Foreign Visitors and the Post-Stalin Soviet State

University of Pennsylvania

ScholarlyCommons

Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations

2016

Porous Empire: Foreign Visitors And e PostStalin Soviet State

Alex Hazanov Hazanov

University of Pennsylvania, [email protected]

Follow this and additional works at: h t ps://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations
Part of the History Commons

Recommended Citation

Hazanov, Alex Hazanov, "Porous Empire: Foreign Visitors And e Post-Stalin Soviet State" (2016). Publicly Accessible Penn

Dissertations. 2330.

h t ps://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2330

is paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. h t ps://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2330

For more information, please contact [email protected].

Porous Empire: Foreign Visitors And e Post-Stalin Soviet State

Abstract

“Porous Empire” is a study of the relationship between Soviet institutions, Soviet society and the millions of foreigners who visited the USSR between the mid-1950s and the mid-1980s. “Porous Empire” traces how Soviet economic, propaganda, and state security institutions, all shaped during the isolationist Stalin period, struggled to accommodate their practices to millions of visitors with material expectations and assumed legal rights radically unlike those of Soviet citizens. While much recent Soviet historiography focuses on the ways in which the post-Stalin opening to the outside world led to the erosion of oﬃcial Soviet ideology, I argue that ideological atitudes inherited from the Stalin era structured institutional responses to a growing foreign presence in Soviet life. erefore, while Soviet institutions had to accommodate their economic practices to the growing numbers of tourists and other visitors inside the Soviet borders and were forced to concede the existence of contact zones between foreigners and Soviet citizens that loosened some of the absolute sovereignty claims of the Soviet party-statem, they remained loyal to visions of Soviet economic independence, commited to ﬁghting the cultural Cold War, and profoundly suspicious of the outside world.

e gap between Soviet concessions to the era of international mobility and Soviet atitudes to the outside world shaped the peculiar nature of globalization in its Soviet context: even as the Soviet opening up to the world promoted Westernization and undermined some of the ideological foundations of Soviet power, it also generated, within the bowels of Soviet institutions, a profound and honestly-held commitment to authoritarianism and social discipline as an instrument of geopolitical resistance, a mental atitude that still shapes Russian oﬃcial approaches to the outside world 25 years aﬅer the fall of the USSR.

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Graduate Group

History

First Advisor

Benjamin Nathans

Keywords

Cold War, Communism, Globalization, Russia, Soviet Union, Tourism

Subject Categories

History

is dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: h t ps://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2330

POROUS EMPIRE:
FOREIGN VISITORS AND THE POST-STALIN
SOVIET STATE

Alexander Hazanov

A DISSERTATION
In

HISTORY
Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennylvania
In

Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the
Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

2016

Supervisor of Dissertation: Benjamin Nathans, Ronald S. Lauder Endowed Term Associate Professor of History,
University of Pennsylvania

Graduate Group Chair: Peter Holquist, Associate Professor of History

Dissertation Committee: Peter Holquist, Associate Professor of History Kevin M.F Platt, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor in the Humanities,
Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures

ii

Dedication

For Emma

iii

Acknowledgments

If there is anything that this dissertation taught me, it is that travel is always a collective endeavor. And this journey was no exception.

I would like to thank the members of my dissertation committee, Ben Nathans, Peter Holquist and Kevin Platt. Ben has been a model advisor, restraining my flights of fantasy, fighting a valiant battle to keep my writing clear and concise, and providing both academic advice and moral support in difficult moments. Peter Holquist offered unfailing encouragement, always pushing me to think bigger. Kevin Platt helped me to push the boundaries of my thinking beyond my comfort zone - and keep it clear as I was doing so. I also thank Thomas Childers, Vanessa Ogle, Antonio Ferros, and especially Kathy Brown for being wonderful teachers and colleagues.

