The word ‘America’ has well-developed grandiose associations for a Soviet person, for whom it refers to a country of skyscrapers, where day and night one hears the unceasing thunder of surface and underground trains, the hellish roar of automobile horns, and the continuous despairing screams of stockbrokers rushing through the skyscrapers waving their ever-falling shares. We want to change that image.
The two Russian writers were interested in a different America, the America beyond Manhattan and New York:
America is primarily a country of one- or two-storey buildings. This is the primary unavoidable condition with which you shall have to reconcile yourselves, comrades, if you want to see the energetic, smiling, yet at the same time sickly and oversensitive face of the United States.4
Il'f and Petrov are precise observers. As the series American Photos in Ogonyok shows, they are spot-on as photographers as well as writers. Although they were not professionals and had nothing more than a Leica at their disposal, they showed themselves to be at the forefront of the photographic art of their day. They combined an eye for the commonplaces of American civilization with an exceptionally sharp gift for observation. The result was that what they brought home with them was a classical piece of photographic reportage. Their interest was in what was characteristic – images, topoi and symbols that captured the essence of America. Such topoi are the highway, the gas station, the department store, Main Street, the awe-inspiring deserts and mountain landscapes of the West, the lights of Broadway by night, the palm trees on Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard, automobiles and ever more automobiles, the endlessly varied faces of people in the melting pot, the super-smart clothes of blacks in the ghettos, the view of midtown Manhattan from their New York hotel room, the arena of Madison Square Garden, the deafening sirens of the New York fire service and police cars. Their text provides us with a clear sense of what impressed them most. It was not the US Wonders of the World but the unspectacular, smooth functioning of American society. Regardless of the contrasts between rich and poor, luxury and destitution, appearance and reality, they remained fascinated by America. When it comes down to it, the book’s theme is ‘the American Way of Life’. ‘The roads are one of the most remarkable phenomena of American life. American life specifically, not just American technology.’5 The highway stands for an infrastructure that opens up the vast space. The gas stations, motels, road signs and traffic regulations are the signs of a well-organized mobile life. They are full of admiration for American characteristics:
Figure 31.1 Il'f and Petrov had a keen sense for the American landscape and were adept at presenting it in their photo-reportage for the magazine Ogonek.
‘The highway stands for an infrastructure that opens up the vast space. The gas stations, motels, road signs and traffic regulations are the signs of a well-organized mobile life.’
They are excellent workers, jacks-of-all-trades. Our engineers say that working with Americans is pure pleasure. They are precise, but not so much as to be pedantic. They are neat and punctual, without being so fussy that other people would start to make fun of them for it. They know how to keep their word, and they trust other people’s words. They are always ready to help. They are good comrades and easy to get along with. At the same time, there are a lot of annoyingly childish and primitive traits in the people’s character. But the most interesting childlike quality, curiosity, is almost absent among Americans.6
They were fascinated by the average American.
We are not concerned here with the progressive American worker, nor with the radical intellectuals. We are interested instead in the so-called average American – the chief buyer and the chief voter. He is an extraordinarily democratic man. He can work and he works hard. He loves his wife and children; he listens to the radio, goes frequently to the cinema and reads but little. In addition, he places great value on money.7
The film industry is in their eyes the centre of vulgarity and vulgarization that threatens to cancel out the astounding achievements of American culture – school, university, theatre.8 ‘A crucial American phenomenon is the omnipresence of advertising – you even find its message spelled out by an aeroplane in letters across the blue sky. It not only accompanies you everywhere; it almost goes so far as to tell you how to live.’9 They are disconcerted by the wastefulness of the lights on Broadway, using up enough energy to supply the whole of Estonia or Bulgaria. But they are also impressed by the level of comfort and consumption they encounter everywhere. They are surprised by the lift service and the practical furnishings of the hotel rooms; everything has been thought of: hot and cold running water, showers, notepaper, a bag for dirty washing, telegram forms. The tables in the cafés and bars always have a set of sauces, salt, pepper and sugar. Events are thought through, well organized and practical. The market reacts at once and responds to the faintest sign of interest on the part of customers. There is an entire section on driving on the roads and a whole chapter on the free service at the gas stations. Everything has to be practical, purposeful and reliable. Americans think concretely, put precise questions and think in a business-like way. When they want to buy a vacuum cleaner or an icebox, they do not want abstract discussions but facts and figures.10 We have to learn from the Americans.
The American businessman has time to talk about business. He sits calmly in his office, takes his jacket off and works. He works quietly, hardly noticeably, soundlessly. He never comes too late but also not too early. Everyone has a telephone. You do not have to wait for special consultation hours because an appointment is fixed in advance and the conversation cannot last a minute longer than it is supposed to. He focuses on the matter in hand and nothing else. It is not clear how he finds the time to attend meetings. In all likelihood, he attends only very rarely. When an American has said in the course of a conversation ‘we’ll do it’, you don’t need to tell him twice. It will be done. Keeping your word, absolutely and whatever the cost – that is the most important thing you can learn from American history.11
It is not hard to tell what the two writers actually want to say and to see at what target they are taking aim with their praise of America. They are hitting out at the bureaucratic chaos of ordinary Soviet life.
