Soviets in Scotland, Brits in USSR 1950s
Sometimes an extended dig in an archive turns up the unexpected. This happened when I was in Moscow last winter. I had been spinning through wheels of microfilm without much luck for a few days when suddenly all these photographs appeared on the screen. The photos were cuttings of newspaper items, all seemingly reporting the same exotic event, a Soviet delegation at the 1955 Festival of Robert Burns in Ayr, Scotland.
My favourite was, and still is, the one from the Edinburgh Evening Despatch (25 Jan. 1955) with the headline ‘Comrade Polevoy lays a wreath and says “Dah”‘. Comrade Polevoy is none other than Boris Polevoy, the dashing Soviet writer, most famous for his hugely popular novel A Story of a Real Man (Povest’ o nastoyashchem cheloveke), in which he tells the inspiring tale of the WW2 Soviet fighter pilot, Alexey Mares’ev. In 1948 Polevoy’s book was turned into a film and even inspired Sergei Prokofiev‘s rousing final opera (opus 117), first performed in December of that same year.
Now, Polevoy was agreeably laying wreaths in Scotland in 1955 alongside Samuil Marshak (the acclaimed Russian translator of Burns and fantastic children’s story writer) and the Russian Professor of English Literature Anna Elistratova, at the invitation of a Welshman named Emrys Hughes. Hughes was the Labour MP of South Ayrshire at the time, but also former editor of the Scottish socialist journal Forward, not to mention son-in-law of Keir Hardie. In 1955, Marshak’s translation of Burns had been reprinted countless times, and was estimated to have sold in excess of 460,000 copies.
After WW2 the link between the Scottish left and writers of the Soviet Union had been re-established in no small part by the extraordinary energies of Naomi Mitchison, who in 1952 ventured on the first British delegation to the Soviet Union since the war alongside Doris Lessing, Douglas Young, A.E. Coppard, Richard Mason and Arnold Kettle.
The trip was organised under the auspices of the AWPA, the Authors’ World Peace Appeal. Last week I spoke about this trip at a meeting of the Anglo-Russian Research Network in Pushkin House, Bloomsbury. The Network, organised by Matt Taunton (UEA) and Rebecca Beasley (Oxford), runs this open-to-all reading group three times a year, and it’s always a fun evening. I gave a paper called ‘“Dear Comrade Apletin…” The British Left and the Foreign Commission of the Union of Soviet Writers’, which was recorded and should be available soon through the Network. But in the meantime, there’s more about the event on the Pushkin House website.
Naomi Mitchison (1897-1999) was a Scottish writer and political activist. Unlike her scientist brother, she was no communist (a Labourite through and through), but she would have certainly at this time called herself a ‘friend of the Soviet Union’. She and her co-founder of the AWPA, Alex Comfort (author of The Joy of Sex – 1972), believed that through cultural exchange and friendly relations the bitter polarisation of the Cold War between the Communist East and the Capitalist West could be mollified, thus fostering world peace. The AWPA was quickly and widely considered to be a dangerous commy plot and part of the Soviet cultural offensive. The Labour Party blacklisted it in 1953, to the consternation of Naomi Mitchison and Cecil Day-Lewis, who wrote an open letter to the Labour Party in defence of the non-partisan Appeal.
But that’s a different story… I was only meant to be writing to say that I was stoked to find these awesome newspaper cuttings in Moscow (RGALI), and that they are now available to access through the excellent and growing online archive of encounters between Scotland and Russia since 1900. Edinburgh University scholar Anna Vaninskaya and her research team have developed a freely accessible online repository of cultural materials — some newly translated. The Scotland-Russia project was established in 2014 “in order to uncover the full spectrum of connections: from passive consumption of the other country’s culture to ethnographic reflection upon it, from creative transformation of the other country’s cultural products to professional collaboration in the creation of joint cultural capital”. Follow the links and stroll around their fascinating archive.
