Chapter Synopses

Bibliography

Chapter 1: Sheila Fitzpatrick, Australian visitors to the Soviet Union: The view from the Soviet side

The Soviet Union was an exotic destination in the 1930s, but some Australians nevertheless managed to make the trip. Based on Soviet and Australian archives on more than sixty Australian travellers, Sheila Fitzpatrick's chapter is an account of a two-way cultural encounter: how the Australians perceived the Soviet Union, and how their Soviet hosts perceived them. The Australians were mainly white-collar professionals, including teachers, economists, politicians, doctors and writers. Many had left-wing sympathies, but this did not necessarily cause them to suspend their capacity for observation and criticism, and the familiar stereotype of 'political pilgrims' only partly applies.

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Chapter 2: Terry Irving, Esmonde Higgins in the Soviet Union

Esmonde Higgins went to Russia twice. After his first visit in 1920 he became a communist; after his second in 1928, he began a long disengagement from communism. What he saw in Russia was a system of rule and a form of proletarian modernity; what he had hoped to see was 'fellowship' human relationships unmediated by markets. Subsequently, a victim of Stalinism, he changed his mind: ruled by terror, Russian had betrayed his dream of a communism of shared feeling. He joined the Labor Party, but remained an internationalist, and thus Russia had a lasting meaning for him.

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Chapter 3: Rosemary Francis, Famine relief on the Volga: Muriel Heagney's winter sojourn

Muriel Heagney visited the Soviet Union in December 1924, before the consolidation of Joseph Stalin's rule. As a working-class woman, Heagney was predisposed to take most account of those aspects of the 'Soviet experiment' that captured her imagination, especially the position of women. She was profoundly impressed by the early attempts of the Soviet Government to transform a previously repressive society. As a result, her Soviet experience significantly affected her approach to her subsequent work in Australia as a member of the labour movement and as an advocate of equal pay and equal opportunity for women.

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Chapter 4: Carolyn Rasmussen, A metallurgist looks at Russia: Professor J. Neill Greenwood and the Soviet Union

In 1932 J. N. Greenwood, Professor of Metallurgy at the University of Melbourne, visited the Soviet Union as part of a year's sabbatical leave. His discussions with leaders of the metals industry across the northern hemisphere, including some of the architects of the 'New Deal', add an unusual perspective to his account of this visit. Convinced he had glimpsed a more equitable and rational society in the making, but with more affinity to its culture than its politics, Greenwood established the Australian branch of the Society for Cultural Relations with the Soviet Union on his return.

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Chapter 5: Ros Pesman, 'Red Virtue': Ella Winter and the Soviet Union

Melbourne-born journalist Ella Winter, who married the much older North American muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens in 1924, was active in Popular Front politics in the United States in the 1930s. She made a number of trips to the Soviet Union and wrote two books recounting her experiences and impressions. This chapter focuses on the role of the Soviet Union and the Popular Front in Winter's life and on her quest to establish herself as a recognised writer and public figure as well as on her writing about the Soviet Union.

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Chapter 6: Jeff Sparrow, Guido Baracchi, Betty Roland and the Soviet Union

Guido Baracchi and Betty Roland travelled to the USSR together in 1933. Their time living and working there led them to apply for membership of the Communist Party of Australia, an organisation that Baracchi had helped launch and from which he'd already been expelled once. Paradoxically, their Soviet experiences also played a role in their break from the CPA and their adoption of Trotskyist ideas. An understanding the meaning of Soviet and Australian Stalinism for Baracchi and Roland requires an examination of an array of factors that illuminate the complex relationship between intellectuals and the communist movement.

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Chapter 7: John McNair, 'Comrade Katya': Katharine Susannah Prichard and the Soviet Union

Katharine Susannah Prichard™s only visit to the USSR in 1933 inspired a lifetime's dedication to the Soviet idea. John McNair's chapter examines key aspects of this engagement, including her 1934 'pilgrimage narrative' The Real Russia, her responses to political developments in the two countries over three decades, her service to the cause of Russian Australian friendship, her relations with the Soviet literary bureaucracy, and her activities as cultural intermediary on behalf of Soviet literature in Australia and Australian literature in the USSR. It also draws attention to the tensions and contradictions underlying her vision of 'a dream come true'.

