Introduction

For the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, Vanguard Press launched a series of books studying Soviet Russia. In the introduction accompanying each volume, the series editor Jerome Davis wrote that his project was to correct the startling ignorance - affecting the American public, intellectuals, and elected officials alike - of what the conditions truly were inside the Soviet Union. Davis, a firebrand professor of social work at Yale University, wrote that “[w]hether the Communists are thought to be ‘dangerous enemies of society’ or the ‘saviors of humanity,’ the facts should be known before judgment is pronounced.”^[i]  

In the immediate aftermath of the revolution as in the decade following, there emerged a spectrum of drastically different stories about what was happening in Soviet Russia, and what it meant. Davis’ ambition was to clear this haze in a collection of studies ranging from The Economic Organization of the Soviet Union to Village Life Under the Soviets —all written by scholars who had actually spent time in the Soviet Union. But how, after a decade during which Russia’s transformation had dominated headlines and shaped international relations, did there remain such a profound ignorance?

In fact, to say that the American public was ignorant is not to say that it was uninformed. On one hand, the perspective of the American media, and in particular its picture of the “Red Peril,” was shaped to a tremendous extent by the stories told by American and European politicians and by the community of bourgeois Russian exiles. In contrast — the accounts provided by American communists were, naturally, structured on a deep ideological bias. Look, for example, to John Reed’s book Ten Days that Shook the World recounting his first-hand experience of the October Revolution. Through one of the most directly experienced American stories of the Bolshevik seizure of power, a story told by an American communist was one the mass media could never trust. 

And so there emerged two parallel American narratives of Soviet Russia, each accusing the other of being blindly propagandistic. It is the project of this exhibit to understand what the Soviet Union looked like through the lens of the left’s prolific publishing industry. Its resistance took two forms, both the denial of the mass media narrative and the turn to a cultural vision.  In a media environment defined by hazy facts and conflicting interpretations, the leftist publishing industry struggled not only to resist the mainstream narrative, but also to transcend the pettiness of the media quarrel by turning to the arts.