In this volume dedicated to the memory of Helen Fehervary and Katerina Clark, two of its fourteen contributors, excellent essays take readers well beyond two entrenched narratives regarding the international consequences of the Bolshevik Revolution. Rejecting the “emigré” paradigm of the Revolution as a “rupture” (4) between Russia and world, as well as the institutionalist paradigm privileging the Communist International and Moscow as the center of world revolution, editors Philip Glessner and Bradley A. Gorski propose a third conceptualization: “an internationalism from below” whose constituent elements are the formation, circulation, disintegration, and significance of “protean networks of individuals, institutions, geographies, and ideas” (4).
In four sections: “Forms,” “Geographies,” “Identities,” and “Communities,” contributors enhance our understanding of internationalisms from below. Serguei Alex. Oushakine uses “cultural arbitrage”—the “functional transformation of art forms through geographic transposition” (28)—to show how Soviet Amerikanizm of the interwar years morphed into Soviet postwar anti-Amerikanizm. Irina Denischenko demonstrates that when it came to theorizing the avant-garde, “red migrations” (115) made possible János Mácza’s The Art of Contemporary Europe (1926). Elizabeth H. Stern examines the complicated reception of Stalinist drambalet in the German Democratic Republic. Trevor Wilson reconstructs a transnational network of Marxists who, during the “Thaw,” returned to Karl Marx’s “philosophical roots” (176), thereby contesting CPSU dogmatism.
The essays in the “Geographies” section demonstrate that for leftist internationalists, place and location were not just dots on a map. They were also mental constructs whose meaning was contested and changing. Roman Utkin takes us to Russian Berlin, where Russians of diverse political leanings grappled with the meaning of the Bolshevik Revolution and art. Readers then head to Tashkent, which Langston Hughes and Arthur Koestler visited in 1932. Gorski shows that their memoirs in the post-Stalinist 1950s about their Central Asian sojourns use “disgust” to construct “revolutionary geographies” (231). Reconstructing the “intellectual migrations” in the 1920s and 30s of the British communist Ralph Fox, Clark chronicles his departure from British academia for the USSR. There he became an expert on India and China. Following Comintern orders, he headed to Spain, where he was killed in the Spanish Civil War in early 1937.
Fox’s story of conversion via “red migration” provides a smooth segue to the next section, “Identities.” Edward Tyerman shows that even though Chinese partisans fought in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War, early Soviet literature did not dispense with racist discourse that “othered” Chinese migrants as being “impervious to pain” (290). Through an analysis of Nikolai Aseev’s 1927 Grand Tour to Italy, Michael Kunichika shows that Aseev judged, as he walked by Roman ruins, the “progress of industry in both Europe and the Soviet Union” (300). Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon analyzes first-hand narratives of Langston Hughes, Margaret Glasgoe, Homer Smith, and Robert Robinson, demonstrating their varied experiences of a “‘colorless’” USSR in the interwar years.
St. Varnon’s essay nicely sets up the final section on “communities.” As Anna Arustamova shows, Russian émigré David Burliuk created real and imagined communities among Russian New Yorkers and even Soviet citizens through work as literary editor of the newspaper, The Russian Voice, from 1923 to 1940. In a masterful essay, Fehervary shows that the Hungarian László Radványi, who spent fifty-nine years in exile, generated communities through his efforts in worker education on two continents. Tatsiana Shchurko spotlights Hermina Dumont Huiswood (1905–98), an Afro-Caribbean radical. Through an imaginative analysis of a postcard in Huiswood’s archive—that of a veiled woman in Central Asia—Shchurko reveals possible parallels between Huiswood and a woman she likely never met, such as the state’s inability to “define” their agency (421). Gleissner reconstructs transnational networks of East and West Germans in the 1960s and 70s, especially their interactions in the USSR (429). He demonstrates the salience of “desire” in generating global mobility.
Does this volume achieve what the editors define as one of its most important goals: “to understand what previous movements, networks and solidarities might have to offer us today”? (5). The authors note that the volume was published after Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Unfortunately, the contributors do not link their scholarship to possibilities for “movements, networks, and solidarities” in the current context. The volume lacks a conclusion addressing this issue and outlining directions for future research. What central questions and concepts should drive future research on “internationalism[s] from below”?
This volume deserves a wide readership. Many of its essays should be staples on undergraduate and graduate syllabi.