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Chapter 8: Joy Damousi, 'Eyes left': Psychiatrist Reginald Ellery and the Soviet dream

The writings and activities of the Freudian psychiatrist Reginald Ellery (1897-1955), a communist sympathiser during the 1930s and 1940s, illuminate the changing interpretation of the romance with the Soviet Union for a generation of radical intellectuals. Joy Damousi argues that Ellery's Soviet visit in 1937 allowed him the opportunity to offer a radical interpretation of his society without committing himself to the discipline of a party. The visit also gave his politics an authenticity, and was later rewritten in a painfully retrospective way. For Ellery, 1937 came to represent dashed utopian hopes, failure, false fantasies and delusion.

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Chapter 9: Kay Dreyfus, Musicians in trouble: The sad case of the Weintraub Syncopators

After a four-year journey that included the Soviet Union, the Weintraub Syncopators, a band of Jewish musicians from Berlin, enjoyed immediate success in Sydney from July 1937. In September 1939 a Scottish businessman alleged that they had been involved in espionage while in Russia. Although full of factual errors and never proven, this confidential denunciation shaped official treatment of the musicians, their wives and relatives for the duration of World War II, providing a rationale for the internment of some individuals, a blueprint for their interrogation and a framework for the progressive disintegration of the group.

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Chapter 10: Sheila Fitzpatrick, Max Crawford in the Soviet Union: The historian as diplomat

In 1943, Professor R. M. Crawford "on leave from the University of Melbourne" served at the newly established Australian Legation in the Soviet Union for almost a year. A sympathiser when he arrived, eager to convey to Soviet hosts his unique capacity to interpret and mediate between the two countries, Crawford found the experience of living in the wartime Soviet Union draining and in many ways disappointing. Sheila Fitzpatrick's chapter is based on his diaries and letters home and on detailed reports from Soviet archives of his (often frustrating) dealings with Soviet officials.

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Chapter 11: Fay Anderson, Australian war correspondents on the Eastern Front

The Australian war correspondents James Aldridge, Godfrey ("Geoff") Blunden and Eric McLoughlin travelled to Russia after the Nazi invasion in 1941. Fay Anderson's chapter examines their varied experiences in the light of the absolute media control imposed by the Soviet Union, the difficulties involved in negotiating Australian censorship, and the ambivalence of Australians towards the Soviet Union. The insights these men communicated home, their compromises and even deception offer surprising, sometimes flawed and largely neglected perspectives on life in Russia during wartime.

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Chapter 12: Phillip Deery, Eric Ashby: A scientist in Russia

After Stalin's purges in the 1930s, casual visitors to the Soviet Union were either guests of the government or those attached to the diplomatic corps. Eric Ashby, one of Australia™s leading scientists during World War II, was in the second category. His experiences throughout 1945 left him with ambivalent impressions, which were reflected in his remarkable book Scientist in Russia. Unlike most accounts by political tourists, it was neither a triumphalist tract extolling Soviet accomplishments nor a bitter expos of authoritarian oppression. Instead, it looked for contradiction, paradox and that ethereal element, the "Russian character".

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Chapter 13: Lenore Coltheart, Jessie Street and the Soviet Union

Jessie Street's first visit to the Soviet Union in 1938 was as a summer tourist, the second in 1945 an official journey in winter. Her accounts of both share the optimistic "futurism" of other feminist reformers, but those of her visit in November 1945 are also a bleak report of a journey through the dark aftermath of war. Rather than emphasising similarities in these travellers tales, looking at contrasting experiences helps us discover why a 'futurist' genre of hope was so powerful in the 1930s' and why it isn't any more.

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