Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941

by Katerina Clark

In the early sixteenth century, the monk Filofei proclaimed Moscow the "Third Rome." By the 1930s, intellectuals and artists all over the world thought of Moscow as a mecca of secular enlightenment. In "Moscow, the Fourth Rome," Katerina Clark shows how Soviet officials and intellectuals, in seeking to capture the imagination of leftist and anti-fascist intellectuals throughout the world, sought to establish their capital as the cosmopolitan center of a post-Christian confederation and to rebuild it to become a beacon for the rest of the world.

Clark provides an interpretative cultural history of the city during the crucial 1930s, the decade of the Great Purge. She draws on the work of intellectuals such as Sergei Eisenstein, Sergei Tretiakov, Mikhail Koltsov, and Ilya Ehrenburg to shed light on the singular Zeitgeist of that most Stalinist of periods. In her account, the decade emerges as an important moment in the prehistory of key concepts in literary and cultural studies today-transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and world literature. By bringing to light neglected antecedents, she provides a new polemical and political context for understanding canonical works of writers such as Brecht, Benjamin, Lukacs, and Bakhtin.

"Moscow, the Fourth Rome "breaches the intellectual iron curtain that has circumscribed cultural histories of Stalinist Russia, by broadening the framework to include considerable interaction with Western intellectuals and trends. Its integration of the understudied international dimension into the interpretation of Soviet culture remedies misunderstandings of the world-historical significance of Moscow under Stalin.

Genres: History, Russia, Russian History, Soviet Union, Nonfiction, Cultural, Politics

432 pages, Hardcover

First published November 15, 2011

About the author

Katerina Clark is B. E. Bensinger Professor of Comparative Literature and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Her books include Moscow, the Fourth Rome; Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution; and, with Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin.

Reviews

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this year, 1935, Eisenstein was repeatedly attacked for his linguistic universalism and seen as not sufficiently patriotic.

Katerina Clark asserts that 1935 marked the apex of Stalinist Cosmopolitanism, she cites the alliance with the French Popular Front and the virtual explosion of Shakespeare translation and celebration especially around Moscow. The dynamic change to follow is inscrutable. The use of the Bard is interesting, not a high art endeavor but the bodily poetry of a Bottom or a Falstaff. Think Bakhtin and his Rabelais and His World.

The first six years of the decade witnessed incredible cross pollination, most pointedly in terms of translation. Berlin, at least before 1933, was satellite for ideas to distill: Modernism could then find quick traction with Soviet audiences. Clark is captivated by the symbolic, how images of Lenin always captured him speaking but those of Stalin commonly showed him writing, at, work—redefining a reality.

She tends to shoehorn events into theory: finding stagings of Brecht to satisfy a tenet of Benedict Anderson or parsing links between Benjamin and Eisenstein. Far too much time is spent on the Spanish Civil War or the proliferation of the Stanislavsky Method. The latter forms an eerie counterpoint to the Show Trials. Lastly encompassing the anxiety of the prewar period was the advent of a Byron Cult, right there in Red Square. I’m far from convinced but undoubtedly entertained. Schiller found the sublime to be a simultaneous eruption of joy and terror. I’d call this mess something similar in analytical terms.

[Olga · Rating 3 out of 5]

A persuasive reinterpretation of Stalinist culture in the 1930s as not monolothic or closed off from the West, but as deeply engaged in conversation with past and contemporary Western trends. The book particularly stands out for its careful reading of Soviet literary journals of the period, and its teasing out of the various discourses (sometimes appearing as masked criticism of Stalin's cultural policies) that took place under the seemingly still waters of official Soviet doctrine. At times the reader can get tangled in the web of names and dates, but this does not obscure the book's overarching argument that Moscow, despite the repressive policies of Stalinism at home, sought to insert itself into the center of a progressive cosmopolitan culture that was envisioned to include not only Europe, but even the United States.

[Rob M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovingly composed and gorgeously detailed literary and cultural history of the Soviet 1930s. By no means a hagiography of Stalinism, this book is nonetheless an antidote to the prevalent narrative of a the Soviet Union being little more than a terrifying black hole.

[William David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really really cool book to study. It's interesting to see how the Stalinist USSR can both insulate into itself increasingly as the Great Terror went on, but still kept a spirit of internationalism through its connection to Europe lol? I definitely need to look more into the Eisenstein bit about Chinese theatre considered as a more 'emotive' mode of communication than Euro, I genuinely cannot tell if this is Orientalist or not. Highly recommend!

[Derek · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a sophisticated approach to Stalinism, communism, Leftist internationalism, modernity, and Moscow. The author’s books on St. Petersburg and the Soviet novel are almost as good.

[Phil · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit effete, but an interesting read about the cultural milieu of the USSR in the 1930s.

[Mirumir · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Boy” was not just meeting “tractor,” he was also encountering Western culture.