The "Constantly Awakening Critical Spirit" against Soviet Cultural Diplomacy: On Andre Gide's Letter to the USSR's Ambassador

The article clarifies circumstances in which in 1935 Andre Gide wrote his letter in defence of Victor Serge to the Soviet ambassador in Paris. The study is based on the materials of the Congress for the Defense of Culture, the Soviet press of that time and documents from the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History. After the Congress, which took place in 1935 in Paris, Gide converged with the anti-Stalinist opposition in France and Belgium, and welcomed a campaign in support of Victor Serge, a politician and writer who had been a participant in the case of the so-called Zinoviev group and was exiled to Orenburg. The article discusses episodes of criticisms against the lack of freedom in the Soviet Union, carried out by Gaetano Salvemini and Magdeleine Paz, and the reaction of the Soviet participants to them. The main controversy on Serge's case was inscribed in the context of the Dreyfus Affair. It shows that the lines of demarcation between the Soviet delegation and the European writers were shaped by the different attitude towards the State and the Individual. For French writers, the Dreyfus Affair was an ideal paradigm for assessing the entire spectrum of relations between the State and the Writer. The Soviet delegates insisted that the interests of the State and the Revolution are above individual freedom; meanwhile, for the European intellectuals, human rights were a universal value, and there were no excuses for violating them. No one in the Soviet Union could know anything about this important polemic. The Soviet press explained that all attacks by the 'Trotskyists' in the Congress were successfully rejected by the Soviet delegates and did not find any support among Western intellectuals. Moreover, according to the Soviet press, Gide refuted the Opponents' claim and manifested his faith in the USSR. Nevertheless, the victorious Soviet reports hid a much more complex reality. In the Congress, Gide, who got through the Dreyfus Affair with much tension and doubts, related the case of Victor Serge to the scandalous judicial process against the artillery officer. A few days after the Congress, the writer addressed a letter to the USSR's ambassador, in which he protested against the persecution and exile of Victor Serge and lamented the inappropriate response of the Soviet delegates to criticism. Mag-deleine Paz and her followers praised Gide's reaction. Starting from that point, contacts with the anti-Stalinists undermined Gide's pro-Soviet attitude which he reflected a year later in his famous book Return from the USSR. It supposed an obvious failure of Soviet cultural diplomacy and its strategies. A commented translation into Russian of Gide's letter to the ambassador Potemkin, made in 1935, from the collection of the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History complements the article.

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