On 29 December 1927, a dense and heavily policed crowd packed the Parisian Cinéma de Grenelle for an emotional journey through time and space. This ‘great popular meeting’, intricately scripted by the committee commemorating the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, provided an immersive, audio-visual experience of the new regime, before inaugurating the French section of the Friends of the Soviet Union. Silent footage of Russia in 1917, a live orchestra, a phonograph playing Lenin's speeches and – at the visual and symbolic centre of the stage – a series of witnesses recounting their recent journeys through the Soviet Union, flanked by French workers wearing the uniform of the Red Army. ‘Socialists, anarchists, communists, non-affiliated workers and intellectuals . . . have experienced Red Russia in every sense’, proclaimed the posters, ‘and these delegates will travel everywhere to tell French workers what they have seen.’Footnote 1 The liturgical and religious dimensions of the event were entirely deliberate: the podium as altar, around which witnesses to the new faith were gathered both to commemorate and to proselytise; the special focus on non-communists (even former anarchists) ‘converted’ by their journeys. Writers who had visited Russia in 1927 celebrated its significance at the subsequent banquet, with French authors Luc Durtain and Andrée Viollis praising ‘a new civilisation on the march, and a new faith’, as well as the desire ‘to live nowhere if not over there’. While the sights and sounds of the spectacle seemed to resurrect October 1917, the hope of the proselytes was that this past and present would also be the future of Europe.Footnote 2
Perceptions of Russia were inseparable from European self-perception. Exactly what the achievements and ambitions of Soviet Russia might signify for Europe – for its social and political development, its borders and global power – was a subject for intense debate, not least at this moment of introspection in 1927. A decade after the October Revolution, Russia could be presented as a template for European political and economic development, a case study in the challenges attending the practice of socialism (especially during the New Economic Policy of 1921–8), or an ominous return to a more primitive past. Europeans reflecting on Russian influence simultaneously looked outwards – to the ways in which Soviet policies might reshape the boundaries and balance of power between East and West, Europe and its colonies – and inwards, to personal worldviews and values. Those who travelled from Europe to Russia in this period thus found themselves confronting the question ‘Who am I?’,Footnote 3 challenged to articulate and even rethink their own concepts and assumptions. Georges Duhamel, a French doctor and writer who journeyed to Russia with his friend Luc Durtain in 1927, confessed that he had ‘never felt more Western than when over there’,Footnote 4 while writer and diplomat Alfred Fabre-Luce described his journey to Russia in the same year as ‘an attempt to gain, through the act of distancing and returning, a closer grasp of my more familiar universe’.Footnote 5 Readers and reviewers meanwhile found in these accounts similar cause to evaluate how contemporary Russia was reshaping individual and European self-perception. As Eugène Marsan asserted in 1928, collectively reviewing travel narratives by Durtain, Viollis, Duhamel and Fabre-Luce, ‘I am as you are, readers: I need to know what effect Russia has had on them, as well as what it has become after ten years.’Footnote 6
Despite the breadth of scholarship on interwar travels to Russia, historians continue to focus on how these travellers depicted Russia, not on how their journeys reshaped ideas of Europe. Most studies prioritise how far Western travellers were ‘convinced’ by the Soviet regime, with its carefully chosen guides and itineraries. Historians chart the ‘techniques of hospitality’ employed by Soviet officials to impress their visitors:Footnote 7 the elaborate construction of what François Hourmant has described as a ‘parallel universe . . . characterised by the omnipresence of simulacrum’.Footnote 8 Equally, there remains an abiding interest in political pilgrimages by Western intellectuals converted by their Soviet experiences, even to the point of remaining ‘surprising indulgent’ about authoritarian practices elsewhere.Footnote 9 Significantly, recent scholarship has begun to shift beyond these binary reactions to the Soviet Union, aiming instead to situate visions of Russia within longer-term cultural exchange,Footnote 10 or to explore the ‘grey zone’ inhabited by the guides who were both mouthpieces and suspects of the Soviet regime.Footnote 11 But there remains an implicit conviction that European travels to Russia tell us about Russia, not Europe. What is more, the reception of interwar travel narratives about Russia has never been explored in detail. In fact, Sophie Cœuré – whose own research on European travels to Russia is invaluable – notes simply that it would be ‘difficult to assess’ the impact of such accounts in the late 1920s.Footnote 12
This article, in contrast, makes the perception of Europe in the mirror of Russia its principal focus. It foregrounds four French travel narratives inspired by journeys to Russia in 1927 that have received little previous attention: Seule en Russie by Andrée Viollis (Françoise-Caroline Claudius Jacquet de la Veyrière), a feminist reporter for Le Petit Parisien who travelled out to Russia in late 1926;Footnote 13 Le Voyage de Moscou and L'Autre Europe: Moscou et sa foi by Georges Duhamel and Luc Durtain (André Nepveu), left-wing doctors, writers and contributors to Europe, revue mensuelle who journeyed together in the summer of 1927 at the invitation of the Soviet Academy of Sciences;Footnote 14 and Russie 1927 by the conservative Alfred Fabre-Luce, whose journey overlapped with that of the two doctors but who published his account in explicit opposition to Duhamel.Footnote 15 Though now little known,Footnote 16 all four accounts were widely discussed and compared by contemporaries – in French political and intellectual circles, in the wider press, and even in trade-union evening classesFootnote 17 – although this reception has been similarly neglected.
