The Supply and Demand of Russian Culture in Nazi Germany, 1933–41

Although the Third Reich is remembered for a lethal Russophobia that culminated in Operation Barbarossa, pre-1941 Nazi popular culture retained a taste for the artifacts of tsarist Russia which was not far distant from the kitsch ‘Russonisme’ one could find in interwar Paris, London or New York. Examples included productions of Russian works at the Berlin State Opera, such as Rimsky-Korsakov’s Invisible City of Kitezh (1937) and Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar (1940); film adaptations of texts by Dostoyevsky and Pushkin, such as The Gambler (1938) and The Postmaster (1940); and numerous books, among them Richard Moeller’s Russia, Being and Becoming (1939). This paper explores implications of the above-described phenomenon at both the personal and diplomatic levels. First, German appetites for the tsarist canon provided an opening for artistically-minded Russophone émigrés such as Olga Chekhova, Maria Cebotari, and Vladimir Novikov to market Russian tableaux, especially in the cinema and on the operatic stage. In doing so these émigrés exploited Germany’s longstanding gravitation toward Russian culture to realize their own dreamscapes in which the Bolshevik menace was absent and imperial authority undamaged. Second, during the era of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (1939-1941), Soviet cultural diplomacy also exploited German ‘Russonisme’ with the apparent aim of presenting the USSR as a neo-traditional polity, consistent with intimations directed toward Ribbentrop and other German dignitaries that Stalinism had abandoned world revolution. The Soviet pavilions at the 1940 and 1941 Leipzig and Königsberg trade fairs, for instance, featured busts of Pushkin and Turgenev, advertisements of Tolstoy’s novels, and posters from the epic historical film Peter the Great (1937-38). The paper emphasizes those ways in which Germany’s traditional Russophilic reflexes, coexisting alongside Nazi Slavophobia, were noticed and manipulated by an array of Russian émigré and Soviet actors pursuing their own objectives.