The Land of Soviets through the Eyes of an American Modernist Writer

The American prose writer, poet, playwright and essayist Dos Passos arrived in the Soviet Union in the spring of 1928. As a result of the trip, the classic of American literature wrote the book Better Times. Russian diaries.

Dos Passos first visited the country of the Soviets in 1921. In 1928, on the eve of the “great turning point”, interest in the “Soviet experiment” brought him to our country for the second time. Dos Passos stayed in Russia for several months, visited Moscow, Leningrad, sailed along the Volga to Astrakhan, and traveled around the North Caucasus.

“I got to Leningrad in the company of an American of Russian origin named Kittin. He published a Russian-language newspaper in New York, and the contrast with America every now and then caused him exclamations of amazement, writes Dos Passos in Russian Diaries. – The Americans who chose to visit the Soviet Union in the summer of 1928 were lucky like no one else. From time immemorial, the Russian state behaved like an oyster, opening and closing. In 1928, foreigners were welcomed with open arms. NEP has not been canceled yet. The war of annihilation between Stalin and Trotsky turned into an unstable truce. Trotsky had already been sent into exile, but Stalin had not yet gained enough strength to purge his supporters from the country’s leadership. People still dared to mention the name of Trotsky. American engineers worked to strengthen the regime. There was no anti-American propaganda. They didn’t shy away from the Americans who came to the country, rather, they were drawn to them.”

The American novelist went sightseeing with Kittin.

“In the Hermitage, they were so carried away by the conversation with the Kyrgyz that they almost forgot to look at the exposition,” the writer says. — Kirghiz just left his yurt in the steppe for a year. His brother, a party member, studied at an Asian university. He himself was still non-partisan. At first I wanted to see the world, and only then decide whether to join the party or not. He loved to read. Literacy was taught to the Kirghiz only after the revolution. He read Gorky. And he was not going to read anything else until he had read everything that Gorky had written. In the revolution, he enjoyed reading and new family relationships.”

Dos Passos was convinced “that Leningrad is a cosmopolitan city, a bridge between East and West, which, in fact, was what Tsar Peter aspired to when laying the foundation of the northern capital. The Russian writers I met in Leningrad gravitated towards Europe. They made no secret of their contempt for Moscow.”

Among other things, the American was greatly impressed by … Leningrad strawberries:

“Leningrad strawberries are the best in the world. I remember how big she is, about the size of a fist, and how fragrant. These are the same strawberries that poor Nikki sent to his wife’s grandmother, Queen Victoria, before the fall of his throne.”

Dos Passos visited the laboratory of the physiologist Pavlov:

“He investigates secretory glands other than the sex glands, and his main instrument in the study of the physiology of the brain is the salivary glands, the product of which can be measured without much difficulty. (…) Pavlov is really a great man, he is almost eighty, his work in the laboratory did not stop for a day, whether it was war or revolution.

On a suburban train I went to visit Korney Chukovsky:

“Censorship forced him to give up literary criticism. Now he wrote children’s books. His “Crocodile” won such popularity among children and adults that he no longer had to fear the regime. Similarly, Lenin’s interest in Pavlov’s discoveries saved the latter from persecution. I remember what Chukovsky looked like, tall, gray-haired, intelligent, like a European writer of the last century. He remembered with longing the European water resorts, Karlsbad, Wiesbaden, Cannes. He was not allowed abroad again. He hinted that he had nothing to be afraid of, but they have many ways to get to a person. His daughter, although not imprisoned, was sent into exile. He was worried about his youngest son. My heart ached not from what he said, but from what he kept silent about.

If in Leningrad the American prose writer saw “something inexorably familiar, already seen in the West”, then when he got to Moscow by night train, he ended up in an “unknown country”:

“It was raining all the time. Looking out the window in the morning, I saw only firs and birches wrapped in fog. There were a lot of people in the car, but train trips in an unfamiliar country always brought a lot of new impressions. (…) A very serious young woman from the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs arranged for me in an old Moscow hotel. (…) Every evening I went to the theater. I made a long list of people I wanted to see. In the mornings I studied Russian. From trying to remember Russian sayings, my head began to split. Muscovites made an indelible impression on me. I considered myself a fairly energetic person, but these people could give me a hundred points head start. They ate more, drank more, talked more, read more, went to bed later, got up earlier than me. The curiosity of these men and women knew no bounds.”

Of all the performances, Dos Passos liked Roar, China directed by Meyerhold the most. But the ballet seemed outdated and boring. I was struck by the new production of Boris Godunov.

“Although actors, like scientists, were in the Soviet government in a special way, the artists of the Art Theater almost died of hunger,” writes the American guest in Russian Diaries.

The filmmakers showed great openness.

“These people were very different from the new generation of American filmmakers that I had the opportunity to meet,” says Dos Passos. – Erudite, absorbing everything new, looking for extraordinary approaches. Eisenstein had a special, sharp manner of speaking. We agreed on the importance of installation. Perhaps he was already beginning to feel his own greatness, he was admired in every way, but I rarely had to meet such a brilliant analyst. (…) It was Eisenstein who persuaded me to go to the performance of the Kabuki theater, which was touring in Moscow for the first time. The people were simply rushing to the performances, and in order to get a ticket, my friends had to act through party channels, to remind who should be of my role in the struggle to save Sacco and Vanzetti. The spectacle was excellent, but I was even more impressed by the amazingly accurate reaction of Muscovites to the ups and downs of the Japanese play.