The central contention here is that these travel narratives concern Europe as well as Russia, and that they reveal some of the most significant ways in which Russia was reshaping European notions of borders, measurability, time and history in the interwar period. The first section demonstrates how discussions of Russian and European development were closely interlinked, often involving the same historical actors (including the writers under discussion), and how travel narratives could deliberately counter the rigidity of borders between Russia and Europe. In the second and third sections, departing significantly from existing scholarship, the article reveals that some of the deepest delineations identified between Russia and Europe were not geographical or even political, but scientific and temporal. The second section explores perceived differences between the measurement, calibration and experience of time and space in Europe and Russia. The third section probes the previously uncharted critical reception of these travel narratives and examines how perceived temporal distinctions between Europe and Russia challenged Europeans in their imagination of the shape and direction of historical development. Contributing to the ‘temporal turn’ in contemporary historiography,Footnote 18 this analysis suggests that the experience of Russia as both past and future caused writers and readers to question their assumptions about the linear, evolutionary model of time – a model still widely portrayed as integral to European modes of thought. Cumulatively, this article reveals how Russia reshaped European perceptions of both time and history, developing our understanding of the cultural imagination of the interwar period.
Russia: The ‘Other Europe’?
The four French writers in this case study were obviously shaped by the specificity of Franco–Russian exchange.Footnote 19 Nevertheless, they also operated within political tourism and discussion on a European scale and with a European focus. French political militants, workers’ delegates, writers, journalists (and even children) who travelled to Russia in the mid-1920s joined a small but steady stream of other foreign visitors,Footnote 20 which in the French case peaked after the Soviet Union's diplomatic recognition by Édouard Herriot's left-wing government in October 1924.Footnote 21 Like other foreign visitors, they were – as voluminous archives attestFootnote 22 – meticulously supervised during their Russian journeys, their trajectories often carefully curated by VOKS (the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations established in September 1923), or, from 1929, by Intourist.Footnote 23 Those attending the inaugural conference of the Friends of the Soviet Union in 1927 found themselves among 947 delegates from forty-three countries;Footnote 24 many would then shape the creation of the society's national sections, as at the Parisian Cinéma de Grenelle in December. Returning home, delegates were provided with extensive documentation in their own languages, explicitly to assist with oral or written accounts of their Soviet visit.Footnote 25
By the time Viollis, Durtain, Duhamel and Fabre-Luce journeyed to the Soviet Union in 1926–7, the travel writing to which they contributed was marked by its own salient characteristics – and long before André Gide's Retour de l'URSS of 1936 became a notorious classic in the genre.Footnote 26 These writers shared in the itineraries of their predecessors (there was, for example, an established circuit that included Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev, Odessa and Sebastopol), and they visited the same schools and factories, despite the illusion of choice.Footnote 27 They also played to the conventions of the genre by discussing an expected array of topics, including the NEP, censorship, violence and surveillance, the cult of Lenin, art and culture, the supply of food, relations between the sexes, family policies and the problem of street children. Sometimes they paid explicit homage to earlier travel writing, whether this writing described Russia or charted other ‘new worlds’. When Fabre-Luce travelled down the Volga, for instance, he sought out the landscapes and peoples depicted by artist Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin in the eighteenth century and, more recently, by the poet and novelist Théophile Gautier and the nationalist writer and deputy Maurice Barrès.Footnote 28 Durtain and Viollis compared their sense of estrangement with that of the protagonist in Gulliver's Travels,Footnote 29 while Durtain's and Duhamel's accounts played with the strangeness of travelling to a ‘new world’ without crossing the sea, while at the same time preserving maritime imagery by describing the train (and indeed Russia itself) as a ship.Footnote 30
While participating in wider patterns of political tourism, these writers were also actively involved in discussions on Europe as continent and idea, even potential federation.Footnote 31 Paris in 1927 witnessed not only discussions and commemorations of Russia in 1917, but equally a series of European-focused meetings and debates. In May the French hosted the central committee of the Paneuropean Union, which discussed a possible European federation, customs union and common currency.Footnote 32 The French national section included writers and political activists who had already travelled – or would shortly travel – to the Soviet Union, among them Alfred Fabre-Luce, former Prime Minister Édouard Herriot and economist Charles Rist.Footnote 33 Viollis, Duhamel and Durtain were similarly active in European debates. Andrée Viollis was already well-known for her reports on Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Portugal and Ireland as journalist for Le Petit Parisien, and fascinated by the relationship between Europe and the East.Footnote 34 Both Georges Duhamel and Luc Durtain contributed to Europe, revue mensuelle, which from 1923 onwards included reflections on Europe as a common ‘fatherland’ and even ‘supreme state’;Footnote 35 and Durtain would publish extracts from his study of Russia in both Europe, revue mensuelle and Europe nouvelle before the book-length version appeared in 1928.Footnote 36 The critical interest was, moreover, reciprocated. Soviet authorities acquired Europe, revue mensuelle until 1930, alongside prominent travel narratives such as Andrée Viollis's Seule en Russie.Footnote 37 Meanwhile, the theme of Pan-Europe was a near-constant preoccupation in Izvestia, official national newspaper of the Soviet government, between late 1929 and summer 1931.Footnote 38