Special relations: Soviet Americanism and the New Deal
Il'f and Petrov were not the only travellers to America during those years. On the contrary, visits to the United States had become fashionable in certain circles. It was thought important to have seen the New World, the other revolutionary civilization. New York was not just the ‘city of the yellow devil’, i.e. Mammon, as Maxim Gorky had described it in all seriousness. It was also the gateway to a world that was essential viewing for people who wanted to be able to speak authoritatively about the future. Soviet visitors to America in the first half of the thirties came from all professions and sectors.12 Among the visitors we find Aleksandr Deineka, the painter, who, like Il'f and Petrov, concentrated on ordinary places – Main Street, gas stations, skyscraper, highway – and who also brought back a collection of pictures of America.13 We find some of the leading architects who had been entrusted with the reconstruction of Moscow and other major building projects; we see them taking a look at the USA, visiting the most important projects there, being shown around the construction sites and making their own drawings. The architects of the Palace of the Soviets went on a fact-finding tour in order to learn about modernity from the foremost exponents of modernity: the Rockefeller Center and Radio City, their fast lifts, their air-conditioning systems, the materials used and their lighting systems.14 Conversely, leading US architects followed developments in architecture and town planning in the USSR with great interest. Some of them took part in competitions – Hector Hamilton entered the competition for the Palace of the Soviets. Some visited Moscow in order to see it for themselves – Frank Lloyd Wright was a prominent guest in 1937 at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Architects,15 and others arranged for their planning and construction offices to participate in the co
nstruction of the large automobile and tractor plants – Albert Kahn was one such.16 Particularly noteworthy were the travels of the engineers. They came to inspect the factories, the assembly of production lines, and the construction of machinery and turbines, as well as dams and power stations.
Most Soviet engineers may be presumed to have visited the centre of the US automotive industry: Detroit and Dearborn, with Ford’s River Rouge complex. The director of the Moscow car plant, Ivan Likhachev, visited Detroit and met Henry Ford in person. General Motors sent forty technicians from the River Rouge complex to Nizhnii Novgorod, where the Molotov car factory was being built, while around 160 selected Soviet workers were sent to the USA for advanced training.17 From time to time, there were also visits of high-ranking delegations, such as one led by Anastas Mikoian, the People’s Commissar for Light Industry (i.e. for food production). Mikoian was overwhelmed by the achievements of the American food industry, especially canned food and fast food. The automated restaurants and the service in bars, cafeterias and restaurants are frequently referred to as exemplary and praised in highly effusive terms. And, in general, the rationalization of consumer goods industries – including kitchen utensils, iceboxes and furniture – and the development of production to satisfy the needs of mass consumption were regarded as almost unattainable models. ‘Cornflakes’ entered the world of Soviet advertising as well as the Russian language.18
Figure 31.2 All Soviet visitors to America were overwhelmed by Manhattan. Boris Iofan, the architect of the Palace of the Soviets, drew this sketch of Radio City Music Hall, New York.
‘The architects of the Palace of the Soviets went on a fact-finding tour in order to learn about modernity from the foremost exponents of modernity.’
Needless to say, people from the film industry also went to America. They visited the major studios of Metro Goldwyn Mayer, Walt Disney and Paramount Pictures in order to learn how to build up a film industry at home – a California on the Crimea and large studios in the Lenin Hills in Moscow. Soviet film people went in and out freely in Hollywood, and, by the same token, American films and American stars enjoyed great popularity in the USSR: in the twenties they included Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and especially Charlie Chaplin, who came to enjoy mythic status among Soviet cinemagoers. In America you could learn how to make films and to understand just what makes for good entertainment. The long-term effects of this acquaintance with Hollywood can be seen everywhere in the Soviet cinema of this period. It coloured the plots and the different genres – musical comedy, musicals and music revues – and encouraged the emergence of the Soviets’ own star cult, whose representatives came increasingly to resemble Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich or Greta Garbo.19 In the process, many of them, such as the director Grigorii Aleksandrov, became more American than the Americans.