Through the years, I have presented bits and pieces of this dissertation in various fora and benefitted from the wisdom of everyone who ever commented on them. I would like to thank Anna Krylova, Anatoly Pinsky, Jim Heinzen, Sam Hirst, Artemy Kalinovsky, Joanna Bockman, Oscar Sanchez-Siboni and Robert Weinberg for their invaluable criticisms and suggestions. I would also like to thank the participants and organizers of the 2012 Hoover Institute Summer Workshop - especially Amir Weiner, Paul R. Gregory, David Satter, John Barber and Julia Stittman - for listening to my ideas when they were not even one-fifth baked.

Many people and institutions offered me their generosity and hospitality over the years. This dissertation would not have been possible without the generous financial support from the George Mosse Exchange Fellowship, the Ben Franklin Graduate Fellowship at Penn, and the SSRC International Dissertation Research Fellowship. I am especially grateful for the Bradley Foundation and Professors Alan Kors and Walter McDougall for providing me with funds that allowed me to complete the research and writing of this dissertation. In Moscow, I enjoyed the hospitality of Ekaterina Pavlova and Igor Aleksandrov, and the generous support of many archivists and librarians. I would like to thank Galina Mikhailovna Tokareva from the Russian State Archives of Sociopolitical History Komsomol Reading Room for helping me, and so many other scholars, to better perceive the Soviet experience.

Thanking the many friends who helped me along the way is the most pleasant of duties. At Penn, Lori Daggar, Noria Litaker, James Hoyt, Elizabeth Della Zazzera, Rachel Guberman, Noor Zaidi, Jim Ryan, Tom Coldwell, Hope McGrath, Chris Muenzen, Emily

Merrill, Matthew Kruer, and many, many others who offered their unflagging friendship. My fellow Russianists, Sam Casper, Claire Kaiser, and Jacob Feygin were wonderful

iv

friends and colleagues. Sam offered endless good cheer, some very good documents, and encyclopedic knowledge of everything under the sun. Claire provided me with sound advice - and helped arrange wonderf two weeks in Tbilisi when I needed a break. Jacob was a generous friend, and a wonderful sounding board, and this dissertation would have been immeasurably poorer without our running dialogue.

In Moscow, I enjoyed the company of many wonderful researchers. I would like to thank Tom Hooker, Tim Noonan, Mike Loader, Kristy Ironside, Stephen Riegg, Alan Roe, Batsheba Demuth and Eric Radisch for keeping me company in the archives and in the afterhours. I am deeply grateful for Orysia Kulick and Beth Kerley for generously providing me with documents from Ukraine which proved of immense benefit for this dissertation.

At Wisconsin, Roberto Carmack, Maya Holzman, Sean Gillen, Patrick Michelson, and many other members of the wonderful history community there provided me with intellectual sustenance, good beer, and an introduction to American culture. My fellow Mosse fellows, Noa Kaspin and Lior Libman helped absorb the culture shock - and introduced me to a very special person. Sara Brinegar was and remains one of the smartest people I know – and a terrific friend. David McDonald and Francine Hirsch introduced me to the study of Russian history, and Jeremi Suri pushed me to think about the Soviet Union in the context of global history. I also thank John Tortorice for his kindness and support.

In Jerusalem, Diego Olstein, Dan Diner, and Alon Confino taught me how to think like a historian, and Asya Bereznyak, Adam Farkash, Anna Gutgarts, Liraz Laor, Anat Ravid, and Sasha Gutkin were very good friends. Back in Tel Aviv, Nimrod Oren, Eyal Gluck,

and Dana Pomernik helped me to figure out what is it I wanted to do “after the army.”

Roee Ben Yishai and Sonya Stutman were there with me every step of the way. Finally, and most importantly, I would like to thank my family. My Russian uncles and cousins, the Gerlovins, Lebedevs and Basenkos, provided me with much needed hospitality in St. Petersburg. Paul and Alice Kosowsky have graciously accepted me into their family. My siblings Eli and Dina, and their spouses, Adi and Roee, provided me with support, good cheer and perspective even across a couple of oceans. My parents, Mina and Hayim Hazanov, were generous, supportive, and kind beyond measure.

