Celebrating the Decennial Anniversary of the October Revolution in Moscow Through the Eyes of Serbian Leftist Intellectuals. 1927–1928

Abstract

In the autumn of 1927, the USSR celebrated the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. The celebration turned into a propaganda campaign, the aim of which was to demonstrate the “achievements of the proletariat” and to improve the international reputation of Soviet Russia. For this purpose, foreign political and cultural figures, mainly of leftist views, were invited. They were expected to present to their compatriots what they had experienced in a positive light. The novelist Dragiša Vasić, the sculptor Sreten Stojanović and the editor-inchief of the Belgrade newspaper Politika, Vladislav Ribnikar, represented the Serbian Civic Left in Moscow. This article places their travel notes in the broader context of the perception of Soviet Russia by Western leftist intellectuals. Serbian travelogues also shed light on the bizarre transformation of traditional Serbian Russophilia, predetermined by the role that St. Petersburg (Petrograd) had played in the national emancipation of the Serbs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, at least in the minds of the interwar leftists. Critical of Tsarism, as well as of their own political establishment, Serbian leftists projected their idealised visions of Russia onto the first socialist state. Impressed by the scale of the Soviet experiment, the representatives of the Civic Left did not fall completely under the spell of the socialist myth embodied in the USSR. This confirms the hypothesis that among the general mass of European leftist intellectuals who sympathised with the Soviets, there were different groups — from 100%  “believers” to sympathetic “fellow travellers”, to which the Serbian authors belonged.