Shaped by these entangled discussions on Russia and Europe, Duhamel, Durtain, Viollis and Fabre-Luce used their travel narratives not so much to confirm as to counter some of the expected distinctions between the two. In particular, they were anxious to explore Russia's complex, symbiotic relationship with Europe, rather than simply to validate the binary reactions towards Russia as the Soviet Union that have continued to take precedence in research. Viollis, for example, played to the expectation of binary reactions by insisting that she had not been entirely ‘convinced’, yet at the same time styled her account as ‘neither apology nor condemnation’.Footnote 39 Durtain, similarly, articulated and then immediately refuted the reader's presumed desire for a one-word answer on Russia, opening his account with the rhetorical question, ‘What are my impressions from the visit?’ ‘Well’, he then answered, ‘it's that everything one could say about the USSR is true! Everything – and also the exact opposite!’Footnote 40 Equally prominent in the texts were references to the multitude of misleading images of Russia in circulation, which, as Fabre-Luce suggested, were causing ‘this great country edging away from Europe’ to become an island, surrounded by ‘a double and distorting mirror of fake news.’Footnote 41
Like many of their contemporaries, these writers paid close attention to the act of crossing the border. Yet as their narratives unfolded, all four writers also explored ways in which the boundaries between Europe and Russia – seemingly so clear-cut at the moment of transition – were in fact more challenging and perhaps surprising to discern, not least because ‘Russia’ and the ‘Soviet Union’ were far from interchangeable. As Rachel Mazuy emphasises, travellers to Russia were acutely conscious of entering both a political and a geographical space. More than that, the most significant border, in the words of the communist Paul Vaillant-Couturier, was that of class.Footnote 42 Durtain and Duhamel were thus disappointed that darkness and snow obscured the banner exhorting workers of the world to unite; Andrée Viollis was similarly irked to cross the border in darkness, so missing the ‘theatrical’ welcome accorded to Western workers (‘how many times had I dreamed of that first contact!’).Footnote 43 Fabre-Luce, meanwhile, described the intense sensation of having crossed ‘the furthest shoreline of capitalism’. For him, this was a liminal moment ‘more emotive that the geographical boundaries dreamed of by Barrès or Chateaubriand’, a ‘crossing of the moral tropics’ that should be marked with its own ‘baptism’ in the manner of crossing the Tropic of Cancer or the equator.Footnote 44
Similarly, all four writers experienced in Soviet maps a disorientating reshaping of both space and narrative, and acknowledged the power of cartography to reconfigure global politics as well as geography.Footnote 45 Durtain was surprised by the portraits of so many philosophers in the customs shed (even the ‘heretical’ Trotsky), and noticed that in the selection of maps, the map of the world was already ‘riddled with red marks’.Footnote 46 Fabre-Luce, during his meeting with the Director of Foreign Policy, Georgy Tchitcherin, noticed the deliberate centrality on the map of the ‘expanding USSR, while the capitalist countries, drawn away by the rotundity of the globe, sidle discreetly to the edges’: a symbolic change of perspective, even if not necessarily a distortion of the material relationships of size and space between Russia and Europe.Footnote 47 Durtain's conclusions were similar. A map in a Russian schoolroom forced his acknowledgement that the ‘immense USSR balances out – indeed, that's exactly the case – a handful of other countries.’Footnote 48 And while Viollis saw the Soviet map as anticipating conflict over Asia between the ‘Russian bear’ and the ‘British leopard’, and recorded Tchitcherin's musings over ‘Moscow, capital of the United States of Asia’,Footnote 49 Duhamel reached comparable conclusions, on the assumption that revolution in China would be diverted from purely nationalist ends. ‘Then’, he wrote, ‘Europe would be compressed into the very corner of a communist continent, reduced to a few nations divided by inexpiable hatreds, under the impassive and suspicious gaze of the great American republics’.Footnote 50
Despite their interest in the moment of border-crossing, however, and despite the mental gymnastics required to adjust to Soviet cartography, all four writers were nonetheless determined to emphasise the more fluid and elusive character of borders between Russia and Europe. As the train travelled through Lithuania and Latvia, before the ‘official’ border, Alfred Fabre-Luce found himself already seeking Russia in these ‘elements detached from Russian territory during the great reshaping of 1918’.Footnote 51 Meanwhile, Georges Duhamel questioned how much of Russia's complex history, geographical diversity, or 150 million inhabitants could effectively be conveyed by a political regime deriving from a revolution only ten years previously,Footnote 52 and therefore insisted that ‘Russia’ and the ‘USSR’ were far from interchangeable.Footnote 53 ‘Who would think of saying, “I'm going to spend my holidays in federal Switzerland”’, he added, ‘or “I've got several clients in monarchical England”?’Footnote 54 Similarly, his companion Luc Durtain despaired of attaching any uniform character to a country ‘placed at the crossroads between Asia and Europe, with its extraordinary diversity of races’.Footnote 55 Reviews in the literary rather than political press, such as Le Monde slave, revue mensuelle, welcomed this recognition that Russia, its people, and its revolutions could not be smoothly conflated and then superficially dismissed in an initial reaction to ‘Soviet’ Russia.Footnote 56