The late, great Tuesday and Clio didn’t care one bit about this dissertation –and my life is

so much richer for that. Finally, this dissertation, and so much else besides, would not have been possible without my wife, Emma Hazanov. She is my best friend, harshest critic, most loving spouse, the recipient of many bad jokes, a resolute enemy of convoluted writing, and proof-reader extraordinaire. I was only able to begin, let alone finish, this project due to her endless generosity, love, and sacrifice. This dissertation is dedicated to her, with all my love.

v

Abstract

POROUS EMPIRE: FOREIGN VISITORS AND THE POST-STALIN SOVIET STATE
Alexander Hazanov Benjamin Nathans

“Porous Empire” is a study of the relationship between Soviet institutions, Soviet society

and the millions of foreigners who visited the USSR between the mid-1950s and the mid-

1980s. “Porous Empire” traces how Soviet economic, propaganda, and state security

institutions, all shaped during the isolationist Stalin period, struggled to accommodate their practices to millions of visitors with material expectations and assumed legal rights radically unlike those of Soviet citizens. While much recent Soviet historiography focuses on the ways in which the post-Stalin opening to the outside world led to the erosion of official Soviet ideology, I argue that ideological attitudes inherited from the Stalin era structured institutional responses to a growing foreign presence in Soviet life. Therefore, while Soviet institutions had to accommodate their economic practices to the growing numbers of tourists and other visitors inside the Soviet borders and were forced to concede the existence of contact zones between foreigners and Soviet citizens that loosened some of the absolute sovereignty claims of the Soviet party-statem, they remained loyal to visions of Soviet economic independence, committed to fighting the cultural Cold War, and profoundly suspicious of the outside world.
The gap between Soviet concessions to the era of international mobility and Soviet attitudes to the outside world shaped the peculiar nature of globalization in its Soviet context:

even as the Soviet opening up to the world promoted Westernization and undermined

vi

some of the ideological foundations of Soviet power, it also generated, within the bowels of Soviet institutions, a profound and honestly-held commitment to authoritarianism and social discipline as an instrument of geopolitical resistance, a mental attitude that still shapes Russian official approaches to the outside world 25 years after the fall of the USSR.

vii

List of Figures

Figure 1.1: Mister Twister

34

Figure 1.2: Hotel Viru, Talinn

81

Figure 1.3: Intourist Information Transfer Scheme Figure 2.1 Intourist Bus, Scale Model

Figure 2.2: Gilbert Becaud and “Nathalie”

Figure 3.1: Black Marketeers on Nevskii Prospekt Figure 3.2 Ian Rokotov
84 121 128 160 186 219 219 243
Figure 3.3 Scene from Dual Trap 1 Figure 3.4 Scene from Dual Trap 2 Figure 4.1 Daily KGB Report, Ukraine

Figure 4.2 Closed Zones, c. 1989

251

293 299 300
Figure 5.1: Moscow Synagogue, Sep. 1948 Figure 5.2: Mark Glotter Figure 5.3: Gifts Seized From Zionist Emissaries

viii

Contents

Chapter 5: Transnational Nationalists: ‘Zionist Emissaries’ Tour the So viet Union ..................................289

Conclusion...................................................................................................................................................336 Bibliography................................................................................................................................................352
1

Introduction

In the late 1960s, the travel writers Delia and Ferdinand Kuhn joined the hallowed tradition of Western travelers going to Muscovy/Russia/Soviet Union in order to decipher

the mysteries of the “Rude and Barbarous Kingdom.”¹In what was no doubt a major

coup by their literary agent, in the run-up to the publication of their travelogue, the Kuhns were able to publish a summary of their findings on the pages of the New York Times travel section.²

The Kuhns’ Times account of their travels begins with the following caveat:
“When the tourist enters the Soviet Union, the test tube of Communism, he is an alien

body not germane to the experiment.” From this perspective, the Kuhns explain the

alienating effects of travelling in the alternate universe that was the Soviet Union: the “giant squid” of the Soviet state that engulfs the traveler, the myriad ways in which the famed Soviet tourist monopoly, Intourist, both hinders the foreigner and shields him or her from the vagaries of Soviet material life, and above all, the psychological costs of

“routine surveillance.” And yet, the Kuhns argue, as long as one follows Soviet law, has

the gumption to stand up to Intourist, and possesses curiosity and an open mind (and no doubt, a copy of their travelogue), one could overcome the barriers the Soviets erected between foreigners and unvarnished (and uncomfortable) truths about the Soviet Union.

