“Stalinist Westernizer? Aleksandr Arosev’s Literary and Political Depictions of Europe,”...

Stalinist Westernizer? Aleksandr Arosev's Literary and Political Depictions of EuropeAuthor(s): Michael David-FoxSource: Slavic Review, Vol. 62, No. 4, Tourism and Travel in Russia and the Soviet Union(Winter, 2003), pp. 733-759Published by: The American Association for the Advancement of Slavic StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3185653Accessed: 28/07/2009 21:59

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Stalinist Westernizer? Aleksandr Arosev's Literary and Political Depictions of Europe

Michael David-Fox

On 4 June 1935 Aleksandr Iakovlevich Arosev sat on the platform in the Negoreloe train station, looking west at the Soviet-Polish border. As an official immersed in Soviet international cultural propaganda and diplomacy, the head of the All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad (VOKS) from 1934 to 1937, Arosev traveled frequently to Europe during the years of the Popular Front. But this time he was only escorting his wife, a Czechoslovak ballerina of Jewish background he had married while a Soviet diplomat in Prague, as far as the border station. He then recorded the following words in his secret diary: "For a long time I walked in the direction in which the train disappeared. Like a Scythian or a Mongol, I har- bor inside me a great longing [toska] for the west and nothing acts on me like the evening sky or the setting sun. I adore the west and would like to follow the sun." Neither this maudlin profession of love for the west, nor the ironic yet cutting self-depiction as an Asian savage reflect sentiments many scholars might expect from a 1930s cultural apparatchik or a Stalin- ist with close personal ties to Viacheslav Molotov. As we shall see, the diary entry is but one key piece in the much larger puzzle of Arosev's strik- ingly variegated depictions of Europe.

It is a truism to say that in the two centuries after Peter the Great, Rus- sia's tangled relationship with the "west" lay at the heart of Russian political evolution, culture, and identity, but it is far from common to explore a similar proposition for the Soviet period. Recent landmark studies on the prerevolutionary period have shown how Russian articulations of proximity and distance from Europe were central to the self-presentations of rulers, on the one hand, and to the dissemination of norms of civilization for elite society and the rest of the people in need of "enlighten- ment," on the other.2 What took place in the wake of westernization holds true, mutatis mutandis, for the decades after the Bolshevik revolution, although the field of Soviet history has with few exceptions narrated Soviet

I am grateful to Elizabeth Papazian and Katherine David-Fox for insightful comments and to the participants in the workshop "Observing and Making Meaning: Understanding the Soviet Union and Central Europe through Travel," University of Toronto, 18-20 October 2002 for lively discussion of an initial draft.

1. Arosev, diary entry from 4 June 1935, published in Ol'ga Aleksandrovna Aroseva and Vera Maksimova, Bez grima (Moscow, 1999), 77.

2. Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1995-2000); Catriona Kelly, Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Cul- ture, and Genderfrom Catherine to Yeltsin (Oxford, 2001), which does take the story into the Soviet period. Kelly points out that even at the height of Stalinism, the denunciation of "foreignness" (inostranshchina) was combined with a "secret and extreme pleasure ... in Western products" and the west was imagined "as both a civilizing and corrupting force" (232, 236).

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internal development to the exclusion of its international dimensions.3 Soviet attitudes toward the west, shaped and reflected by well-traveled mediators such as the diplomat, writer, and politician Arosev, were fundamental to postrevolutionary ideology and culture and to major shifts within them between the 1920s and the 1930s. This article refracts a much-asked question-what new sources say about attitudes toward the Soviet system-through an almost entirely new prism, depictions of the outside world and their inevitable linkages to the domestic order.

Indeed, Soviet relationships with the west experienced a remark- able transformation over the course of the interwar years. In the 1920s Soviet ideology was marked by deep ambiguities: while touting the many "achievements" of the new revolutionary order, it assumed there was still much to learn from the advanced and "cultured" west. By the late 1930s, under losif Stalin, Soviet culture along with the rest of Soviet socialism was

baldly declared superior, and previously coveted contacts abroad could

bring penalties ranging from intense suspicion to physical annihilation. Even as the pendulum swung in this direction, however, the west continued to play an extraordinary dual role as capitalist enemy and exemplar of civilized modernity. Severe restrictions on travel and international ex-

change imparted to that elite Soviet minority able to cross borders with the west, both literally and figuratively, a heightened source of prestige and danger. This article interprets how Arosev, who lived and traveled ex-

tensively in many parts of Europe before and after 1917, tried to navigate these treacherous waters as he depicted the west to Soviet audiences. The

emerging study of travel, of the west in the Soviet imaginaire, and, more

broadly, of the transnational dimensions of Soviet history, can confront some of the field's thorniest problems by considering individual lives that were long impossible to recover in any depth. Arosev allows us to concen- trate on three such problems: generation, ideology, and audience.

Faced with a flood of new Soviet-era personal documents that were almost completely unavailable before 1991, scholars now have the chance to probe well beneath the level of the official ideological positions described above and interpret individual and popular attitudes toward the Soviet order.4 Implicitly grappling with the insoluble question of what

people in the crucible of Stalinism "really" thought, the new scholarship has reached remarkably little consensus. Basically, debate has become polarized between those who, by rejecting a public-private dichotomy as

post-hoc "liberal" projection, strongly imply that true belief and intense

engagement with the Soviet worldview were prevalent if not the norm, and others who use new sources to find examples of widespread resistance

3. Since the mid-1990s a noteworthy wing of Russian-language historiography has at-

tempted to study the image of the west in the Soviet Russian popular consciousness, with

special reference to party-state propaganda and control over information; see, most im-

portantly, A. V. Golubev et al., Rossiia i zapad: Formirovanie vneshnepoliticheskikh stereotipov v soznanii rossiiskogo obshchestva pervoi poloviny XX veka (Moscow, 1998).

4. Irina Paperno, "Personal Accounts of the Soviet Experience," Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3, no. 4 (Fall 2002): 577- 610.

Aleksandr Arosev s Literary and Political Depictions of Europe

and unorthodox beliefs far from official ideology.5 Neither side in this ongoing conceptual impasse, however, has paid much attention to the problem of generation, which can be understood as the issue of the distinctive experiences of age cohorts and their subjective embrace of generational identities.6 A post-Soviet attack on western "subjectivity" studies homes in on aspects of this generational issue, maintaining that studies of autobiographical writing in the 1930s should not ignore authors' experiences and writings in previous decades, nor should authors of various ages and trajectories be homogenized as carriers of a collective discourse.7 The relationship between intimate spheres and the Soviet order can appear different among the 1930s generation (those who came of age under Stalin- ism) and those with earlier and later generational identities. Arosev, an Old Bolshevik who felt himself part of a generation formed by revolution and civil war, felt alienated from a rising generation he associated with the 1930s order.8

Grappling with the problem of generation is especially imperative in any attempt to recover the international dimensions of Soviet communism. As is well known, the size and composition of the party-state was radically transformed between the 1920s and the 1930s. In contrast to Old Bolsheviks and other elites who had often lived in European emigration

5. On the one side are those looking at the problem through the lens of "subjectivity," including the internalization of 1930s attempts to transform or "reforge" the self (Jochen Hellbeck, "Laboratories of the Soviet Self: Diaries from the Stalin Era" [Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1998], centering on the case of Stepan Podlubnyi, Tagebuch aus Moskau 1931-1930, ed. Hellbeck [Munich, 1986], as well as Hellbeck's various articles) or the articulation of attendant discourses dictating the making of the "new person" (Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia [Pittsburgh, 2000]). On the other side are those (generally in Anglo-American scholarship) stressing rejection or distance from official categories on the part of "ordinary people" or subaltern groups or (especially in much recent Russian scholarship) on the part of the nonparty intelligentsia. See, in the first instance, Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalins Russia: Terror, Propaganda, andDissent, 1934-1941 (Cambridge, Eng., 1997), and, in the second, the reverent treatment of intelligentsia memoirs in Golubev et al., Rossiia i zapad, 158-60 and periodically throughout the text.

6. The importance of generational cohorts has long been noted in Soviet history, most famously in Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921- 1934 (Cambridge, Eng., 1979). But it was often difficult to study the second element- generational consciousness -especially in the study of individual figures in the prewar era.

7. Sergei Glebov, Marina Mogil'ner, and Aleksandr Semenov, "The Story of Us: Proshloe i perspektivy modernizatsii gumanitarnogo znaniia glazami istorikov," Novoe liter- aturnoe obozrenie, no. 59 (2003): 203. These authors, however, charge that western authors with whom they disagree are soft on the gulag (202-3) and seem unaware that the limita- tions of discourse analysis they identify were long ago debated by historians of Russia. The authors present themselves as especially attuned to the dangers of slavishly adopting western categories in writing "our history"; indeed, such influences are pervasive in their own language and approach.

8. In Arosev's case we will also see an ethos of self-criticism that in some respects con- nects him to younger people in the 1930s. For a postwar diary suggesting a gulf between public conformity and personal dissent, see John Keep, "Sergei Sergeevich Dmitriev and His Diary," Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 4, no. 3 (Summer 2003): 709-34.

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or who spoke foreign languages, the new cadres first trained in the 1920s and then massively promoted in the 1930s, including at the upper eche- lons, were not only "completely unburdened" of cross-cultural experience or an advanced, cosmopolitan education but had significantly restricted access to information on the outside world.9 Sabine Dullin's recent study of the Soviet diplomatic corps contains especially good data on the generational shift. Dullin suggests that in this special outpost of the party- state-where foreign languages and experience abroad were more im-

portant than almost anywhere else-many post-1929 cadres were in fact not radically different than those who came before. Even among diplomats, however, an influx of newly promoted cadres of humble origins starting in the mid to late 1920s brought "incontestable" social and cultural differences from those with a better knowledge of the outside world, leading to "profound political suspicion on both sides."1' It is impossible to understand Arosev in the 1930s without considering his fiercely cultivated Old Bolshevik identity, his experiences abroad before and after 1917, and his often angry embarrassment at the increasingly parochial new leadership of which he was a part.