Playing with their own – and their readers’ – expectations, these writers also highlighted moments of missed exoticism: moments of unexpected similarity or ‘Europeanness’ in a country more frequently associated with ‘radical alterity’.Footnote 57 Georges Duhamel found to his surprise that the Sunday market in Moscow's Smolensky Square suggested ‘both Asia and Europe, the Orient and the Rue Mouffetard [in Paris]’.Footnote 58 Similarly, Andrée Viollis's internalised images and expectations of exoticism and orientalism were abruptly challenged by her experience of Nizhny Novgorod, 250 miles east of Moscow. This populous and commercial centre, spanning the Volga and Oka rivers and famous for its wood-crafted nineteenth-century merchants’ estates as well as for the all-Russia Exhibition held there in 1896, was still an important centre for trade in the late 1920s. Yet ‘where are the precious stones’, Viollis lamented, ‘the sable, the Persian silks, the fabrics from Smyrna and the cashmere from India, the exquisite firearms from Tiflis, and the Caucasian and Turkish rugs? Are we really in Nizhny Novgorod, or are we actually at a fair in Lyon or Paris?’ Still more disappointing was her glimpse of a delegate from the southern Russian Republic of Kyrgyz. Inspired, perhaps, by images of turbans as emblems of the exotic,Footnote 59 she had imagined him robed in scarlet, ‘a turban resting on his forehead, on its crest a fountain sprinkled with pearls, and fixed with a gemstone’. Instead, he was swathed only in an ordinary scarf, and wearing an equally nondescript cap and overcoat. He could have been a merchant from Normandy, or the Auvergne. He was not even escorted by a romantic caravan of camels – having arrived, pragmatically, by plane.Footnote 60 Certainly, she conceded, the fair at Nizhny Novgorod was still more Asian than European. Yet it exemplified for her a new Asia, ‘racing towards mechanisation, using the telephone, the aeroplane and the radio’, and seemingly losing its own soul under its increasingly European guise.Footnote 61 Nor were such frustrated expectations to be found only among Europeans. When Alfred Fabre-Luce travelled south to Tiflis (in present-day Georgia), he found himself the object of heightened curiosity among the local population. Pressing their excited faces against the windows of the carriages, they tried to catch a glimpse of the foreign traveller, but were disappointed to find that he, like Rica in Montesquieu's Lettres persanes, had divested himself of immediate interest and exoticism by donning local costume.Footnote 62
If Russia lacked exoticism, it also challenged the specificity and presumed superiority of European culture. In the basement of the Hermitage, Luc Durtain mused over the fragments of Graeco-Scythian art, with their suggestion that Hellenic culture – so integral to European self-perception – had been ‘one of the earliest deposits of alluvium to enrich the Russian soil, if not the earliest’.Footnote 63 More broadly, his study of architecture and the human scale in Moscow led, first, to reaffirmation, even self-congratulation, for the European and his characteristics. Yet the more frequently Durtain conducted his experiment, the less clear his conclusions became. Although often struck by a greater serenity, passivity or resignation on Russian countenances than on the faces of anxious, chronometrically regulated Europeans, he also located the European ‘gaze’ – often now associated with imperial and gendered control – in Moscow.Footnote 64 And this posed a challenging problem. Was Russia, then, not also some kind of Europe? Durtain thus called upon the reader directly to rethink and resituate Moscow, and even Russia itself:
Not in Europe, as you have just observed. Not outside Europe, as you have previously acknowledged. This unique combination of daring novelty and archaic tradition, together with the geographical breadth and diversity of a country which, isolated from other civilisations by the curious chasm of its frontiers, numbers 150 million inhabitants and occupies a sixth of the earth's land surface: does this not cumulatively legitimise, in terms of moral geography, the provisional recognition of a sixth continent? Just as we refer to North America and South America, could we not similarly refer to Europe and the Other Europe?Footnote 65
Systems of Mastery and Measurement
While Russia could represent an ‘other Europe’, a mirror in which to seek alterity and find resemblance, this did not signify that the border between the two was an undifferentiated ‘grey zone’ with no salient features at all. On the contrary, all four writers in this study were convinced of a profound difference between Russia and Europe, but not only or straightforwardly in the areas that other writers had described, such as economics, surveillance or censorship. Instead, one of the shared convictions of these writers – and one that has not previously been explored in detail – was that Russia and Europe inhabited different regimes of measurability, temporality and historicity. These perceived distinctions sometimes had the more straightforward effect of bolstering the Europeans’ own convictions, supporting theories that European travel in this period could ‘distract the European eye or even allow it to rediscover and re-impose a Western supremacist vision’.Footnote 66 However, they also prompted the realisation that Russia's elusive place within European concepts and experiences of time, speed or human endeavour might require a rethinking of these frameworks themselves.
