“Red Moscow is the Heart of the Proletarian World Revolution”: Political Emigrants in the Capital of the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s

Abstract

In the 1920s and 1930s, Soviet Russia became one of the world’s centres of political emigration. Many of those who took part in the failed revolutionary uprisings in Europe after World War One found refuge in the first socialist state. Having arrived in the USSR and having overcome the initial shock of immersion in an unfamiliar environment, foreign communists formed a privileged and largely isolated social group. Within itself, it was divided into closed national-party “communities”, in which the daily life of German, Polish, Chinese, Bulgarian, and other “revolutionary fighters” and their families took place. Indifferent during their stay in Moscow to what was happening outside their “ghetto”, years later, political emigrants in their recollections would express a whole range of feelings and assessments regarding Soviet society, the ruling regime, and, in general, the environment they had lived in. Unflattering descriptions of Moscow and Muscovites, everyday scenes, complaints about the injustice of the state system of distribution of goods and privileges — all this serves as a valuable addition to prevalent ideas about the era and the people who lived in it. The Great Terror of the second half of the 1930s put an end to political emigration into the USSR as a social group. In the end, foreign communists had to share with the entire Soviet society the terrible trials of the second half of the 1930s and early 1950s. If it had not been for this involvement in the fate of the country, its images, left by the few who survived, would not have been so sincere and,  therefore, historically  valuable.