¹Marshall Poe, Rude and Barbarous Kingdom: Russia in the Accounts of Sixteenth Century English

Voyagers (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012).

²Delia and Ferdinand Kuhn, “Foreign Bodies in the Communist Test Tube,” New York Times, 4/10/1970.

2

This perspective on the incommensurability of foreign bodies and the Soviet system was shared by many Soviet officials - albeit from a radically different angle. A 1963 report on the misbehavior of one such foreign body, the American sociologist Lewis Feuer, by the head of the Academy of Sciences Institute of Philosophy F.V. Konstantinov, can serve as a useful case in point. During his four-month stay in the Soviet Union, Feuer, Konstantinov complained, neglected his research topic, the “theoretical foundations of historical materialism.” Instead, he spent his time “talking to Soviet people on the street, in markets, in synagogues, in open meetings in educational institutions”- all the while refusing the services of an officially assigned translator. Feuer even enrolled his daughter in a Soviet school with the express purpose (according to Konstantinov), of “spying on [vyvedat’] the moods of Soviet children and their parents’ opinions.” Even worse, Feuer not only shared his decidedly non-historical-materialist perspective on Soviet society with many Soviet colleagues, but also caused a public scene

by declaring that Soviet Marxism was “at a crossroads,” that antisemitism was rife there,

and that the younger generation of Soviet people displayed a “powerful drift away from

Marxism” in a public address at the Institute. ³

Based on Feuer’s behavior, Konstantinov concluded that he and other American

exchange participants were not scientists at all, but simply “functionaries of the State Department.” Therefore, he recommended, the Soviet Union should discontinue its

³“F.V Konstantinov to TsK KPSS, 10/6/1965,” Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv noveishei istorii

[RGANI], f. 5, op. 55, d. 3, ll. 215-216.

3

exchange agreements with the Americans. These, he argues, served no useful purpose but

to provide a channel “for the infiltration of ideological spies, of blatant anticommunists

into our country.”⁴This cri de coeur received a cold and laconic reply from the Central Committee: Soviet officials in charge of the exchange program were well aware of Feuer’s anti-Soviet proclivities, but could not reject his candidacy according to the terms of the Soviet-American scientific-cultural exchange agreements.⁵

While their ideological predilections could not be further apart, Konstantinov, the anonymous Central Committee official who rejected his request, and the Kuhns all

agreed on two crucial points. First, foreigners were indeed “alien bodies” quite unlike

anyone else in bloodstream of Soviet society. Second, the mighty immune system of the Soviet state found itself rather ill-adapted to deal with the threats they posed. Seen from the perspective of Soviet authorities, the Kuhns’ experimental metaphor was extremely apt if, but not at all in the way the Kuhns envisioned it.Foreign visitors to the post-Stalin Soviet Union were indeed participants in an experiment, but not quite the one the Kuhns were thinking about: rather, the experiment involved the introduction of large numbers of foreigners into a society organized along largely autarchic lines between the 1920s and the 1950s, thus forcing its institutions to face a new social force they were not designed to accommodate. Porous Empire traces the unfolding of this experiment from the initial Soviet opening up to the world in the mid-1950s to the demise of the Soviet system in

⁴Ibid, 217.

⁵“Spravka na no. 20791, 7/25/1965,” RGANI, f. op. 55, d. 3, l. 218.

4

1991, exploring how Soviet institutions sought to benefit from, accommodate to, and limit the socio-cultural consequences of the ever-growing presence of “alien bodies” on Soviet soil.