This sense of difference between Europe and Russia was prompted by changes observed in the character, usage and mastery of urban and rural space as Western Europeans travelled eastwards. The more industrialised and populous areas of central and northern Europe were, as Viollis and Durtain noted, characterised by their ‘abundance of manmade achievements’,Footnote 67 with their transport networks, stations and canals seemingly as natural and ‘rooted’ in their landscapes as the trees. In contrast, the rarer glimpses of factories after the Russian border gave the impression of imported foreign ‘specimens’.Footnote 68 For Fabre-Luce, space appeared as ‘that great Slavic luxury’, while for Durtain the salient characteristic of ‘Slavic immensity’ was the relationship to ‘the Earth, still unconquered, with its elemental proportions . . . the miracle of unrealised consubstantiation’. And those who – unlike Durtain himself – could not compare their journey with the Sahara or the American prairie, would doubtless experience the elemental shock still more intensely.Footnote 69
The sense of a shifting relationship between humans and their environment was also sharpened by the immediate context of the railway and its rolling stock. The change of rolling stock to match the gauge of the Russian railway seemed here symbolic as well as practical. Travellers from Paris to Moscow spent the first two days of their three-day journey in the same carriages, where the ‘magical mirrors seemed still, sometimes, to show us the veiled image of Paris’. On the third day, the Soviet sleeping cars were newer, massive, and garish: as Durtain put it, ‘what vast Russian governments are to French départements’.Footnote 70 Arriving in Moscow, these writers were similarly conscious of a shift in scale. Duhamel, for example, described the palace that included the writers’ collective where they were hosted as ‘oversized: seemingly not on a human scale’.Footnote 71 ‘Everything in Russia is adjusted to the gigantic stature of the Romanovs’, concluded Viollis, contemplating her ‘elephantine’ bath and comparing herself with Gulliver in the land of the giants.Footnote 72 Certainly, Western Europe was rich in architectural variation, as Durtain acknowledged, and the streets of London, Madrid, Stockholm, Berlin and Paris might seem at first glance to have little in common. Yet in the mirror of Russia, the cityscapes of ‘our great European country’ (and, strikingly, he used the singular here) seemed more closely based on ‘houses built on human proportions’ than their Russian counterparts. For Durtain, the European assumed the image of a ‘man with windows round his head, who has long known how to resolve, with a smile, problems of which so many other peoples are ignorant’.Footnote 73
It was not only matter but also movement that determined these perceptions of difference between Europe and Russia. Viollis, for one, was surprised that her train should arrive in Moscow at the advertised hour, because she assumed a lack of correlation between western and eastern timetables, despite a deliberate expansion of ‘rational and efficient’ time through the standardisation of times and schedules across national borders.Footnote 74 Durtain and Duhamel were struck by the change of speed when changing rolling stock to match the Russian track gauge. The sudden slowing to no more than fifty kilometres an hour – just as the landscape was becoming simultaneously more open and less populated – conveyed a sense of qualitative as well as quantitative difference between European and Russia speed. Indeed, as Durtain questioned, what role could European speed, a ‘quality that is so nervous, so tense’, possibly play in the vastness of Russia?
What force could its bar of steel – an alloy of haste, willpower, and precision, embedded in our country in a well-defined world whose contours it deforms – exercise here, in these deserts where distance has recovered its original fluidity? In this slow peregrination, space and time are unbounded. Indeed, I no longer have the sensation of the ship's bow leaving the quay and setting off across the waves: instead I'm like a probe sinking into the ocean, descending towards the unknown.Footnote 75
More profoundly, this formed part of a wider debate over the status and role of scientific endeavour in Russian and European society and politics. Durtain and Duhamel, doctors and writers invited to Russia in their professional capacities, focused this debate on scientific theory and practice, as well as on technological development. Unusually among European visitors, they were able to visit both hospitals and laboratories – including that of Pavlov, though he himself was absent at the time.Footnote 76 They were impressed that the state should devote significant financial resources to scientific research despite more pressing demands of modernisation, particularly electrification, and that leading scientists critical of the regime should be supported in their research, albeit under close supervision.Footnote 77 And yet despite this admiration, they also voiced their anxiety at the ‘austere cult of science’ in Russia, with its assumption that human behaviour could always be scientifically determined and predicted.Footnote 78 Durtain, for instance, found the ‘mixture of facts and arithmetic, authority and propaganda’ to be too ‘dry’, and was especially disconcerted when a Russian schoolchild asked him the time of the next French revolution, ‘just as a traveller would enquire at the ticket office at what time a particular train would depart’.Footnote 79
Much of the debate over this supposed cultural difference between Russia and Europe could be interpreted as a certain self-satisfaction, even self-congratulation, on the part of the European visitors: an assumption that Europeans could master ‘precision tools’, whereas Russians were ill-equipped to do so.Footnote 80 Yet there was a simultaneous rethinking of Europe and Europeans. Even Fabre-Luce, who was often derided in reviews for superciliousness, peering down on ordinary mortals through his monocle,Footnote 81 acknowledged that these traits were no laughing matter. ‘You [Russians]’, he wrote, ‘make us realise our own misplaced idealism by exaggerating it to comical dimensions’. The fusion of science and emotion, class and nation, politics and religion and the search for happiness – ‘this curious compilation of contrasting conjectures may define the Russian Revolution, yet it also renders it movingly close to our own experience. It leaps into the abyss towards which we, too, seem to strain’.Footnote 82