Yet how can we analyze how individual figures positioned themselves vis-a-vis official ideology, including Soviet ideological stances toward the outside world, without confronting the nature of ideology itself? Al-

though ideology has always loomed as a central issue in Soviet studies, historians have rarely discussed it explicitly in post-Soviet scholarship, and what discussion there is has also quickly reached an impasse. For several decades, during the heyday of the "old" social history, scholars shap- ing their scholarship in response to the field's foundational totalitarian school steadfastly refused to attribute causal importance to ideology, even when in practice they illuminated many aspects of it. In the 1990s, there-

fore, a number of voices began to clamor persuasively about the need to

"bring ideology back in." Yet such scholars have often implicitly taken ide-

ology as equivalent to official high doctrine and insisted on its "primacy." Even more implicitly, ideology is often restrictively treated as a unitary, fully coherent dogma emanating from above-rather than understood as also including, more pervasively, the features of a disseminated worldview, which in the case of individuals can be mixed or combined with many other forms of belief." If the latter, ideology cannot be isolated as a "fac-

9. See Golubev et al., Rossiia i zapad, 129-31. 10. Sabine Dullin, Des hommes d'influences: Les ambassadeurs de Staline en Europe 1930-

1939 (Paris, 2001), 75; see also 68, 76. 11. The most influential voice explicitly discussing the role of ideology understood in

this way as central to the course of Soviet history has been that of Martin Malia, starting in The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 (New York, 1994) and finish-

ing, more recently, with his many journalistic pieces. Cf. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Moun- tain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995), 151, 356. For the influence of Malia's neototalitarian perspective on ideology as a master key to Soviet history, one that can be

analytically isolated to explain its unfolding rather than understood as evolving in constant

interrelationship with "circumstances," see Amir Weiner, "Nature, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia: Delineating the Soviet Socio-Ethnic Body in the Age of Socialism,"

AleksandrArosev's Literary and Political Depictions of Europe

tor" in an equation, even as a primary factor, but only understood in its interrelationship with practices and circumstances. When Soviet ideology is seen in this wider sense, the radical tensions within Soviet ideology on such fundamental issues as the relationship of socialism to the western world are far more readily apparent.

Arosev's assessments of Europe and the western "intelligentsia" en- gaged and mixed official ideological constructs, cultural baggage, and highly personal emotions simultaneously. This was one important area, moreover, in which official ideology spoke in more than one voice and pitch. Even as the official orthodoxy in the 1930s came to assert the out- right superiority of Soviet culture, and the hunt for enemies paved the way for the antiforeign hysteria of the purge era, the new Stalin-era particu- larism clashed with an ongoing communist universalism, support for the pan-European antifascist culture, and glorification of many individual westerners and selected features of the "advanced" west. I will argue that Arosev took advantage of tensions within Soviet ideology concerning how the contemporary west should be evaluated while always attempting to remain politically orthodox.

Contradictory chinks in the official ideology alone do not account for the fluctuations between admiration and hostility in Arosev's depictions of Europe, however. Tensions in the ideology manifested themselves especially when Arosev crafted different portrayals of Europe for different audiences ranging from putative future readers of his diary ("posterity"), the targets of mass-produced pamphlets, consumers of fiction, members of the cultural bureaucracy, and Stalin himself. Avoiding firm implications about what Arosev "really" believed, this article establishes that Arosev al- tered his portrayals of Europe for different audiences with deliberation until his purge and execution in the 1937-1938 Arosevshchina (Arosev affair), which decimated VOKS and the Popular Front cadres of Soviet cultural diplomacy. A major goal of this investigation, then, is to actively compare Arosev's presentations of European themes in personal documents such as his diary to his extensive archival and published record. Indeed, it would be impossible to even pose the question of variations in his reports on European travel and related themes without juxtaposing a range of published and unpublished sources.

The title of this article, "Stalinist Westernizer," requires some expla- nation. The term Stalinist refers to the fact that Arosev, in addition to cul- tivating his associations with the Stalin wing of the party, cast his lot for the transformations of Stalin's "second revolution." The term Westernizer is not intended to suggest that Arosev believed the Soviet Union could proceed down a western path. After all, even many nineteenth-century westerniz- ers did not call for Russia simply to copy western development. Rather, the

American Historical Review 104, no. 4 (1999): 1115, 1119; for rare critiques of Malia's conception of ideology, see Yanni Kotsonis, "The Ideology of Martin Malia," Russian Review 58, no. 1 (January 1999): 124-30, and David Priestland, "Marx and the Kremlin: Writing on Marxism-Leninism and Soviet Politics after the Fall of Communism,"Journal of Political Ide- ologies 5, no. 3 (October 2000): 377-91.

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title calls attention to Arosev's European cultural orientation and his emo- tional attachment to the west with which we began. Its question mark draws attention to the persistent conflict he perceived between his cultural and political sides, which at crucial moments subsumed his admiration for the west.

Kazan', Moscow, Paris, Prague Arosev was a revolutionary who reached adulthood between 1905 and 1917, and his insurrectionary pedigree formed a large part of his identity. Born in 1890 in Kazan' into the family of a merchant of the first guild, he could be considered a third-generation radical: his maternal grandfather, Avgust Gol'dshmidt, was a German Bait who was a member of the populist People's Will party, and his mother was a Latvian of revolutionary convictions who helped her son organize underground activities and further his education. As a schoolboy Arosev became close to the "fighting organization" of the Socialist Revolutionaries and took part in armed uprisings in Kazan' in the Revolution of 1905; soon thereafter he became a Social Democrat allied with the Bolsheviks. In 1917 Arosev was mobilized into the army, where he became an officer elected to the Tver' Soviet of Work- ers' and Soldiers' Deputies. October found him a member of the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Bolshevik Party of Moscow and the Mos- cow Region, where he was prominent in the Bolsheviks' armed uprising. He took part in the civil war in Ukraine in the Tenth Army, and in 1919 became editor of the guberniia newspaper Znamia revoliutsii. These and other formative revolutionary experiences later pervaded his literary activities, his 1930s diary, and his sense of belonging to the generation of 1917.12 One sign of this generational identification was his determination to join the Society of Old Bolsheviks, although his acceptance was delayed because of his Socialist Revolutionary proclivities as a fifteen-year-old. When he submitted his autobiography to the society in 1931, he wrote that one of his greatest literary ambitions was to describe the revolutionary uprising. In a noteworthy passage, he wrote: "Earlier I thought that with the word [slovom] one could describe everything. Now I see that words, however they are combined, are a pale copy of reality. Still, one must write ... because this does not only describe the old, but call forth the new." His

preoccupation with the gulf between writing and doing was related to his

abiding interest in the comparison "between the worker and the intelligent in the revolution."'3 Even in this dry record of his revolutionary and lit-

12. See Arosev's autobiography from the Society of Old Bolsheviks, Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial'no-politicheskoi istorii (RGASPI), f. 124, op. 1, ed. khr. 80, 11. 4- 14 ("Arosev, Aleksandr Iakovlevich"); Nikolai Trachenko, "Sled na zemle," introduction to Arosev, Belaia lestnitsa: Roman, povesti, rasskazy (Moscow, 1989), 3-17; V V. Popov, "Arosev, Aleksandr Iakovlevich," in N. N. Skatova, ed., Russkie pisateli XX vek: Biobibliograficheskii slovar' (Moscow, 1998), 1:84 - 86. The Soviet-era biography of Arosev by Anatolii Cherno- baev, Vvikhre veka (Moscow, 1987), contains a wealth of information on all phases of Aro- sev's life, but the information is selectively chosen and presented.

13. RGASPI, f. 124, op. 1, ed. khr. 80, 11. 13-14 ("Arosev, Aleksandr Iakovlevich").

Aleksandr Arosev 's Literary and Political Depictions of Europe

erary vita, the lifelong conflict he perceived between culture and action, literature and politics, word and deed was forcefully expressed.

An Old Bolshevik revolutionary, Arosev also became a Stalinist, and not merely in the sense of adapting to the great changes of the 1930s, although he did that too. Arosev's close ties to Molotov, later Stalin's right- hand man, may have prompted his early adherence to the Stalin wing of the party. With two other middle school students, Molotov and Arosev formed the first Social-Democratic fraction in Kazan', and in 1909 the two friends were imprisoned together. His longstanding ties to the Molotovs were further strengthened when his first wife, Ol'ga Goppen, befriended Molotov's wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, when both were working in the Zhenotdel (Women's Section) in Kazan' in 1920. Arosev maintained close personal ties with Molotov into the 1930s, but he also had links with Niko- lai Ivanovich Ezhov, head of the NKVD during the Terror, with whom he served during the civil war.14 Stalin's personal archival collection (lichnyi fond) contains a substantial file on Arosev. It suggests that Arosev cultivated Stalin as early as 1924, when the inner-party factional struggles were in full swing. In 1923-24 Arosev was a top official in the newly founded Lenin Institute, an institution deeply involved in creating the Lenin cult and waging inner-party battles through party history. Arosev's first extant letter to Stalin, in which he was ostensibly penning a routine query about his work for the Lenin Institute, set a pattern by which Arosev angled for a personal meeting: "perhaps you could now put aside for me a small amount of time for an oral report on a range of questions which cannot but interest you."'5 Intellectual, "cultured," or scholarly Stalinists in the party like Arosev frequently had a hard time with Stalin and his immedi- ate entourage of praktiki, and they often compensated with attempts to appear tough and loyal before the top leadership.

