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British cultural engagement and exchange with the USSR

The history of British cultural engagement and exchange with the USSR spans the entire Soviet period, from 1917 to 1991. From its inception, the Bolshevik regime in Russia, and the USSR it soon created, attracted support from many socialists and left-wing groups in Britain and around the world. Many British sympathizers came from the left-leaning intelligentsia: artists, writers, scientists, social scientists, and musicians, among others, wanted to foster links with their Russian counterparts working in the first socialist society. Assumptions about the superiority of progressive Soviet culture informed attitudes toward Soviet culture, and led to Soviet developments in fields such as architecture, as described in this issue by Stephen Ward, becoming influential. Cultural relations societies and individual connections established channels of communication with the Soviet state that endured in some cases for many years, and facilitated exchanges such as tours of performing arts and exhibitions, visits of professional delegations and distinguished guests, publication of translated works of literature and academic papers, and exchange of professional information. This special edition brings together studies of British exchange and engagement with Soviet culture, offering a comparative view of what communication in the cultural sphere was conducted with the USSR and interrogating its forms and significance. Cultural and political communication between Britain and the USSR was profoundly shaped by the politics between the countries, which became strained as early as British intervention in the Civil War. While communists and socialists from the working classes and middleand upper-class intellectuals were enthused by the socialist experiment during the inter-war years and especially the ‘red decade’ of the 1930s, at a diplomatic level the relations between the USSR and Britain remained cool. The wartime alliance against fascism brought the countries closer and saw a flowering of cultural relations: contacts were established between organizations to aid the production of positive propaganda about allies that had on both sides been regarded as inimical so recently. Suspicion lingered, however, and soon grew after 1945 into Cold War tension. Even after the death of Stalin in 1953, while cultural exchange was vaunted as a means of promoting peace and understanding between societies and individuals, it rarely remained purely cultural, but was used to score political points in a war waged with soft power. At an unofficial level, however, politics was often the impetus for cultural engagement: much communication between the USSR and Britain in the cultural sphere was about and informed by politics. Alison McClean’s research uncovers a significant chapter of cultural engagement and exchange with the USSR and Soviet culture in the 1930s. She describes how a network of visual artists developed in 1930s Britain across a series of organizations,