Through these debates ran the anxiety that differences between scientific mastery and measurability in Europe and Russia challenged the systems of analysis that the travellers carried with them. Durtain, for instance, suggested that those encountering this ‘new civilisation’ should come ‘bearing measuring instruments under their arms’,Footnote 83 and yet at the same time found in Russia a country ‘where every human limit has disappeared’, and where ‘our very concepts of countries, and our ideas, seem too narrow’.Footnote 84 Fabre-Luce, endeavouring to situate the Russian economy in the era of the NEP, admitted that ‘it cannot be entirely defined by our own measuring instruments’.Footnote 85 ‘In its tragic experiment, it gathers up every one of our cards and scrambles them completely, so that we start the round all over again’.Footnote 86
Time and History
The realm in which such incongruence was most salient – both for the travellers and for those who heard, read and reviewed their accounts – was that of time itself. Travel and travel-writing exist in a multifaceted relationship with time: there are the multiple times of the journey, its narrative and reception;Footnote 87 there is the relationship between the ‘individual’ time or eigenzeitlichkeit of the traveller (carried, like Durtain's mental measuring instruments, ‘in one's luggage’),Footnote 88 and the regimes of temporality of the peoples and countries encountered. More profoundly, there is the question of whether these regimes of temporality can coexist as separate realms or ‘pluritemporalities’,Footnote 89 or whether, despite their geographical variation, they represent stages in a single, teleological evolution.Footnote 90 As recent research has explored, the perception of time is closely influenced by chronopolitical control, and framed by what François Hartog has termed ‘regimes of historicity’: ‘ways of articulating the past, the present, and the future and investing them with sense’.Footnote 91
Here, the writing and reception of the travel narratives in this study speak to a controversial theme: the impact on European perceptions of temporality and historicity of the countries to which they travelled. In their 2021 volume on European travel writing, Paula Henrikson and Christina Kulberg note that Europeans have often been accused of ‘imposing their own sense of time onto the rest of the world, of denying it temporality altogether, of being blind to the multiple times existing simultaneously’.Footnote 92 Equally, and especially in colonial contexts, Europeans have been associated with a linear, evolutionary model of time: a ‘puncturing of cyclical time by the arrow of modernity’,Footnote 93 a ‘transition narrative’ in which other countries remain in ‘an imagined waiting room of history’, and in which the modern, European idea of history ‘came to non-European peoples . . . as somebody's way of saying “not yet” to somebody else’.Footnote 94 As recent research also underlines, the ‘chronopolitical’ efforts of Europeans to impose standard times and narratives on other peoples have never been entirely successful. Instead, such efforts have frequently coexisted with, rather than effectively suppressing, alternative means of measuring, recording and experiencing time.Footnote 95
Yet what is perhaps less well studied is that even the Europeans who might – and often justifiably – be accused of judging other nations according to the ‘unitary time of Western modernity’ did not necessarily remain within their stereotypes. This study of French writers in Russia is a case in point. Whatever their views on Russia's ability to master and continue scientific technological development, these writers acknowledged that, after its Revolution of 1917, Russia represented a possible future for Europe. How, then, could it be located on an evolutionary model that assumed Western European development as the desirable or inevitable conclusion? Was it in the past, present or future on such a model? Or could it be understood only in an alternative regime of historicity – such as cyclical or salvational – despite these being, at least in François Hartog's theories, sub-dominant in the linear, ‘futurist’ regime of historicity that held sway after the First World War?Footnote 96
The first point to note here is that the writers in this study experienced Russia as uneven in its temporality – which could, of course, be said for any European country, regardless of revolutionary rupture. Some travellers, for example, were struck by social distinctions that they had believed gone with the revolution: Fabre-Luce described Leningrad as seeming, visually, almost pre-revolutionary (though ‘this great mirror is untruthful’),Footnote 97 while Viollis found herself wondering whether the scene on board ship as she travelled down the Volga ‘would have been different in the time of the tsars’.Footnote 98 Again like other travellers, both Durtain and Duhamel saw the horse-drawn carriage (izvoztchik) as an anachronistic relic of the past: no wonder that all the drivers should be counter-revolutionary, observed Durtain, just as all butchers in La Villette were once royalist.Footnote 99 Both, too, described their surreal encounter with the ancien regime smile of a Moscow aristocrat, who had sold his entire wardrobe to a cinema company and now donned his former persona – and clothing – only to play in Soviet films (no wonder the aristocratic characters should seem so convincing).Footnote 100 One day, perhaps, Russian cities would be all ‘harsh industrial silhouettes, covered with futurist posters’, but for now their appearance was less temporally homogeneous.Footnote 101
But if Russia seemed ‘miraculously half in the past, and half in the future’,Footnote 102 then it was extremely difficult to situate on a European timeline. Travellers sometimes looked down on the ‘medieval’ countryside, like Fabre-Luce during his journey to Tiflis, and discerned the railway line as a thin line of modernity flanked by ‘the middle ages to both left and right’.Footnote 103 But the problem then, as Duhamel sought to articulate, was that the Russian peasantry were both superficially similar to the farmers of the Cévennes (themselves all too close to their medieval predecessors) – and yet also ‘the real masters of Russia’, thrust through their greatest and possibly final jacquerie into a status unknown in Europe.Footnote 104 Meanwhile, French communists in Leningrad – like actor and film critic Léon Moussinac, reporting on the tenth anniversary celebrations for L'Humanité – described how the films shown alongside Battleship Potemkin juxtaposed European and Russian newsreels in a way that made Europe appear to be ‘a great leap into the past . . . a ridiculous old world: small, pitiful, tragic’.Footnote 105 For Viollis, Russia was a ‘great laboratory with broken windows’ (a quotation from Paul Morand, to whom Fabre-Luce dedicated his account);Footnote 106 for Fabre-Luce, too, the future to which Europe might be heading. Did this mean that the rupture of 1917 had disrupted the linear understanding of history?
