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This thesis explores an under-appreciated aspect of British engagement with the Soviet 1930s. Using British travel accounts, it considers how British travellers approached, understood and explored the Soviet Union in that decade. It does so via the concept of sincerity, as travellers sought truth in the Soviet Union. Travellers were aware of Soviet cultural diplomacy and intense ideological debate about the Soviet Union in Europe, and thus simultaneously sought to negotiate Soviet self-representation and present themselves as sincere observers of Soviet life to British audiences.
In the first three chapters it maps a discourse of travel. This discourse can be described as being constituted of a sense of discovery that travel would satisfy, dissent about competing visions and understandings of ‘Russia’, and doubt/the performance of doubt about a travellers’ capacity to offer something new and insightful. The Soviet tour features as a nexus of concepts about sincerity and Soviet self-representation. Finally, travellers conceptualised the Soviet people in various ways, most notably of there being a divide between ‘rulers and ruled’, and the ‘city and the countryside’.
Once this discourse is mapped, the thesis examines encounters between travellers and Soviets framed by three concepts: the ‘usable self’ of Soviet personhood, the problematic binary of ‘public and private’ in such a politicised society, and how travellers fit into a sense of ‘us and them’ in Soviet life. These chapters consider how travellers’ expectations, and the general categories described here, are confirmed and confounded by the range of encounters, situations and relationships travellers and Soviets had with one another, and how sincerity was related in these encounters.
This thesis therefore makes several contributions: it considers sincerity as a fulcrum point for study of inter-cultural exchange, and explores its performance and reception in culture; it affirms the value of treating these travellers’ texts as cultural objects in their own right, over the political aspects often studied previously; and it explores a range of Soviet reactions to, and understandings of, foreigners, via a great variety and number of encounters that have not yet been considered by the scholarship. |
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