Intellectuals and the Russian Revolution

This presentation raises three related topics in the international history of the Russian

 Revolution that, as we mark the centennial, deserve far greater exploration. The first has to do with rise of a distinctive system of Soviet cultural diplomacy that made in-country visits a linchpin of Soviet international agendas. This system had special relevance for foreign intellectuals, and it also influenced the domestic evolution of the revolutionary state. The second, has to do with the return from emigration to the USSR of non-communist émigré intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s, including those from non-Russian national diasporas such as the Ukrainian emigration. The successful Soviet recruitment of these “proximate” returnees helped shaped Soviet approaches to other, more distant groups of intellectuals.

Soviet non-Russian intellectuals soon became deeply involved as intermediaries in

 transnational cultural and cultural-diplomatic ties with geographically or culturally

 proximate groups abroad (eg, Azerbaijani intellectuals and Iran, Turkic intellectuals and

 Turkey, Central Asian intellectuals and the Middle East). Finally, the talk will discuss a

 major dimension of comparative revolution scholarship that has been almost completely ignored in the historiography of the Russian Revolution: the concept of the life-cycles or biographies of revolutions. This conceptual lens, I will argue, assumes importance not only in the “structural,” social-scientific comparison of revolutions; it is relevant to the history of transnational perceptions and interactions. In the early 20th century international “wave” of revolutions of which the Russian was a major part, the views of actors toward the differing stages of their own revolutions’ life cycles shaped their perceptions and attitudes toward the Soviet case. For example, a number of important Mexican intellectuals saw in the Soviet example an opportunity to re-revolutionize their own stalled revolution, and East Europeans after 1948 were expected to recapitulate or cautioned to avoid earlier developments in Soviet revolutionary history.