The problem was compounded in that, even if Russia were to be located on a linear model of time through the accomplishment of social or cultural change experienced in Europe, its pace and sequence of change were different. Both Fabre-Luce and Durtain expressed the resulting sense of temporal disorientation when writing of artistic and stylistic development. Durtain, for example, noted that commercial posters were both ‘born of our own cubism’ and yet ‘several years ahead of us’;Footnote 107 Fabre-Luce observed that post-revolutionary Russia had experienced the symbolism of the 1890s and pre-war futurism as a single stage, before ‘becoming dada in 1920, just like us’.Footnote 108 This sense that Russia had somehow contrived to ‘miss’ a necessary stage in development rather than simply ‘accelerate’ (as Hartmut Rosa's ‘theory of modernity’ would suggest) was, of course, even more widely discussed in social and political terms.Footnote 109 French communist Georges Altman was proud to proclaim in his combined review of Durtain, Duhamel, Viollis and Fabre-Luce that ‘Russia accomplished two revolutions at the same time: one against the middle ages and the other against modern society. A fact that has disrupted the events that followed as well as the views of observers.’Footnote 110 Indeed, in a further article reviewing a recent book on Russia by the Armenian writer Armen Ohanian, he reaffirmed that for French observers in particular, the model of a 1789 revolution in which popular militancy in Saint-Antoine ended with the government of the bourgeoisie made the interpretation of the ‘double Revolution’ of 1917 extremely problematic.Footnote 111 And there is certainly evidence for Altman's claims. Fabre-Luce bitterly criticised the ‘absence’ of a bourgeois revolution, and insisted that one could not ‘simply pass on the torch of intelligence from one class to another’ without serious consequences.Footnote 112 Duhamel, though in opposition to Fabre-Luce,Footnote 113 was likewise concerned by this conflation of political and social stages – noting, in the case of the redistribution of land, that ‘one must advance one step at a time, rather than in a single bound.’Footnote 114
Moving outwards to the reviews of these travel narratives, it becomes clear that the ‘placing’ of Russia on a temporal model, and the related questions of the shape and motor of historical progress, prompted lively debate. Reviewers such as Marcel Thiébaut in the Revue de Paris highlighted the temporal ambiguity of ‘this great land mass situated outside time, and which seems, to some, to remain in the middle ages, while others see it as offering a vision of the future.’ Despite the material, metallic connection of Russia to Europe through the very tracks of the railway system, travellers and readers alike imagined it separated by an ocean, eliding contemporary journeys into early modern adventures in search of Montaigne's ‘cannibals’.Footnote 115 And if Europe and Russia did not belong on a single linear trajectory, then perhaps there were other possible conceptions? Fabre-Luce himself had suggested the possibility of separate but perhaps converging lines for these ‘two Europes’, with Russia becoming more nationalist and Europe more socialist, and Thiébaut's review suggested the same ‘possible meeting point’: ‘Russia is moving towards capitalism, while we are slowly becoming more socialist.’Footnote 116
If these two lines of development were converging, then what did this mean for concepts of agency and inevitability as ‘engines’ of motion through time? Viollis did not believe that ‘Russian bolchevism’ could be established in Europe, let alone in France; Duhamel, meanwhile, did not believe in the ‘imminence of communist revolution in France’, yet imagined a more distant future in which, by slow adaptation of attitudes and a generalised, incremental desire for change as irresistible as a rising sea, communism might ‘spread over the entire breadth of the world’.Footnote 117 Communist reviewers criticised this gradualist approach: they argued that left-wing, relatively sympathetic travellers such as Durtain and Duhamel should, with what François Hartog would later identify as the ‘futurism’ of their times,Footnote 118 accept the ‘iron reality of communism’, and trust that the sufferings of rapid and radical change would be justified by the new world thus created.Footnote 119 But there was then the question of individual agency.Footnote 120 Fabre-Luce castigated Duhamel for his fatalistic assumption that communism was an inevitable future – ‘He should have said, and so I'll say it for him: “Insofar as this depends on me, never!”’Footnote 121 And both Fabre-Luce and Duhamel (as well as Durtain, and many of their reviewers) asked the question: ‘if, for example, Lenin had not been a Bolshevik, would bolshevism have triumphed?’Footnote 122
The final problem with situating Russia on an evolutionary model of European time was the perception of time as cyclical: an earlier regime of historicity in which, according to Hartog, ‘the future might not repeat the past exactly, but it would certainly not surpass it’.Footnote 123 Such a model received considerable attention in debates around the potential decline and fall of European civilisation in the aftermath of the First World War, such as in Paul Valéry's La Crise de l'esprit (1919).Footnote 124 The cyclical character of history, and the specific question of European and Western decline and revival, would continue to be debated through the 1920s, shaped by the publication of Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 1918–22), and by Henri Massis's riposte of 1927, The Defence of the West (La Défense de l'Occident), which urged the rediscovery of Europe's Graeco-Roman and Christian roots in a new crusade for survival.Footnote 125 Meanwhile, the same concerns were also voiced in the popular press. ‘Civilisations, like nations, are mortal’, insisted Le Petit Journal, à propos of a debate between Gaston Riou and Raymond Poincaré over the existence of a European ‘nation’. ‘And history – which we should not disregard – shows us that they perish if they lose their sense of value, their instinct of self-preservation’.Footnote 126 François Hartog, while arguing for the dominance of a more linear, ‘futurist’ regime of historicity in the interwar period, nonetheless acknowledged the popular and emotional pull of cyclical alternatives, such as Jacques Bainville's Histoire de France (1924), which sought to undermine contemporary notions of progress and to suggest that time did not simply ‘march on’.Footnote 127 What Hartog does not mention – though it is germane to this analysis – was that Jacques Bainville was a royalist, and so had particular reason to oppose a more teleological, republican model.
