 Influenced by the German sociologist Klaus Mehnert’s study of Soviet youth, Kennan noted how young people were carried away by the “romance of economic development” to the point that they were relieved “to a large extent of the curses of egotism, romanticism, daydreaming, introspection, and perplexity which befall the young of bourgeois countries.”34 To demonstrate the continuity and consistency of the Russian character of life, Kennan sent home an 1850 diplomatic dispatch, passing it off as if it were current!35
In the years of the First Five-Year Plan, Western writing reached a crescendo of praise for the Soviets’ energy and sacrifice, their idealism and attendant suffering endured in the drive for modernization. The post–World War I cultural critique of unbridled capitalism developed by American thinkers like John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen encouraged many intellectuals to consider the lessons that capitalist democracies might learn from the Soviets. Western leftists and liberals hoped that engineers, planners, and technocrats would be inspired by Soviet planning to discipline the anarchy of capitalism. In “An Appeal to Progressives,” contrasting the economic breakdown in the West with the successes of Soviet planned development, the critic Edmund Wilson (1895–1972) proclaimed that American radicals and progressives “must take Communism away from the Communists … asserting emphatically that their ultimate goal is the ownership of the means of production by the government and an industrial rather than a regional representation.”36 The educator George Counts (1889–1974) waxed rhapsodic about the brave experiment in the USSR and its challenge to America, though within a few years he turned into a leading anti-Communist. As economist Stuart Chase put it in 1932, “Why should the Russians have all the fun of remaking the world?”37 John Dewey expressed the mood of many when he wrote that the Soviet Union was “the most interesting [experiment] going on upon our globe—though I am quite frank to say that for selfish reasons I prefer seeing it tried out in Russia rather than in my own country.”38
Even the evident negative aspects of a huge country in turmoil did not dampen the enthusiasm for Stalin’s revolution from above. Popular historian Will Durant (1885–1981) traveled to Russia in 1932, witnessed starvation, but was still able to write, “The challenge of the Five-Year Plan is moral as well as economic. It is a direct challenge to the smugness and complacency which characterize American thinking on our own chaotic system.” Future historians, he predicted, would look upon “planned social control as the most significant single achievement of our day.”39 That same year the Black writer Langston Hughes (1902–1967), already interested in socialism, visited the USSR with other writers to produce a documentary. Inspired by what he saw—a land of poverty and hope, with much struggle but no racism or economic stratification—he wrote a poem, “One More ‘S’ in the U. S. A,” for his comrades. Decades later the anti-Communist Senator Joseph McCarthy brought him before his committee to discuss publicly his political involvement with Communists.40
Journalism occupied the ideological frontline. With the introduction of by-lines and a new emphasis on conceptualization and interpretation instead of simple reportage, newspapermen (and they were almost all men) evaluated and made judgments. Reporters became familiar figures in popular culture, and as celebrities back home, those posted in Russia gradually became identified with one political position or another. Of the handful of American correspondents in Moscow, Maurice Hindus (1891–1969) stood out as a sympathetic observer of the country about which he wrote. Unlike those who relied on Soviet ideological pronouncements or a reading of the Marxist classics as a guide to understanding what was going on in Russia, Hindus chose to “be in the country, wander around, observe and listen, ask questions and digest answers to obtain some comprehension of the sweep and meaning of these events.”41 He befriended Western men and women of letters, like John Dewey and George Bernard Shaw (whom he guided through the USSR on a celebrated trip), and once was prevailed upon by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s psychiatrist to allay the novelist’s fears of a coming Communist revolution in America. To his critics, Hindus was naïve, apologetic, and even duplicitous. One of his fellow correspondents, the disillusioned Eugene Lyons (1898–1985), considered Hindus to be one of the most industrious of Stalin’s apologists.42 Whatever his faults or insights, Hindus developed and popularized a particular form of reporting on the Soviet Union—one emulated later with enormous success by Alexander Werth, Hedrick Smith, Robert Kaiser, David Shipler, Andrea Lee, Martin Walker, David Remnick, and others—that combined personal observations, telling anecdotes and revealing detail to provide a textured picture of the USSR that supplemented and undercut more partisan portraits.43
The Christian Science Monitor’s William Henry Chamberlin (1897–1969) came as a socialist in 1922, and left in 1934 as an opponent of Soviet communism. In those twelve years, he researched and wrote a classic two-volume history of the Russian Revolution that, along with Trotsky’s account, remained for nearly a quarter of a century the principal narrative of 1917 and the civil war.44 The Nation’s Louis Fischer (1890–1977) was an early Zionist, who became disillusioned when he served in the Jewish Legion in Palestine and came to Russia in 1922 to find “a brighter future” in the “kingdom of the underdog.” His two-volume study of Soviet foreign policy, The Soviets in World Affairs (1930), was a careful rebuttal to the polemics about Soviet international ambitions. Lyons was very friendly to the Soviets when he arrived in Moscow at the end of 1927 and wrote positively about Stalin in a 1931 interview, before he turned bitterly against them with his Assignment in Utopia (1937). Duranty, the acknowledged dean of the Moscow press corps, stayed for a decade and a half, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932, refused to recognize the great famine in Ukraine of that year, and often justified what he observed with the phrase, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”45
Several European journalists were more critical earlier than the Americans. Malcolm Muggeridge of the Manchester Guardian reported on the famine months before his American counterparts; and Paul Scheffer of the Berliner Tageblatt was refused re-entry after he wrote about the violence of mass collectivization. One of the most dramatic defections was by Max Eastman, a leftist celebrity, formerly the bohemian editor of the radical journal Masses, who had enjoyed notoriety as the representative of the Left Opposition in America and promoted Trotsky’s line in Since Lenin Died (1925) and Leon Trotsky: Portrait of a Youth (1926). The translator of Trotsky’s extraordinary History of the Russian Revolution (1932), he attacked Stalin’s cultural policies in Artists in Uniform (1934). By the mid-1930s his doubts about Marxism led him to conclude that Stalinism was the