Arosev's identity as a man of culture derived from his literary activities and his European travel, both of which began in the prewar period. In Vologda exile in 1907-1909, where he finished middle school, he began to write a novella about a Russian intelligent of revolutionary sympathies who idealized workers from afar. The manuscript was seized by the gen- darmes before Arosev fled abroad at the end of 1909. In Belgium he continued active party work but also found time to take literature and philosophy classes at the University of Liege (later, in Petrograd in 1916, he was also a student at the Psychoneurological Institute). The spring of 1910 found him in Paris, where he stayed on and off until 1914. The period of his European emigration was the time he learned French and pursued his literary activity. He presented hisjuvenilia to Maksim Gor'kii during a side trip to his villa on the island of Capri, then a center of Bolshevik activity. In Paris, he later reported, he decided to work as a mason in order to es-

14. Ibid., 11. 4-14; Aroseva and Maksimova, Bez grima, 28-30, 32-33, 86; Natal'ia Aroseva, Sled na zemle: Dokumental'naia povest' ob ottse (Moscow, 1987), 146-65; Trachenko, "Sled na zemle," 4-9.

15. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, ed. khr. 695, 1. 1, Arosev to Stalin, 20 June 1924. On Arosev's work at the Lenin Institute, see Chernobaev, Vvikhre veka, 135- 47.

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cape the intelligentsia milieu (intelligentshchina), but his stint at manual labor only lasted two weeks before he became unemployed. This episode again suggests a degree of discomfort with his cultural side.16

Arosev's second European sojourn came during his work as a diplomat in the 1920s. It is unclear why Arosev left the Lenin Institute and was sent abroad, but 1924 marked the beginning of eight years of diplomatic work in Europe. Despite his political credentials, as a diplomat living abroad for such an extended period Arosev also acquired in Soviet terms a faintly unorthodox aura. After all, it was to the diplomatic corps that many opposi- tionists were sent in the 1920s in order to remove them from the domestic political struggle, and the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs was a state

agency frequently resented in communist and Comintern circles. Militant communists viewed with suspicion the Soviet who lived abroad, wearing black tie, and practicing the traditionally aristocratic art of diplomacy.17 In 1924 Arosev returned to Paris as the second secretary of the Soviet em-

bassy and head of the press bureau. After France recognized the Soviet Union diplomatically in 1924, Arosev, in a ceremony on 14 December 1924, raised the hammer and sickle over the Soviet embassy in the presence of members of the Soviet colony in Paris, including Il'ia Erenburg and Vladimir Maiakovskii.18 Arosev was then posted in many European countries, becoming adviser to the ambassador in Stockholm in 1926 and the ambassador to Latvia in 1927, along with brief stints in the other Baltic countries, Poland, and Hungary. From 1929 to 1932 he was the Soviet ambassador to Prague. From there, according to his daughter Ol'ga, he traveled frequently to Vienna and around Europe in his automobile so that his children "would succeed in knowing and loving Europe." Another

daughter, Natal'ia, also remembered her father repeatedly professing his love for France: "Sometimes you fall in love with a foreign country.... You love it like a beautiful woman. Your homeland you love like a mother.

Completely different sentiments! My father frequently said that for France he would even work paving the roads with stones."19 In Prague, Arosev re-

portedly declaimed Silver Age poetry at cultural gatherings at the ambassador's villa, but this time his revolutionary side evidently haunted him; by the time of his recall as ambassador to Czechoslovakia he voiced disdain at the "ladies, smiles, senseless conversations . . . lying eyes" he saw in

diplomatic high society.20 Arosev's literary career also marked him in generational terms. As

a young writer he belonged to a cohort-including other young communists of "pen and sword," Iurii Libidinskii and Aleksandr Tarasov- Rodianov-that came to the fore following the revolutionary-military convulsions of the civil war. In 1920, Arosev turned back to literary activ-

16. RGASPI, f. 124, op. 1, ed. khr. 80, 11. 5-6 ("Arosev, Aleksandr Iakovlevich"); see also Trachenko, "Sled na zemle," 7-8; Chernobaev, Vvikhre veka, 30.

17. Dullin, Des hommes d'influences, 9, 76-78, 101-7. 18. Popov, "Arosev," 85. 19. Aroseva, Sled na zemle, 167. 20. Aroseva and Maksimova, Bez grima, 47. Diary entry from 7 November 1932. See

also Chernobaev, Vvikhre veka, 157-58, 166.


ity as he headed the State Publishing House in Ukraine. Between 1920 and 1933, he published collections of short stories, novellas, and novels in leading Sovietjournals and publishing houses, but the early 1920s can be considered the height of his literary career.21 Why this was the case forms a key facet of his ongoing internal duel between culture and politics and explains his sense of failure as a writer in the 1930s.

Historians of Soviet literature have not been kind in their assessments of Arosev's literary talents. Robert Maguire thought his 1927 short story one of the two poorest pieces ever published in Aleksandr Voronskii's prominent thickjournal, Krasnaia nov' although Maguire has a somewhat more positive assessment of his earlier work.22 The recent Russian critic V. V. Popov does not hide his low estimation of Arosev's largely autobiographical short stories and novellas of the 1920s: "in these uncomplicated accountings of what the author saw and experienced there was almost no plot ... as before there were almost no sharply defined, distinct main characters.... As a writer [Arosev] did not change his party positions, the topics of his works, or his authorial strategies."23 These and more extended critiques of Arosev's writing by both scholars draw directly on the literary criticism of the 1920s, particularly Voronskii's mixed assessment discussed below. Yet other contemporary critics were even more dismis- sive. A review by Mikhail Levidov in the first number of Lef claimed that Arosev had no use for "form": he knew so much Wahrheit, Levidov noted sarcastically, that he did not need Dichtung at all. Hardly even a belletrist, Arosev was at best a good memoirist and compiler of protocols.24 As we shall see in the next section, Arosev's disregard for plot and "belletristic" elements are not simply connected to a lack of literary talent but to his pioneering work in a documentary and memoiristic mode linked to the "sketch." Considered by many litterateurs to be a lowly, popularizing genre, the sketch provided Arosev with a medium to convey political messages and psychological dilemmas embedded in the recent history of the revolution. Here we can note several features of Arosev's literary oeuvre that are crucial for understanding his future course.

Arosev was one of the first Soviet writers to depict the figure of the communist in his works. He did so, according to Popov, in ways that were far more "attractive" to the political leadership than the sometimes omi- nous allusions of the literary fellow-travelers, the nonparty writers prominent in the 1920s. Because of the stature he accorded Bolshevik heroes taking part in recent revolutionary history, Arosev fell into the camp of proletarian writers, a designation that had nothing to do with the writers' social background (or even the concept of proletarian culture, which Arosev rejected) and everything to do with ideological messages and po-

21. For a bibliography of his works published between 1920 and 1933, see "Spisok knig A. Ia. Aroseva, izdannykh pri ego zhizni," in Arosev, Belaia lestnitsa, 555.

22. Robert A. Maguire, Red Virgin Soil: Soviet Literature in the 1920' (1968; reprint Evanston, 2000), 317, 319, referring to Arosev, "Na zemle pod solntsem," Krasnaia nov' 1927, no. 9.

23. Popov, "Arosev," 85. 24. Mikhail Levidov, "O piatnatsati-trista strok," Lef, 1923, no. 1:247.

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litical commitment. In part because these were deemed most novel in the

early 1920s, Arosev made his greatest literary impact in the period from 1921 to 1924. Popov explains one reason for this: "Arosev, who held and remained at high party posts from the beginning of the revolution, pos- sessed one advantage in comparison to other writers-a thorough knowl-

edge of the life of the leaders of the country and almost unlimited access to much and varied information, something that he constantly utilized and that was immediately noted by critics."25 Arosev's prominent backer of this period, Voronskii, noted that his gifts were not "descriptive"-his works lacked plot and subject, his characters were not precisely drawn, and everything appeared hastily composed. But his genuine calling as a writer lay in his ability to convey the "moods, doubts, and spiritual move- ments" of his Bolshevik heroes. More than merely an autobiographical writer, Arosev was thus a "memoirist of inner-party spiritual conditions."26 But Voronskii's critical praise of Arosev and other "proletarian" writers

evaporated after 1925 as their subject matter became less important to him.27 This shift lies behind Arosev's acute sense in the 1930s that his lit-

erary career had ended in failure. Yet as Arosev drew on his political side to further his own cultural ca-

reer in the early 1920s, he was plagued here as well by a persistent association with unorthodoxy. Arosev shared with his literary cohort a propen- sity to depict something terribly strained, tormented, or wrong about his communist heroes' internal life: "such is the neurasthenic Bolshevik (a stock character in this early fiction, despite vigorous protests from Bolshe- vik critics that he was 'untypical') like ... Arosev's Terentii Zabytyi, whose tormented visions of unconsummated love induce narcosis."28 Arosev's

Bolsheviks, then, were at once heroic men of energy and discipline and

psychologically wounded party intellectuals. A character frequently en- countered in his fiction is "the intellectual who is painfully aware of his inner alienation from the revolution, although he is himself its creator and

organizer."29 In the 1920s, Arosev's revolutionary intellectual amidst the

proletarian mass was awkward and tormented, no less than the cultured,

Europeanized Old Bolshevik intellectual would be in the Stalinist 1930s. This dualistic depiction of disciplined revolutionary organizers who

are simultaneously tortured souls turned Arosev into the object of militant critics' ire. Voronskii went out of his way to rebut detractors of the early 1920s who saw Arosev's communist characters as "Hamletized" and his

intelligentsia orientation "saturated" with a "degenerate spirit."30 Accord-

25. Ibid., 84; on the three proletarian writers, EdwardJ. Brown, Russian Literature since the Revolution, rev. and enl. ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 110-22.

