The Spy Who Changed History. Svetlana Lokhova
students were based on their own political ideology, reinforced by selective imported left-wing reading and popular culture including movies. Long before the Revolution, the idea of America had exercised a profound fascination for Russians, and not just for its technological successes. There was a hungry market in Russia for American movies and cheap novels about cowboys and gangsters.18 An unusual import was the staging of selected American dramas. Several American plays were produced in Moscow, notably The Front Page – famously adapted in 1940 for the screen as His Girl Friday starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell – which was rechristened Sensations for a Communist audience. Giving theatre-going Muscovites a further taste of the life and times of the windy city was a staging of Chicago, a ‘tale of America’s foremost big gun and bullet city’ depicting the life of Roxie Hart and today more renowned as a musical. Hollywood movie styles inspired domestically produced Soviet films, which often emulated the style and stunts of Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton and the Keystone Kops in delivering their ideological message. In one popular movie, The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks,19 an American philanthropist, fearful for his own safety having heard lurid tales of bloodthirsty Communists, brings a cowboy to Moscow as a personal bodyguard. The cowboy, played by a Moscow circus clown, is a carbon copy of Keaton, while Moscow’s finest do a passable impression of the Keystone Kops. The philanthropist falls victim to conniving White Guards spinning impossible tales such as that the iconic Bolshoi Theatre was dynamited by the Communists. Mr West returns to the US, and the arms of his relieved wife, knowing that tales of bloodthirsty philistines destroying Moscow are untrue. As the students arrived in America, like Klivans they felt the need to tackle prejudices about the new Russia similar to those held by Mr West and many Americans.
Two Russian satirists, Ilf and Petrov, summed up Russian expectations of arriving in depression-hit New York:
the word ‘America’ has well-developed grandiose associations for a Soviet person, for whom it refers to a country of skyscrapers, where day and night one hears the unceasing thunder of surface and underground trains, the hellish roar of automobile horns, and the continuous despairing screams of stockbrokers rushing through the skyscrapers waving their ever-falling shares.20
They believed they would find a culture of exploitation in America and that ‘the rich people not only had all the money’ but ‘the poor man was down, and he had to stay down’.21 They had devoured in Moscow the available books on America, mostly those of socialist writers Sinclair and Dreiser about the current state of the US. Without another source of knowledge, they believed them to be the gospel truth. The students expected to find ‘a population, low-class and mostly foreign, hanging always on the verge of starvation and dependent for its opportunities of life upon the whim of men every bit as brutal and unscrupulous as the old-time slave drivers; under such circumstances, immorality is exactly as inevitable, and as prevalent, as it is under the system of chattel slavery’.22
As devout Communists, they did not expect a warm welcome on American soil but to be confronted with cold shoulders and suspicion. And they soon learned that outside the narrow circles of intellectuals and émigrés they needed to be careful when discussing Communism. On their travels, they discovered that the deeply conservative soul of America was rooted in traditional churchgoing communities that were suspicious of new-fangled foreign ideas.
Officially, a man will never be forced out of his job for his beliefs. He is free to hold any views, any convictions. He’s a free citizen. But let him try to praise communism – and something like this happens, he will just not find work in a small or big town. He will not even notice it happening. People who do it, do not believe in God but go to church because it is indecent not go to church. As for Communism, that is for Mexicans, Slavs, and black people. It is not an American thing.23
Russians were not yet an urbanised people, and they knew that the real America was to be discovered in its myriad small towns and villages, not its cities. Soviet visitors loved taking road trips, driving across America’s incredible highway system in the freedom of a car. On their journey they discovered in equal measure much to admire and amuse:
Americans don’t like to waste time on stupid things, for example, on the torturous process of coming up with names for their towns. And indeed, why strain yourself when so many beautiful names already exist in the world? That’s right, an authentic Moscow, just in the state of Ohio, not in the USSR in Moscow province. There’s another Moscow in some other state, and yet another Moscow in a third state. On the whole, every state has the absolute right to have its very own Moscow.24
Soviet visitors discovered in America a confusing, happy melting pot of nationalities. One remarked that ‘a Spaniard and a Pole worked in the barbershop where we got our hair cut. An Italian shined our shoes. A Croat washed our car.’ However, they encountered racism and discrimination of a type that their revolution had eliminated:
To a Soviet person, used to the nationality policy of the USSR, all the mistakes of the American government’s Indian policy are evident from the first glance. The errors are, of course, intentional. The fact of the matter is that in Indian schools, the class is conducted exclusively in English. There is no written form of any Indian language at all. It’s true that every Indian tribe has its own language, but this doesn’t change anything. If there were any desire to do so, the many American specialists who have fallen in love with Indian culture could create Indian written languages in a short time. But imperialism remains imperialism.25
Russian visitors to the US often found American society shallow: ‘If you should attempt to maintain that film is an art in conversation with a cultured, intelligent American, he’ll just plain stop talking to you.’26 American workers were too materialistic, seemingly happy with the system of exploitation, easily bought off rather than striking and heading to the barricades. Americans appeared obsessed with their material conditions to the exclusion of culture and the spiritual. The observation of Gertrude Klivans was that to meet demand the Soviets published more books in a year, she estimated, than any other country. However, many of the avid readers had probably had only one square meal in three years. In addition, ‘Art rates [are] very high in Moscow and throughout the Soviet states Opera is highly popular, as are the theater and literature. Among the classic authors, Tolstoy reigns supreme. Gorky is the idol of the modernists. But art, in Russian fashion, must interpret the struggle for expression of the masses, the keynote of present day civilization in that country.’27
MIT welcomed the arrival of the Russians. The Institute had embarked on an ambitious investment plan at the very moment the Great Depression hit, leading to a dramatic fall in US student numbers. In 1932 and 1933, across the nation some eighty thousand youths who in more prosperous times would have attended college were unable to enrol. Universities were thus desperate for the income that the arrival of the Russian students provided and were correspondingly uninterested in asking any awkward questions. America’s finest universities were about to start teaching the cream of Russia’s leadership how to build an even stronger socialist society. And one university was to show inadvertently how to spy on America and create a chain leading to the greatest espionage achievement of all time: the theft of the secret of the Manhattan Project – how to build an atomic bomb.
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