Defence of a ‘cyclical’ model of history, according to which essential national or human characteristics created the conditions for a series of repeating, if not identical, patterns, was not politically neutral. Massis's Défense de l'Occident was resoundingly popular on the right, receiving lavish praise across the nationalist and royalist French press.Footnote 128 Antoine Rédier, founder of the Légion which, together with other movements of right-wing reaction to the short-lived Cartel des Gauches government of 1924–6, held up the threat of communism to galvanise European revival, was explicitly inspired by Massis.Footnote 129 Meanwhile Georges Valois, founder of the Faisceau, had already deployed similar images in the new preface to his ‘philosophy of authority’, L'Homme qui vient, in 1923, finding in the Frankish king Clovis a model for reviving Christian leadership, and explicitly juxtaposing Lenin, dictator of the ‘Scythian hordes’, against Mussolini, supposed defender of civilisation.Footnote 130 Others on the right depicted repeating cycles of revolution: royalist militant Léon Daudet argued for a Russian cycle of revolution and dictatorship on the model of French precedents, with 1917 as the ‘daughter’ of the Paris Commune of 1871, and ‘legitimate grand-daughter’ of 1789–93 (Marat, meanwhile, was seen to prefigure Lenin).Footnote 131 Catholic daily La Croix concurred that the Russian revolution repeated French precedents but with still greater devastation, picturing a decline and fall to the pagan times of the ancient world.Footnote 132
Though important, the political distinction between competing regimes of historicity was not absolute. Left-wing writers such as Duhamel also reflected on the etymological, ‘revolving’ sense of revolution, specifically on the challenge of stabilising its propensity to keep turning.Footnote 133 Fabre-Luce, the most conservative of the writers in this case study, imagined converging lines of development rather than a cycle of rise and fall. And there was, moreover, a final challenge to the teleological model that crossed political borders: the question of how Russia might shape the geopolitical balance of power in the immediate and longer-term future, not only in the anticipated clash between the United States and the Soviet Union,Footnote 134 but also in the development of Europe's Asian and African colonies and protectorates, already attuned to the emancipatory potential of combined nationalist and communist ambitions. Both the writers in this case study and those who reviewed their works reflected explicitly on the ways in which Europe had already supplied its colonies with the mental and material tools for its own destruction, preparing pathways for European decline alongside possibilities for progress.Footnote 135 Action française reflected on the ways in which Asian colonies might misuse the ‘arms’ or ‘tools’ of their colonisers, ironically almost anticipating the argument of Jean-Paul Sartre's introduction to Frantz Fanon's Damnés de la terre more than thirty years later.Footnote 136 When Soviet incitement was suspected behind a mutiny by Vietnamese nationalist soldiers in February 1930, one of the most deeply felt fears was that those seeking to appropriate European systems were so unskilled in their management that they might drive the engine of history right off the track.Footnote 137
Conclusions
Communism and its threat or promise of contagion have always produced strong reactions. Those who travelled to Russia in the interwar period, particularly as the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution gave impetus to assess the degree of communist ‘success’, necessarily sought to gauge their own reactions to this political and social experiment, and to respond to those at home who awaited their judgements. And, as previous research has shown, the elaborate ‘simulacrum’ of Russian life presented by their guides might convert, convince or repel.
Yet, as this article has demonstrated, those who travelled to Russia in this period did not write and think only about the Soviet Union. Instead, both they and their readers and reviewers reflected on Europe in the mirror of Russia: finding in this encounter cause to re-evaluate (and sometimes seriously question) their own assumptions on national borders and differences, on systems of measurement and even on the shape and direction of time and history. As this case study has emphasised, writers caught up in networks of European political tourism – and in debates over Europe as idea and community – often resisted clear-cut opposition between Europe and Russia. Not only did they juxtapose the finality of crossing the political border of the Soviet Union with the difficulty of locating a geographical moment of transition, but they also emphasised their sense of ‘missed exoticism’ when they located the European ‘gaze’ in Moscow and raised the question of whether Russia could constitute an ‘other Europe’. Meanwhile, all four writers in this study articulated a sense of difference that was not straightforwardly political, social or geographical but instead encapsulated by distinctions between European and Russian relationships to the natural and built environment, and to systems of measuring speed and space. Equally – and here this case study challenges previous assumptions about European ‘spatialisation of time’ and the imposition of Western understandings of temporality and historicity – Russia exerted a disconcerting influence on European conceptions of both time and history. These travel narratives and their reception reveal a persistent inability to situate Russia on a linear, teleological model of time – as if Russia acted like a magnet on a compass, destabilising European conceptions and calibration. Moving between futurist and cyclical regimes of historicity that pictured the shape and direction of time quite differently, European writers on Russia struggled to define its temporal location and significance with their pre-existing ‘systems of measurement’, even calling into question the systems themselves.
There were, indeed, moments when neither linear nor cyclical models of time could quite make sense of the impact of Soviet Russia on the travellers’ individual time or eigenzeitlichkeit. On his journey home to France, Alfred Fabre-Luce mused on how the ‘Russian clock, after having slowed down for centuries, has suddenly gone crazy, marking the hours of the distant future, or of some impossible time’, and how he would need to readjust his watch to the ‘good old time of France’. Yet even this act might not be sufficient to recalibrate to European time. ‘Something’, he concluded, ‘has changed. I'm like that hero from Einstein who returns to his native planet white-haired after a voyage of only ten minutes’.Footnote 138 Here, Fabre-Luce touched on a theme implicit in many of these accounts and reviews, as well as in the oral testimonies of mass meetings such as at the Cinéma de Grenelle in Paris in 1927: that Russia, being ‘a country outside space, delineated by ideas’,Footnote 139 was somehow also in its own alternative and even ‘eschatological’ temporality,Footnote 140 more easily reached through psychological conversion than by travelling across Europe. How this sense of temporality intersected with contrasting models of historicity – and how the oral and written accounts of militants as at the Cinéma de Grenelle would depict national, international and European identities – still remains wide open for exploration.
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to the editors and anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions, which have greatly enriched the scope of this article.