26. A. Voronskii, Na styke (sbornik statei) (Moscow, 1923), 156-64. 27. Maguire, Red Virgin Soil, 232. 28. Ibid., 93, referring to Arosev, Zapiski Terentiia Zabytogo ("Strada"): Povest' (Berlin,

1922); Popov, "Arosev," 85. For a different perspective on the "profound ambivalence" of this work, see Michael Gorham, Speaking in Soviet Tongues: Language Culture and the Politics

of Voice in Revolutionary Russia (DeKalb, 2003), 95-100. I am grateful to Michael Gorham for sharing relevant chapters of the book before its publication.

29. Viacheslav Zavalishin, Early Soviet Writers (Freeport, N.Y, 1958), 208. 30. Voronskii, Na styke, 157.

742


ing to one typically severe party critic at the time, "Arosev concentrates too much on the doubts, backwardness, internal dualities [razdvoennosti v dushakh] of communist activists.... They and the author regret too much of themselves and each other, they have too many longings and doubts."31 It is impossible not to reflect on the implications of this fact: after Arosev turned from literature to his political career as head of VOKS during the Popular Front, his personal diary, his only literary outlet by that time, expressed the same kind of tormented doubts about his own life that his autobiographical yet fictional communists expressed in his literary output of the 1920s.

In still another way, Arosev's activities as a cultural diplomat in the 1930s were linked to his literary career of the previous decade. Arosev may have risen to prominence as a proletarian writer preoccupied with political themes, but he was simultaneously a patron of Russian literary fellow- travelers of those years. He reportedly helped secure publishing opportunities for such writers, notably for Erenburg's novels Trest D. E.: Istoriia gibeli Evropy and Zhizn' i gibel'Nikolaia Kurbova. The party chose him, along with Voronskii, to open the publishing house and literary almanac Krug (Circle), which was intended to give publishing opportunities to literary fellow-travelers unable to publish elsewhere; the goal was to make them more communist, although in practice it provided a significant outlet for patronage.32 Arosev's admiration for the Russian literary fellow-travelers of the 1920s foreshadows his admiration for the European political fellow- travelers whom he met and wooed in the 1930s. In both instances, he strove to remain politically orthodox while admiring brilliant men of culture.

Among the proletarian writers of the 1920s, Arosev stands out as ex- ceptional for his extensive European experience. The literary camp to which he belonged, according to one scholar, "had few contacts in Eu- rope" and was "on the whole exclusively Russian in culture and out- look."33 Arosev's love for the west, about which we have seen several sources speak, was in time complemented by his love affair with a young foreigner: in Prague, Arosev chose as his second wife the twenty-two-year- old Gertrude Freund, whom he brought back to Moscow with him in late 1932. In the context of the 1930s, as we shall see, this could be seen as a most literal symbol of an unsavory union with the west.34 Stalin, in his half- joking, half-deadly manner, told Arosev when he met with him on a trip back to Moscow in 1929 that the diplomat had become "as polite as a bourgeois" (po-burzhuaznomu vezhliv). Arosev did his best to deflect this bit of barbed banter in his next letter by denouncing the Soviet diplomatic

31. Popov, "Arosev," citing G. Gorbachev, Ocherki sovremennoi russkoi literatury (Lenin- grad, 1925), 78.

32. On Krug and Arosev's literary patronage in the 1920s, see Maguire, Red Virgin Soil, 32; Popov, "Arosev," 84; Trachenko, "Sled na zemle," 14-16. Both Erenburg novels were published in Berlin by Gelikon in 1923; Trest D. E. was issued the next year in Khar'kov by Gosizdat Ukrainy (which Arosev headed in 1920) and Zhizn' i gibel' Nikolaia Kurbova was published in Moscow in 1923.

33. Brown, Russian Literature, 151. 34. Aroseva and Maksimova, Bez grima, 12; Aroseva, Sled na zemle, 225-27.

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corps to Stalin as a bunch of cautious "old women."35 Yet his diary records his internal unease that his work in politics and the cultural bureaucracy had contributed to his failure as a writer. He urged his children to pursue the success in art that he felt he had never achieved.36

"To the West": A Fictional Train Ride

Arosev's second period of European travel after 1924 left a noticeable im-

print on his literary output, as his 1925 collection of short stories, Moscow- Paris, became the first of several works with "western" themes and set-

tings.37 The first short story of this collection, "Na Zapad (ocherk)" (To the west [a sketch]), is especially worthy of analysis because it deals with

conceptions of the west and Soviet behavior abroad. Like his other fiction, the stories in Moscow-Paris make mention of real people and contemporary events that Arosev witnessed. Like his earlier output, "To the West"- an account of a train ride recounted by the narrator, presumably Arosev, from the USSR to Paris-is laden with ideological messages. Here too there is no real plot or character development; rather, the train is an ideal

setting for his kaleidoscopic descriptions of travelers going west, allowing the narrator to describe various Soviet and western social and political types. The train, often the symbol of technological advance and the road to communism, is recast as a vehicle for the Soviet encounter with Europe.

Arosev's preoccupation with the genre of the sketch in the 1920s is

interesting and significant. Since its origins in the late eighteenth century, "the genre constituted a generic mix of journalistic documentation

(freely borrowing from the language of the press, science, and statistics) and prose, most often employing a realist style and an eyewitness first-

person narrator loosely associated with the sketch writer." It often described the non-Russian borderlands, and in the 1920s a "rural focus stands out."38 Arosev, then, took a genre focused on the backward domestic other and trained it on the west. Because the sketch stood between

journalism and literature and required a minimum of literary technique, it was favored by novice writers; because of its ability to showcase Soviet themes for mass audiences, in the late 1920s it was "most directly and

forcefully recast as a mechanism for promoting the ideas, goals, and lan-

guage of the party-state."39 Arosev can thus be seen as a pioneer in using the ideological potentialities of the sketch to depict the west.

In "To the West" Arosev focuses on the improper actions and miscon-

ceptions about the "west" of a dubious nonparty intellectual, the Soviet artist "V." In the course of the train ride, the reader encounters a number of foreigners, all of whom are typecast by their relationship to the Soviet Union: anti-Soviet Lithuanians, an "Anglicized lady" representing a

wealthy, pro-Soviet liberal. But in the midst of these more fleeting en-

35. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, ed. khr. 695, 11. 2-4, Arosev to Stalin, 3 December 1929. 36. Aroseva and Maksimova, Bez grima, 84. 37. Notably Arosev, Senskie berega: Roman (Moscow, 1928). 38. Gorham, Speaking in Soviet Tongues, 152. 39. Ibid., 153.


counters it is V's misconceptions on which the sketch focuses: "In the restaurant car I became acquainted with artist V, who was traveling abroad somehow without concrete plans, to what city it was uncertain, for the amorphous but noble goal of studying the contemporary art of the west. Along with this, he imagined the west, as it seemed to me, not as a variety of countries, greedily jostling one another on the same European penin- sula, but as some sort of definite point to which he was striving." The intellectual, then, harbors a subjective idea of the west that is an over- simplified and apolitical mirage. It soon becomes clear that the artist who holds this conception of the west is politically and ideologically suspect in all sorts of ways. Half-drunk, he even sketches a likeness of Lev Trotskii (who in 1925 was being heavily condemned as the leader of a petit bourgeois deviation). V. is all too obviously guilty of behavior unbecoming of a Soviet abroad. In a symbolic moment as the train crosses the Soviet border into Lithuania, the artist has downed his fifth glass of vodka: "Under our very eyes the peaceful Soviet citizen degenerated." The last words of the story imply that V's concept of a single west is based on outward appearances: "Gradually everything became more comfortable, the world was transformed somehow in a European way. Even the artist V. disappeared. Perhaps he believed that he had already reached that point which he so definitively called the west."40 The artist's political and behavioral deviations are thus linked to his erroneous notion of the west, for him an imaginary construct that, it is implied, he admires too personally and too much.41 By questioning the artist's mythical west, Arosev challenges the notion of a single monolithic west (the personal quest of the disreputable intellectual). As an alternative, the narrator inserts the view of Europe as a variety of rival capitalist ("greedilyjostling") countries.

In "To the West," the west is also portrayed as a dangerous place, as il- lustrated by the aggressive behavior of anti-Soviet Lithuanians (who shout at the travelers "Bolshevik scum!"). Yet in spite of these warnings, the very opening of the story, which looks forward in time to the moment the So- viet passengers disembark in Paris, provides an intriguing hint that the narrator's ideological certainty is undermined by a perception of inferiority in the face of an advanced and wealthy Europe. As the Soviet passengers arrive, they suddenly realize how different they are: "We looked at ourselves, at our Soviet suits, at our galoshes. More than anything else for some reason the galoshes started to jump out at us. Is this not the Tatar heritage?"42 Here, as elsewhere, Arosev uses "Tatar," "Scythian," "Asiatic," not in a positive or Eurasianist sense, but in a context directly linked to backwardness and inferiority. While the bulk of the story serves to differ- entiate the trustworthy narrator from the unsavory artist, in this passage all the Soviet travelers are united at the outset in their sense of difference. Yet Arosev, probably deliberately, leaves his own conclusion about "cultured" Europe unresolved: is the invocation of the Tatar heritage merely

40. Aleksandr Arosev, "Na Zapad," in Moskva-Parizh (Leningrad, 1925), 3-9. 41. Cf. the treatment of national stereotypes in Arosev, "Amerikanets v Evrope," in

Arosev, Belaia lestnitsa, 512-24. 42. Arosev, "Na Zapad," 3.

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a call to overcome stereotypes that really have to do with material inferi-

ority (such as poor-quality clothing)? Or is it a realization of deeper, un-

derlying differences in Russian and European history? Even this didactic sketch aimed at a mass Soviet readership, then, leaves us with a hint of Arosev's own ambivalence.