Deciding to form an opinion about the country of the Soviets, not only in Moscow and Leningrad, the American writer, armed with Hugo’s “Russian Tutorial”, a pocket dictionary, a volume of Jack London, Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin”, as well as a pass that was given to him in exchange for a passport left in the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, and a pack of rubles, already in the summer “in splendid isolation” went to Yaroslavl:

“In addition to the gilded onion domes of the collapsing monasteries, I remember a huge, with a spade-beard, a cab driver (as if from the extras of Boris Godunov), who drove me to the steamer. He towered over the fragile droshky and the little horse like a mountain.

For some reason, he decided that I was a German. And in elementary broken German he managed to explain to me that everything is terrible. Every barefoot beggar in the village thinks he is the equal of any decent man. And Russia needs the Hindenburg, which will show everyone their place. Only Stalin is capable of this. During my entire journey, the cab driver was the only one who mentioned Stalin’s name aloud.

On the river steamer Dos Passos went down the Volga:

“I was given a cabin on the upper deck. In the mornings a wonderful breakfast was served: tea and black bread with butter and black caviar. Lunch and dinner, mostly porridge and cabbage, not the worst food. In the city where Lenin was born, from a cliff of red clay, the Volga was very reminiscent of the Mississippi.

Back in Moscow, Dos Passos could not find a room. Alexander Fadeev and his wife sheltered him in his large apartment:

“Fadeev, still a young man with a short haircut and pleasant manners, would have seemed at home in the Wild West. He came from the East – from Siberia. He wrote a successful novel and admired the regime. His wife held a high position in the GPU. A nimble Komsomol member worked as a servant for them. They lived simply but well. The apartment was located near the barracks of the Red Army. Every morning I was awakened by a song: a unit went to the parade ground to do drills. In those days, Russian soldiers always sang on the march.

Fadeev’s friends spoke freely on any topic. No one was afraid of being denounced to the GPU. The GPU was right here. I must say that I liked Fadeev. After my departure from Russia, he became one of the most ardent supporters of Stalinism in the literary world. When Khrushchev exposed the monster and threw his body out of Lenin’s tomb, Fadeev committed suicide.

Autumn has come. Rain and sleet in Moscow turned into snow.

“The only reason I didn’t get cold was because of a few sets of gorgeous warm underwear that I inherited from an American expedition organized by the Museum of Natural History, who returned home after hunting Siberian tigers,” writes Dos Passos.

Life in Moscow was in full swing. The American writer went to concerts, looked at the collection of French Impressionists, closed to the general public, “collected by some Moscow merchant”, went to almost all theatrical premieres, visited kindergartens and schools, army, amateur, factory theaters.

“The people here are friendly and nice… The vastness and emptiness of the country is amazing,” writes Dos Passos in Russian Diaries. “I could feel the enthusiasm with which people were building a better life everywhere. Those who took the side of the regime were united by participation in a common cause. Many party members were driven by sincere convictions. (…) I was struck by the wild fantasy inherent in the Russian mind. I felt that, despite the destruction of many talented people in the liquidation of the most educated and ruling classes, the Russians could still be considered one of the main reservoirs of the human mind.

Like many representatives of the Western world who spent a lot of time in the Soviet Union, I, of course, had doubts about the correctness of the chosen path. Days and weeks passed peacefully and calmly, without any hint of the very possibility of Terror, when suddenly the iron fist made itself felt. I spent the evening with an Englishman and his Russian wife in an apartment filled with antique furniture and knick-knacks. He came to Russia to work for the victory of the communist idea. Now he tried with all his might to escape from Russia. For him, this desire has become an obsession. They will never let his wife out. She has the wrong class roots. The Cheka, said the Englishman, absorbed the worst features of the tsarist secret police. “In cruelty, no one compares to the Russians, not even the Chinese.” I tried to argue with him. He stressed that Terror was on the wane. Most of the first Chekists have already been shot. I talked about how freely I traveled around the country, how people spoke openly. From this I concluded that the Russian revolution was entering a liberal phase. He drew a parallel with France. Under Napoleon, an iron order reigned in the country, but there were no such executions as under Robespierre.

I can talk like that, the Englishman pointed out to me, because no one is keeping me here. Here he and his wife are trapped. Sooner or later they will come for them. As always, at night. No one saw any arrests, or rather, did not dare to talk about them. Less than five years later, Stalin proved the Englishman right.

Before leaving Moscow, Dos Passos had to be nervous: for some reason, the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs was delaying the issuance of his passport. The writer knew that the communist newspapers wrote about him approvingly, many farewell parties were arranged in his honor, and yet the American involuntarily wondered: did he blurt out something superfluous?

Finally, he was issued a passport. With a Polish visa and a train ticket to Warsaw.

“My friend, an actress from the Art Theater, brought the entire theater of sanitary propaganda from one of the large factories to the farewell. (…) “Tell us,” she asked, when I was already standing at the door of my car, impatiently shifting from foot to foot, waiting for the train to depart, “are you with us or against us? They want you to show your true colors.”

What could I say? The train has already started moving. I jumped into the wagon. The next morning, when I crossed the Polish border, in those years the communists did not rule in Poland, I had the feeling that I had broken out of prison.

In the USSR, Dos Passos was seen as the “American Gorky”, the most politically influential writer in the West, and it was ardently desired that he “put his literary talent at the service of communist doctrine.” But behind the outwardly decent facade, the “iron hand of terror” did not hide from the writer, he also noticed the deep-rooted feeling of fear of the special services in many people. Leaving Russia, Dos Passos experienced the feeling of a man released from prison…

Sergei Ishkov.

Photo from the site https://en.wikipedia.org