Aleksandrov worked with us every day. Although I had heard of his admiration for America, I was taken aback by the deep traces that great continent had left in his mind. Starting from his clothes and advancing from there via his stereotypical smile, right down to the detailed accounts he gave us of his experiences, everything expressed an almost childish affection and veneration for America and the American way of life. For example, we were very surprised to discover that after only one rehearsal he knew all our first names and surnames. Later on, we learned that, even before the first rehearsal, he had asked for a list of all the members and had committed it to memory. Such behaviour was unknown in the Soviet Union; in America, as I later found out, it was a normal procedure for men in leading positions.20
As far as music was concerned, the transfer of sound, rhythm and movement in the shape of American music in general, not just jazz, was unmistakable. American bands came to the Soviet Union as early as the first half of the thirties. George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue was first put on by Isaak Dunaevskii in Leningrad in 1931.21
In a certain sense, Soviet visitors to America could always manage to feel at home, despite their criticism of capitalism. Wherever they went, they met acquaintances or close friends, often people with knowledge of foreign languages. Since the USA is a land of immigrants, they frequently encountered Americans whose roots lay in the old Russian Empire, often in the shtetls of the Pale of Settlement. Everywhere they encountered immigrants from Russian Poland, Lithuania, Odessa, St Petersburg – Max Factor, for example, who came originally from Elisavetgrad, or Rouben Mamoulian, the Hollywood producer of Porgy and Bess, whose origins were in Armenia. In the remotest parts of the American provinces they suddenly happened on people with origins in the Russian Empire. In addition, they moved among the progressive intelligentsia: Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, the translator Charles Malamuth or Stuart Chase, the leading thinker of the Roosevelt New Deal.22 The fact that both Americans and Russians shared a passion for flying also proved fruitful for a meeting of minds. The Soviet aviators who had landed in California after their record-breaking flight had a rapturous reception for the most part on their return journey through the United States.
This inclusive network was astonishingly intricate, and it had not sprung into existence overnight, but rather in the decade following the Revolution, and especially during the period of the First Five-Year Plan – in other words, between 1928 and 1932.23 Its vitality arose from the fact that at the time nothing stood in the way of good relations between the United States and the new Russia. There were no disputed territories, no quarrels about frontiers or minorities, and the division into victors and defeated that so poisoned the post-war atmosphere in Europe was also absent. The fact that diplomatic relations were not established until 1933 had not prevented the two states from forming amicable relations with each other. Both seemed to profit from having entered the European scene as revolutionary newcomers: the USA with its entry into the war in April 1917, the new Russia with the Revolution, and so not until February and then October 1917. Both had appeared armed with revolutionary programmes: President Wilson with his Fourteen-Point Programme for eliminating secret diplomacy and what was in effect a revolutionary policy for intervening democratically in the affairs of foreign states, Lenin with his declaration of war on the old European powers, a revolutionary defeatism and internationalism that refused to recognize national frontiers. Lenin and Wilson – in the eyes of Old Europe these were figures who embodied upheaval, revolution and the rise of non-European powers in world politics. In addition, on the American side, there was an emergency aid campaign at the time of Russia’s greatest need, namely the famine in the Volga region at the end of the Civil War, a campaign that only an affluent and magnanimous country like the United States was capable of organizing. In this way many factors combined to create the intense relationship between America and Russia in the first decade following the Revolution: the affinity existing between newcomers, the absence of the contentious issues between states that were so typical of Europe, and the dense networks of linguistic, cultural and, not least, economic relations created by immigration to the United States. The end of the 1920s witnessed the emergence of a constellation in which the two countries seemed to be dependent on one another and each was persuaded that it might profit from the other. In 1929 the United States had been badly shaken by the world economic crisis, and an obvious solution seemed to offer a way out: the vast Soviet market with its unlimited interest in American technology and know-how, the modernization needs of a backward country forced into industrialization. They seemed to be two complementary halves of a single whole. This was the honeymoon period of US–Soviet social relations. America even expressed enthusiasm for the plan. The New Deal was to be America’s answer to the anarchy and chaos of the capitalist system. Soviet authors who wrote poetically about Soviet planned utopias enjoyed popular success in America,24 and Stuart Chase, America’s leading exponent of planning, became a favourite interlocutor for Soviet visitors. The Soviet leadership wanted to learn from America and hoped to synthesize ‘Bolshevik passion’ with ‘American pragmatism’. For its part, America began
to look to Russia so as to learn from the Russians.25 Soviet Americanism – sovetsky amerikanizm – has been described as the compensatory ideology of a backward country in the process of modernization.26
In 1929, 2,500 Americans visited the Soviet Union; by 1930 this had risen to 5,000, and by 1931 to 10,000. The literature about Russia grew fourfold.27 In 1931 there were more than 1,000 US technicians and engineers in the Soviet Union, chiefly in the automotive and tractor-making industries. American engineers became pioneer figures of Soviet industrialization. Colonel Hugh H. Cooper led the construction of Dneproges,28 while John Calder directed the construction of the Stalin tractor works. For many, the journey to the Soviet Union of the Five-Year Plan became a second youth and an expedition to a new frontier. We are indebted to men such as these for some of the best accounts of the Soviet Union of the day.29
Moscow, 1937 Page 64