Intimate Admiration: Western Motifs in Arosev's Diary In striking contrast, our author articulates his most unabashedly positive depictions of the west in a diary written for himself and posterity. As a source, the diary is as problematic as it is fascinating. Arosev began to write what eventually became ten notebooks and folders on 28 September 1932, and by the diary's last year, 1937, the old underground conspirator was

composing them in code. The diary remained hidden until 1956, when Arosev was officially rehabilitated, in an old chest in the corridor of his sis- ter's Leningrad communal apartment. Arosev's diary has never been published in full, but in 1999 Arosev's daughter, the actress Ol'ga Aroseva, published a chapter of excerpts along with her own memoirs. In that vol- ume, portions of the diary entries from 1932 to late 1936 were published nonchronologically, with occasional short commentaries. Because her father is clearly a central figure in Aroseva's own autobiography, one must wonder about all the factors that went into her selections-and in partic- ular, whether Arosev's criticisms of the 1930s order were featured over his

political activities and convictions as a mid-level Stalinist cultural official. As we shall see, the archival record helps us to address this problem.43

Arosev writes repeatedly about his motivations for keeping the diary. He frequently mentions his fear of death, his desire to leave his thoughts for his children and future generations, his loneliness, and his desire to cultivate his creative (as opposed to his official political) side. Here is his

entry of 6 March 1935: "Akh, diary of mine! I write it as my terrible evaluation [otchet] before myself and no one. I write in the evenings, when

everything quiets down and the past becomes transparent. I really do not have time to keep a diary.... This need to write-it is because I am so

completely immature, a failure, and lonely." On 4 December of the same

year, he speaks of his descendants as a future audience: "My diary is an at-

tempt to continue to live after death.... The closer I move toward the de-

nouement, the more sincerely and accurately I keep notes. ... It will be

good if one of my heirs will study the diaries and do something useful." On 13 August 1936 he appears to flirt with suicide: "These pages are my laboratory of thought. My thought of thoughts is of death. It dictates my diary notes ... I want to throw myself into the secret of nonexistence."44 Unlike some diarists in the Stalin era, the old revolutionary seems to have written in confidence of secrecy, for himself and for posterity.

43. A number of different diary entries, moreover, are cited throughout Chernobaev, V vikhre veka, and in "Aleksandr Iakovlevich Arosev," Istoriia SSSR, no. 4 (1967): 111-20.

44. Arosev, diary entries from 6 March 1935, 4 December 1935, and 13 August 1936, in Aroseva and Maksimova, Bez grima, 73-75.


The diary establishes Arosev's sense of belonging to a revolutionary generation that preceded the generation of the 1930s. The available entries never give any indication that his commitment to socialism, Marxism, or the fundamentals of the Soviet order is less than complete. Yet his generational identity is frequently invoked when he strongly criticizes Soviet political developments of the 1930s. For example, after a reunion of red partisans in 1934 he recorded that these were "feeling" people with "poetry inside." But he frequently felt that the enormous turnover of cadres during Stalin's Great Break of the late 1920s had diminished a great heritage. Earlier the same year he heard that Anatolii Lunacharskii, the Old Bolshevik intellectual and Soviet Russia's first commissar of enlighten- ment from 1917 to 1929, had been dismissed from the presidium of the Central Executive Committee. Although Lunacharskii had been ailing since 1932, for Arosev the move was obviously a political act. "It is nothing other than a struggle against old party members and true revolutionaries," Arosev commented, seeing it as a phenomenon that illuminated difficul- ties in his own political career. From his return to Moscow in Novem- ber 1932 to his appointment to VOKS in March 1934, Arosev remained without any kind of official position and, almost certainly as a result, found it temporarily impossible to publish in the press. This was a humil- iation he never forgot. In light of what had happened to Lunacharskii, "my own unemployment became more comprehensible."45 His diary entries from this period are often bitter, and he noted many negative changes in Moscow life upon his return. "Moscow, my native Moscow!" he exclaimed. "I was in the office of the Moscow Soviet, where we led the uprising. Now it is just another mind-numbing chancellery [umootupliaiushchaia kantse- liariia]." Without a secure political position, Arosev found, people were "treating me as alien [delaiut chuzhim]," something he attributed to "bureaucratic cowardice" and "the cautious defensiveness [zamknutnosti] with which everyone lives." But after Stalin appointed him to his new post in 1934, he expressed positive sentiments that seem to echo Stalin's cate- chistic question-and-answer style: "Moscow is being heroically transformed. New tall buildings. Wide squares. Will it remain socialist? Yes, it will remain socialist, undoubtedly, but it will have to be defended."46 Arosev also expressed admiration for Stalin's five-hour speech to the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934, writing in his diary on 26 January: "He spoke unhurriedly, as if conversing. He was witty. The more he spoke, the closer he became to the audience. Ovations. Explosions of laughter. Full-blooded. But a practical, working speech."47

Part of the political credo that can be deduced from the diary was Arosev's embrace of collectivism, which he clearly tied to his revolutionary identity. He composed his "testament" to his children between Janu- ary and August 1935:

45. Arosev, diary entries from 7 October 1934 and 3 January 1934, in Aroseva and Maksimova, Bez grima, 74, 79-80.

46. Arosev, diary entries from 5 November 1932, 24 October 1933, 9 December 1933, and 28 September 1934, in Aroseva and Maksimova, Bez grima, 46, 49, 50-51, 73.

47. Arosev, diary entry from 26January 1934, in Chernobaev, Vvikhre veka, 178.

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First of all, children, do not live as I have. I was insufficiently courageous toward myself. Feeling great artistic forces (to make literature, act on the stage), I somehow trampled that inside me.... Fear makes a man a beast, lack of fear makes him God. So let this connect you, and strongly: love for man, hatred of what oppresses him, and joy in the struggle for another life, a higher one than that of today.... Continue the revolutionary line [rod] ... Trust the collective and test yourself against the collective.... In any case, however, you will live in a time when the collective will play a much greater role than it does in ours.48

Whatever antagonisms he felt between the revolutionary and the 1930s

generation, Arosev at this important moment mixed utopian hopes for the future carriers of Soviet collectivism with his personal homily.

After the news of the first major Moscow trial in August 1936, in which sixteen Old Bolsheviks stood accused, Arosev was deeply shaken. On 13 August he wrote: "The times in which we live are exceptionally terrible. No one believes anybody else.... Everyone is afraid of one another and

everyone looks furtively. No one talks about the main things." Three days later the "zig-zags" in which "revolutionaries have become reactionaries" reminded him of something out of Fedor Dostoevskii. On 22 August 1936 he wrote, "I am afraid that I myself will end up the victim of slanderers. I was very trusting." In political terms, then, the diary suggests that Arosev harbored reservations about the 1930s order that deepened in 1936.49 In his conception of a cultural crisis in the Soviet Union, however, he went so far as to invert the official claim of Soviet cultural superiority. If in Eu-

rope there was an economic crisis, "here there is a crisis of culture" due to the low cultural level of the new generation. Even as he turned the official

orthodoxy about Soviet cultural superiority on its head, then, he shared the reasoning behind the Soviet drive for "culturedness."50 Yet ignorance of European culture and mores was also part of the crisis he perceived, and he hardly exempted political elites from criticism. Arosev talked of the "ignorance that is characteristic for almost all of today's cultural offi- cials [tepereshnikh kul'trabotnikov]" and became embarrassed by party leaders' lack of polish in the presence of foreigners. For example, when he and others showed up in tails to a dinner hosted by the deputy commissar of foreign affairs, he felt that Bolshevik leaders, like the visitors to Paris

wearing galoshes in "To the West," stood out from their civilized sur-

roundings. "[Anastas] Mikoian in a white shirt ... [Grigorii] Kaminskii

simply in a dirty blue coat. One trouser leg was lifted up above his sock." Arosev railed against his countrymen especially when he saw them in the

presence of foreign onlookers-or in his entries from abroad, when travel heightened his critical ruminations on the impressions Soviets

48. Aroseva and Maksimova, Bez grima, 84-85. 49. Arosev, diary entries from 13, 16, 22 August 1936, 5 September 1936, and 22 De-

cember 1936, in Aroseva and Maksimova, Bez grima, 73-76. 50. Arosev, diary entries from 6 August 1933, 14June 1934, and 24 October 1933, in

Aroseva and Maksimova, Bez grima, 48, 52, 72. See also 63. On the "culturedness" cam-

paign, see Kelly, Refining Russia, 230-311.


made on western observers. In Paris at the end of 1935, Arosev wrote that a Soviet literary delegation "brought in such lies and stupidities that the French blushed.... You could have brought twelve stools instead of twelve writers from the USSR, and the effect would have been the same." The "red count" Aleksei Tolstoi was "primitive" in the "social realm" and was "capable of ruining things more than an illiterate peasant [muzhik]." A Soviet diplomat-who, incidentally, occupied the prized Paris posting Arosev had never been able to recover in the late 1920s and 1930s-came in for special condemnation: "What can a nitwit [tupitsa] like S. feel and understand?"51 According to his daughter, Arosev frequently referred to Stalin as "the Asiatic" (Okh, aziat, aziat!).52

Arosev considered his March 1934 appointment to VOKS, which focused on influencing foreign noncommunist intellectuals through cultural and scholarly relations, as a demotion from his previous diplomatic posts. In one 1934 outburst, he referred to himself disparagingly as the So- viet Union's maitre d'hotel, demanding to know: "Why am I-VOKS? Why do I have to make sure that in Paris they receive books, say, on chemistry from us, and we from them?" His frustration at doing petty bureaucratic tasks and dispensing "rotten and toothless smiles" was exacerbated by the sense that it had deprived him of the cultural creativity he admired in leading western intellectuals.53

While the organs of Soviet cultural diplomacy throughout the interwar years cultivated a highly utilitarian tone when discussing foreign visitors behind closed doors, Arosev used his diary to express a strong personal attraction to fellow-traveling luminaries whom he met. In 1934 Arosev wrote that he felt he could do little to aid such "friends of the USSR" as Andre Gide or the physicist Paul Langevin, who were overcom- ing the same kind of tortured doubts he identified in other intellectuals, including himself. Using that key term wavering, without which Arosev could hardly analyze the intelligentsia, he called them "full of bucolic love for us; they came to us not without intellectual suffering and wavering ... Coming over to us was a great risk."54 From 1934 to 1936 Arosev traveled several times to Europe; in summer 1935, for example, he met extensively with Sovietophilic intellectuals in France, England, and Switzerland. After a June 1935 meeting with George Bernard Shaw and other British intellectuals at Lady Nancy Astor's place, Arosev almost exulted: "I came away with many observations, the impression these people imparted was deep. They are simple yet not simple." Gide, whom he met at the end of 1934 in his Paris apartment, was "weighty... his ideas and philosophy are thick [gustaia], they flow slowly and heavily." Victor Marguerite was lauded in

51. Arosev, diary entry from [no day] December 1935, in Aroseva and Maksimova, Bez grima, 61-63.

52. Aroseva and Maksimova, Bez grima, 37. 53. Arosev, diary entries from 26 September 1934 and 23 September 1934, in Aroseva

and Maksimova, Bez grima, 64-65, 72-73; see also 45, 73, 75. 54. Arosev, diary entry from 26 September 1934, in Aroseva and Maksimova, Bez

grima, 65.

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traditional intelligentsia terms, comfirming his stature as a "great artist":

"Internally terribly far from philistinism [meshchanstva]."55 The fellow-traveler to whom Arosev was closest, and whom he ad-

mired the most, was the French writer Romain Rolland. On 7 January 1935 he wrote a euphoric entry from Rolland's Swiss villa: "Mountains, covered with forest and snow. A Geneva lake.... In the villa the smell of books and the garden. I slept well. And the conversations with this great man moved me completely. Everything changed from its place. One wants to work as the bird sings, that is, as he does. Simple. No, I have never breathed in the atmosphere of the work of thought and literature as here, at his place." Arosev came to understand that Rolland was fascinated with

revolutionary men of action in a manner that matched his own fascination with European fellow-travelers as creative men of culture. "[Rolland] again was interested in Stalin, Molotov, the life of revolutionaries under-

ground. I spoke about prison and exile." Upon departure, Rolland's Rus- sian wife, Mariia Kudasheva, told Arosev that this talk had made such an

impression on Rolland that the grand ecrivain had told her, "Look, you see how people struggled, and I have lived such an uninteresting life." Arosev then wished he could be more like Rolland himself: "And I have to admit that at these words ... I myself became ashamed. I consider my own life

boring and very 'external.' I would like to live the life of the mind just like him, if only to a thousandth part."56

In the midst of his trips to Paris, London, Prague and other European destinations in these years, Arosev expressed an acute awareness of western

perceptions of Soviets' cultural deficiencies. Writing again of leading French fellow-travelers in September 1934, Arosev went so far as to picture himself and all other Soviets through their eyes, and he regretted the

picture they saw was not a worthier one: "They cannot help but see in all of us the stamp of bureaucrats [chinovnikov], a certain pallor and wooden- ness in our faces." He appears to regret Stalin-era suspiciousness of out- siders: "And we give little to them. We are even obliged, it seems, to be a little afraid of them."57 In this formulation, Arosev included himself.

"Conversations and Meetings with Our Friends in Europe"

Arosev's other accounts of his travels to Europe in the mid-1930s are in some respects similar but often significantly different from his diary. For

example, his descriptions of figures such as Gide and Rolland, the circumstances of their meetings, and even specific phrases used are at cer-

55. Arosev, diary entries from 18July 1935 and [no day] December 1934, in Aroseva and Maksimova, Bez grima, 70, 66-67.

56. Arosev, diary entry from 7 January 1935, in Aroseva and Maksimova, Bez grima, 67- 69. For a full-length consideration of Rolland's Sovietophilia, see Michael David-Fox, "The 'Heroic Life' of a Friend of Stalinism: Romain Rolland and Soviet Culture" (unpublished manuscript).

57. Arosev, diary entry from 26 September 1934, in Aroseva and Maksimova, Bez grima, 65.


tain points similar or identical in his diary, in unpublished records of public speeches, and in widely disseminated published writings. This only makes the divergences more apparent, and it is the differences and their significance that I would like to establish and analyze here.

On 4 May 1935 Arosev presented a talk to the Foreign Section of the Union of Soviet Writers entitled "Meetings and Conversations with the Most Prominent Representatives of the West European Intelligentsia." The Foreign Section had emerged in the mid-1930s as one of the major players in Soviet cultural diplomacy. Staffed by a talented and energetic group of Soviet writers, it carried on a massive correspondence with foreign literary figures, became a key host for visiting literary intellectuals, and managed Soviet involvement in international leftist and antifascist literary initiatives. It certainly eclipsed VOKS in political significance; although it was limited to literary affairs, literary figures had pride of place among the most celebrated foreign "friends of the USSR." Arosev was a member of the commission's administration (pravlenie), and much of his talk held the form of a briefing summarizing his recent travel experiences to his colleagues.

To this official gathering Arosev was able to express great admiration for the western "friends," but in a different and more qualified way than in the effusive personal outpourings of his diary. He set the tone for an unusually favorable evaluation almost immediately: "One must say that among the intelligentsia there are brave people." He had concrete, positive things to say about almost each one of the dozen or so figures he touched on from his travels to Prague and Paris. For example, the leftist musicologist Zdenek Nejedly (later, after 1948, the Czechoslovak equivalent of Andrei Zhdanov, but at the time the loyally pro-Soviet head of the Czechoslovak Society of Friends of the New Russia) was portrayed admiringly as someone with "colossal influence," enormously energetic, ascetic, and reminiscent of a revolutionary intellectual from tsarist Russia.58 Gide's apartment was described reverently as the dwelling of a great man of letters (after Gide's "betrayal" a year later, when he criticized the Soviets in an account of his 1936 visit, Arosev scrambled to disassociate himself from the French writer). Here is the crux of Arosev's evaluation of Gide:

This man is very direct, he knows the worth of a word, his attitude toward the word is honest and economical, like [Nikolai] Gogol"s, he speaks little, and immediately began to ask how the Congress of Writers went, why the congress was necessary and how writers in the USSR are orga- nized. He took a very leftist position. He imagines the nature of the USSR quite well, but he is nonetheless French, a person of west European culture, he is an individualist. He has a superb knowledge of our culture. The question of society and the individual, the collective and the self, the

58. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (RGALI), f. 631, op. 14, ed. khr. 3, 11. 2, 4-5 ("Stenogramma doklada A. Ia. Aroseva 'O vstrechakh i besedakh s vidneishimi predstaviteliami zapadno-evropeiskoi intelligentsii' 4-go maia 1935 g.").

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organization and independence of creative work-this is the basic question that preoccupies Andr6 Gide. ... His entire apartment, the entire milieu gave me the impression of a laboratory of thought.59

In this passage, Arosev was qualifying a strongly expressed admiration

("laboratory of thought" was the phrase he used to describe his own di-

ary) by inscribing his impressions of his meetings abroad into a broader

interpretive framework-that of the western intellectual caught between two dichotomous choices, one close to Soviet or communist positions and the other close to bourgeois traits. Thus Gide wavers between individual- ism and collectivism, creative independence and organizational disci-

pline. A similar Soviet Marxist schema informed Arosev's treatment even of his beloved Rolland, whom he twice described in this Union of Writers' talk as a "genius."60 Rolland was portrayed as caught between "two poles," one bourgeois and one socialist-in his case, a lingering pacifism and the embrace of social revolution. '"You surely understand," Arosev told his audience, "that the process of polarization which the intelligentsia is now ex-

periencing, split between fascism and socialism, cannot but express itself in the psyche [v dushe] of this complex and sensitive man."61

In putting his own dealings with these western intellectuals into a broader class analysis of the intelligentsia, Arosev was adapting what would have been immediately recognizable to his audience as one of the great Soviet orthodoxies about the intelligentsia as a social group. In the Soviet Marxist class narrative the intelligentsia was a "wavering" entity, elements of which could be drawn to the camp of either the proletariat or the bour-

geoisie. This framework formed one of the major vehicles for connecting evaluations of individual foreigners to Soviet ideological principles.

Arosev framed his Union of Writers' report with this Marxist-Leninist "axiom." His latest travel in Europe confirmed that the continent was in-

creasingly dominated by the single struggle between fascism and social-

ism, which determined the conditions of life in the west. At the end of his

speech he related these two poles to the wavering European intellectual. It is often said that a given westerner "sympathizes" with us or "is striving toward us," he declared, but what did that really mean? "After all, even

sympathy is not especially sympathetic if it is alien to our psychology." What determined western intellectuals' failure to understand the USSR, he continued, was their lack of ideological monolithism: "We all, from

great to small, good to bad, have a point of view on life; each writer has a

point of view on what he writes and what others write. He knows for whom he writes. This is the most important characteristic of our times and it dis-

tinguishes us from the west European intelligentsia. They do not have a

point of view because they came out of that class which does not have a future. The bourgeoisie does not have a unified ideology."62 Arosev did not

59. Ibid., 11. 16-17. 60. Ibid., 1. 22. 61. Ibid., 1. 20. 62. Ibid., 11. 22-23.

Aleksandr Arosev ' Literary and Political Depictions of Europe

reflect on how this profound deficiency among western intellectuals, confirmed by class analysis, could be reconciled with the admirable and even heroic qualities he attributed to those intellectuals he admiringly described. But even if the tones clashed, the two strands of his speech could be reconciled: those "brave" members of the western intelligentsia formed that segment that gravitated toward Soviet socialism.

Arosev's pamphlet, Conversations and Meetings with Our Friends in Eu- rope, published in a 1935 edition of 50,000 copies, forms another point on the continuum of his depiction of the west. In this work, in which Arosev returns to the genre of the sketch, his personal admiration for European intellectuals is cut to a minimum. Figures such as Nejedly are praised, but their positive traits consist almost entirely of their recognition of the So- viet Union as a superior system to be emulated. Here, when he conveys his conversations, Arosev's Soviet views are contrasted to the Europeans' lack of understanding. Gide, for example, cannot grasp the need for central- ized writers' organizations, while Arosev instructs him about writers who perish not only intellectually but physically if they isolate themselves from social and political life.63 Because the pamphlet is geared toward a mass audience, the theme of the wavering intelligentsia is presented even more forcefully and crudely. Describing his visit to Bratislava, Arosev identifies one intellectual as "the new Hamlet" and relates what he allegedly said: "To tell you the truth, we [intellectuals] feel a great responsibility, but as a group we are devilishly passive, we are made up of 'to be or not to be,' we are Hamlets and our Hamletism is used by the fascists. The intelligentsia is necessary in practice for your Soviets and your socialism, and therefore your intelligentsia does not suffer from Hamletism."64 It will be recalled that party critics condemned Arosev's "Hamletized" Bolsheviks in his 1920s fiction; here, through a foreigner's voice, the Soviets are told they are superior because they lack the wavering intrinsic to the bourgeois intelligentsia.

A decade after "To the West," Arosev returned to the symbol of the train en route to Europe. The first chapter of Conversations and Meetings with OurFriends in Europe, devoted to a description of a train ride to War- saw, allows Arosev to convey a new kaleidoscope of impressions as the train hurtles westward. He brings out an important point overheard in a con- versation among Europeans about Russia and the west: "In general one must compare Russia, I mean Soviet Russia, not with France or England but with what Russia was before the revolution." The attribution of Soviet problems to the tsarist past was for a decade a cornerstone of VOKS's propaganda work with foreigners; here again it is confirmed for Arosev's Soviet audience through the mouth of a foreigner. Arosev closes the train ride with the thoughts of a young Russian girl trying to comprehend the difference between Europe and her homeland, which echoes in simplified form his argument to the Union of Writers about the European

63. Arosev, Besedy i vstrechy s nashimi druz'iami vEvrope (Moscow, 1935), 31-32. 64. Ibid., 13.

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bourgeoisie's lack of ideological unity. "I understand the difference now-said the girl- they are all running in various directions, and we are going in one, together."65

Dear losif Vissarionovich: Europe as an "Old Prostitute"

Arosev crafted yet another image of Europe in his frequently lengthy letters to Stalin, which number more than a dozen and are concentrated in two periods, the late 1920s to early 1930s and the Popular Front period from 1934 to 1936. During his time as a diplomat in Europe, news and evaluations of the situation abroad were what he could offer Stalin, along with his frequent pitches for personal meetings and promotions. In 1929, Arosev attempted to set up a personal, "party" channel to the top leadership. He used Molotov's name and his connections with him; he also recalled his three periods of exile in the revolutionary underground, when he heard "Stalin's name above all," and dangled the fact that he now had "data" on someone in the diplomatic corps who needed to be routed out and exposed. "Our diplomats to this day have assumed the roles of some sort of old women and have been overjoyed if everything was quiet .... Our red diplomacy is undergoing a crisis because it is led by people ... in- capable of understanding the psychology, the complex psychology of a leader of the state and revolution." Striving to create a link of revolutionary steeliness binding himself to Stalin as his agent in the diplomatic corps, Arosev closed by inviting Stalin to use him "more profoundly" and not merely for "bureaucratic work."66 He later told Stalin that his dismissal from diplomatic work in 1932 (which came after his marriage to a Czechoslovak citizen, a dispute with some Ukrainian coworkers in the Soviet embassy in Prague, and, apparently, dissatisfaction with him in the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and secret police) was a bureaucratic pay- back for his direct ties to the Politburo and its members.67

During the period of the first Five-Year Plan, when Arosev was ambassador to Prague, he used the opportunity to report to Stalin on European affairs-generally to confirm the success of Stalin's policies. "The trial of the Industrial Party created here a specific reaction: it began in the most

genuine way to divide the bourgeoisie, it created ... mistrust within them and fear of the danger of the growth of the socialist state." Arosev de-

ployed martial metaphors to portray himself encircled by hostile elements: "The [anti-Soviet] hostility that is now taking hold in [some] circles is not as broad, but on the other hand they are more decisive and evil. The bourgeois avant-garde is psychologically gathering itself against us. We are beginning to feel a little bit like at the front."68 The fear that Stalin

inspired in Europe was another recurring motif. In 1929 he told Stalin:

65. Ibid., 6. 66. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, ed. khr. 695, 11. 2-4, Arosev to Stalin, 12 March 1929. In

the original, the emphasized phrase was written in capital letters. 67. Ibid., 11. 107-8, Arosev to Stalin, 3 March 1934, emphasis in the original. 68. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, ed. khr. 695,1. 16, Arosev to Stalin, no date [1930].

Aleksandr Arosev ' Literary and Political Depictions of Europe

'Your report at the [Party] Congress created an enormous and positive impression for us in Europe. Never yet has the tone of a report at one of our congresses been so simple and commanding." Speaking on behalf of the entire continent, he concluded: "The factual data pronounced in this powerful tone terrified Europe (and undoubtedly America)." Arosev's conclusion about "our diplomacy": "We must start from the position that a clash between us and capitalism is inevitable."69 Other parts of Arosev's correspondence from these years also take the form of reports on the international situation, in which he assumes the world-historical perch of the Marxist-Leninist mezhdunarodnik: "Postwar Europe has ended," he wrote in one 1931 example that began with his theses on the "new phase" of capitalism, "and PRE-war Europe has begun."70 In mid-1931 Stalin apparently wrote Arosev a short note-the only indication, with the possible exception of several brief encounters in Moscow, that Stalin ever re- sponded to his messages. Arosev dashed back with effusive gratitude: "In some unknown way, no matter how short [your reply] was, it suddenly ex- plained a lot to me, gave me directions, expanded my vision, and fired my enthusiasm for work."71

This was the backdrop to Arosev's next letter ofJuly 1931, which seems extraordinary in light of everything else he wrote about Europe in his diary. It began prosaically enough, with Arosev pleading once again to be promoted to a "responsible post" in France. He next heightened the rhetoric of enmity and revolutionary war he had deployed previously: "[Soviet ambassadors] are the legal agents of the revolutionary Central Committee who are located in the most important nests of enemies of the USSR." Now using the coarse imagery of mastery and defiance that Stalin himself often preferred when speaking of the western powers, Arosev ended predicting the death of Europe: "The visit of Bernard Shaw to [the USSR] produced a genuine commotion in the minds of the miserable intelligentsia here. Their best, most admired representative turned out to be the messenger for the USSR and its wishes. Ekh, if only you could see in general the giant steps by which the old prostitute Europe is being de- stroyed."72 The pro-Soviet European intelligentsia he so clearly separated from capitalist Europe in the Union of Writers' lecture seems included in this sweeping condemnation.

In addition to letters to Stalin, Arosev left an archival record from the mid-1930s that confirms the picture of an ambitious and assertive (if not always successful) organizer. He deployed his ties to Molotov and Ezhov in matters ranging from his access to the internal Kremlin telephone system to his place in the tribunal on the Revolution Day parade.73 He frequently

69. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, ed. khr. 695, 11. 5-15, Arosev to Stalin, no date [1929]. 70. Ibid., 1. 16, Arosev to Stalin, 29 April 1931, emphasis in the original. 71. Ibid., 11. 56-57, Arosev to Stalin, 23 May 1931. 72. Ibid., 11. 59- 60, Arosev to Stalin, 31 July 1931. 73. RGASPI, f. 56, op. 1, d. 1013, 11. 1-2 ('A. Arosev, Pred. VOKS. Predsedateliu

Soveta narodnykh kommissarov-t. Molotovu, 13 fevralia 1935"); ibid., 11. 3, 4, letters to Litvinov and Ezhov, 17 November 1936; Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi federatsii, Mos- cow (GARF), f. R-5283, op. la, d. 308, 1. 47, Arosev to Ezhov, probably May 1936.

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tried to use his access to leading European fellow-travelers, such as his

weekly meetings with Henri Barbusse in 1934, as a tool in his ongoing at-

tempts to arrange audiences with Stalin.74 In 1935 he finally got his wish: he became responsible for accompanying Romain Rolland, then part of the creme de la creme of the antifascist, pro-Soviet intelligentsia, during Rolland's time in Moscow. Rolland's 29 June interview with Stalin repre- sents a symbolic moment in which Arosev's cultural and political aspirations collided: "the Asiatic" vozhd' met with the genius of the "progressive west" while Arosev, the cultured Soviet mediator, translated for them.

Stalin very quickly dashed Arosev's hopes that his European contacts could enhance his political standing. During the interview Stalin's suspi- cions were aroused by Arosev's translation. He appeared especially dubious about Rolland's unexpected proposal to keep the most loyal Euro-

pean "friends of the Soviet Union" informed about the latest twists and turns of Soviet policy by empowering a special institution specifically for that purpose. "Such an institution could be, for example, VOKS, if it were

given great political significance," Rolland told Stalin. The French writer

appeared to be meddling in Soviet cultural politics on the side of his friend Arosev.

"Are you adding this in on your own behalf?" Stalin immediately shot at the translator, Arosev.

"Not at all, not at all," Arosev, taken aback, replied. "I will now ask Ro- main Rolland to confirm this."75

There was a reason Rolland's seeming endorsement of a heightened role for VOKS may have seemed suspicious. Between 1935 and 1936 Aro- sev circulated to the Central Committee, to the Politburo, and to Stalin a

barrage of plans for VOKS's reorganization that would have, in the best traditions of party-state bureaucratic struggle, subordinated myriad other institutions involved in international cultural relations to his own agency. Imparting political and ideological stature to these arguments, Arosev re-

configured the familiar picture of the wavering intelligentsia in light of the rise of Nazism: a polarized west European intelligentsia was caught between communism and fascism, and fascist states were devoting massive resources to "international cultural expansion."76

In the course of 1936, the year the political witch-hunt of the Great

Purges commenced, Arosev sensed that a high-level "special regime" of

74. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, ed. khr. 695, 11. 156-57, 158-59, 160, Arosev to Stalin, 23 October 1934, 7July 1935, and 22January 1936.

75. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, ed. khr. 775,1. 3 ("Beseda t. Stalina s Romen Rollanom," 28 June 1935); Aroseva and Maksimova, Bez grima, 27-28. For a discussion of all the

documentary evidence on the meeting, see David-Fox, "The 'Heroic Life' of a Friend of Stalinism."

76. GARF, f. R-5283, op. la, d. 276, 11. 76-77 ("Sekretariu TsK VKP(b) tovarishchu Stalinu. Dokladnaia zapiska. O propagande sovetskoi kul'ture zagranitsei i razvitie raboty VOKS. 5/3/35"); GARF, f. R-5283, op. la, d. 308, 11. 59-64 ("Proekt dokladnoi zapiski v Politbiuro TsKVKP(b) o VOKS"e"); GARF, f. R-5283, op. la, d. 277,11. 99-104, ('V Otdel

kul't-prosvetitel'noi raboty TsK. Dokladnaia zapiska. A. Arosev," no later than Novem- ber 1935); GARF, f. R-5283, op. la, d. 276,1. 21, A. Arosev to L. M. Kaganovich, 25January 1935. He wrote to Kaganovich in the familiar ty form.


distrust began to surround him. His letters to Stalin took a more desper- ate turn. In part, the ties with the west that had usually been a source of privilege and prestige were beginning to turn into a liability for those involved in cultural diplomacy. More specifically, however, Arosev's foreign wife had twice been refused permission to travel with Arosev to Europe. On 9 April 1936 Arosev, following the language of the Stalin cult, wrote to Stalin from Paris "as to a teacher." Given his contemporaneous theses about the wavering intelligentsia, it is more than ironic that Arosev con- fessed that he wrote to Stalin after "long waverings." Family members of other Soviet leaders had been given permission to travel abroad with the 1936 delegation, but the rejection of his wife had put him in an "excep- tional position." For the "first time in all my long work in the party there is this kind of action from the CC [Central Committee]. And of course it worries me greatly.... You are my onlyjustice."77 By the time of the first Moscow trial, August 1936, Arosev felt the wave of political suspicion within the party turning against him. He wrote again to "my leader and teacher," hoping to achieve "such sincerity that the letter will be a photo- graph of my troubles and thoughts." Arosev was in a state of "great internal depression," feeling an "unusual coldness and a certain distrust" from several sides. Going over the many potential reasons his enemies were creating an "unhealthy atmosphere" around him, Arosev again spoke about his wife: "I can openly say that she totally belongs to us, she is a nonparty Bolshevik, but because she is a foreigner it is easier to permit bad attitudes toward her. When some comrades say, for example, look, your wife often goes abroad, then that is ... an echo of that servility toward the rest of the world [zagranitsy] with which we are struggling. As a matter of fact, why don't they say in a tone of reproach, look, how often you travel to Kaluga! In fact we, our country is higher and better and purer and let Europeans and Americans be envious about who travels to the USSR."78

This affirmation of the Stalin-era assertion of superiority over the west was part of a long and disjointed appeal that ended with a plea to end the "special regime of distrust." Arosev sent copies to Molotov and Kliment Voroshilov, asking either to be transferred to more "solid" diplomatic work or to leave VOKS for literary or theatrical affairs, where he would demonstrate in artistic form "the whole force and vitality of our party."79 A little less than a year later, sometime betweenJune andJuly 1937, accu- sations of foreign espionage and international Trotskyism led to Arosev's arrest as an enemy of the people.80 All "Viacha" Molotov could do, on the verge of his oldest friend's arrest, was reportedly hang up the phone in response to several of Arosev's calls. Finally, he confirmed Arosev's fate by warning him: "Take care of your children."81

77. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, ed. khr. 695, 1. 161, Arosev to Stalin, 9 April 1936. 78. Ibid., 11. 162, 164, Arosev to Stalin, 4 August 1936. 79. Ibid., 1. 165. 80. GARF, f. 5283, op. la, d. 342,11. 41-48, Arosev to Nikita Khrushchev, 22 March

1937; GARF, f. 5283, op. 2a, d. 1, 11. 1-5 ("V. Smirnov, BRIO Pred. VOKS. Sekretariu TsK VKP(b) tov. Andreevu, A. A. 22/111-38").

81. Aroseva and Maksimova, Bez grima, 86.

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If Arosev perceived a clash between his cultural and political sides, were they in fact irreconcilably in conflict? Or, put another way, how was it possible for a Stalin-era official to express such profound if episodic admiration for the west and western intellectuals? Let us try to sort out these difficult questions with reference to the problems of generation, ideology, and audience raised at the outset. First, Arosev's generational identity and the European experience connected to it unquestionably made it difficult for him to operate in the 1930s. Not only did his European and intellectual sensibilities prompt him to feel that he was different from many others around him, but they brought with them that faint whiff of unortho-

doxy that pursued him in spite of all his political credentials. Analysis of "To the West" suggests that his engagement with Europe also imparted to him a sense of the west as a subjective category, something that perhaps made him more proficient at crafting different depictions of Europe for different audiences.Yet it was not as if Arosev simply said one thing in his

diary and another in public; for example, he was able to express a high degree of admiration for the European fellow-travelers to the Union of Writers as well as in his diary. By the same token, however, there was

hardly a seamless continuity between his intimate reflections and many of his other statements. In his diary he professed sentimental love of the west while to Stalin he blustered about Europe as an old prostitute.

Arosev's cultural aspirations and political convictions can be reconciled in a way that avoids hypocrisy and dualism as the interpretive framework with which to view his life. He strove to balance Soviet socialism with those aspects of the western, European, civilized culture he admired; much of what he did admire about Europe was leftist, and the changes of the 1930s did not destroy his belief in collectivism and the Soviet system. Even his harshest diplomatic condemnations of bourgeois Europe could still imply a revolutionary, potentially universalistic future for Europe (and the USSR). The Soviet bureaucratic crudeness Arosev decried was

deplorable, not least because it might deflect Europeans from the cause of Soviet socialism. A young and beautiful Soviet Europe, at least potentially, would eclipse the bourgeois whore and perhaps even meliorate the USSR's "crisis of culture."

That said, however, Arosev was clearly capable of adjusting the degree of admiration and enmity he expressed toward the west and Europeans. This becomes more comprehensible when, first of all, we consider how these disparities expressed themselves when he spoke to different audiences. His expressions of admiration for Europe were reserved for restricted or elite audiences connected to his "cultured" side (his diary, the Union of Writers), while greater doses of suspicion and hostility became

prominent for mass audiences (readers of pamphlets, the press, and the fictionalized "sketch") or those linked to high politics and international relations (Stalin and the party leadership). Second, the reason it was not

intrinsically heretical to tailor differentiated messages for these audiences was that Soviet ideology itself was not and could not be univocal on the fundamental question of the "west." Leninism taught that the proletarian revolution had to assimilate the highest achievements of the advanced


west, and even Stalin's "socialism in one country" allowed, even required, lionization of European intellectual luminaries and their cultural heritage inside the USSR, as long as they were deemed politically acceptable. There could not be ideological uniformity on "the west," which included, for example, all of European imperialism, capitalism, society, science, technology, and culture. Ideological considerations in the questions con- fronted by Arosev, which hardly emanated exclusively from the "state," were mixed with highly charged personal views. His personal elation at meeting leading western intellectuals in his diary, for example, was combined with at least one diary reference to their "wavering," the notion he used elsewhere in his Marxist-Leninist analysis of the western intelligentsia.82 Ultimately, there is no way neatly to isolate an ideological factor in Arosev's stance. On fundamental issues, ideology was pervasive but not entirely monolithic, much as ideologues wanted it to be.

In the end, even as Arosev tailored his message and exploited ideological fissures, his positive sentiments about many aspects of Europe and the west did make his life trying and filled with doubts. Indeed, the theme of the wavering intellectual runs like a red thread throughout his many activities. Originally fascinated by the problematic, special, and compromised role of the revolutionary intellectual in the proletarian revolution, he was also preoccupied by Soviet intellectuals seduced by the bourgeois west and western intellectuals wavering in their engagement with the USSR. The torments that racked him, however, did not revolve around engagement with 1930s projects to "reforge" himself. Rather, his warnings about other wavering intellectuals ultimately appear linked to his longstanding sense that his own political aspirations were compromised by his cultural side, itself closely related to his European sensibilities. Before his death in 1938, it was not impossible for him to be both a Stalinist and a westernizer, but the combination was perilous, painful, and difficult to sustain.

82. Arosev, diary entry from 26 September 1934, in Aroseva and Maksimova, Bez grima, 65.

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