Australian History
Book Details

Political Tourists

Travellers from Australia to the Soviet Union in the 1920s-1940s

Academic Monograph

Sheila Fitzpatrick and Carolyn Rasmussen (eds)

Few Australians travelled to the Soviet Union in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s; it was a distant place with a notoriously cold winter and harsh living conditions, even for visitors. But it did have one tourist attraction: its politics.

Opinion

'Political Tourists represents a successful challenge to the shibboleths central to
the phenomenon of the 'political pilgrim' . . . [Its] contributors approach old
controversies in a fresh, nuanced fashion. More importantly, they make it difficult for
future studies to rehash the same tired formulae when examining the experiences of those
who, foolishly or otherwise, glimpsed the future in the USSR.'
Journal of Australian Studies March 2008

Click link for full review: www.mup.com.au

"Political Tourists is a welcome addition to the literature and will prove engaging for other historians entering the historiographical debates over the Soviet Union and its relationship with domestic Communist Parties." (FJHP 2008)

Click link for full review: www.mup.com.au

About this Title

For Socialists and many liberals, the Soviet Union of the 1920s-1940s was the site of the great Socialist Experiment. Most Australians who travelled there wrote about their extraordinary experiences, and the recent opening of the Soviet archives gave access to the Soviets' reactions to their visitors.

Collecting the research of leading historians and writers, Political Tourists explores Soviet tourism through figures such as Eric Ashby, RM Crawford, Reg Ellery, Neill Greenwood, Esmonde Higgins, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Betty Roland and Jessie Street. Drawing on both Australian and Soviet archives, this is a unique insight into the Soviet experience in the 1920s-1940s.

Table of Contents

Contributors
Preface
1. Australian visitors to the Soviet Union: The view from the Soviet side (Sheila Fitzpatrick)
2. Esmonde Higgins in the Soviet Union (Terry Irving)
3. Famine relief on the Volga: Muriel Heagney's winter sojourn (Rosemary Francis)
4. A metallurgist looks at Russia: Professor J. Neill Greenwood and the Soviet Union (Carolyn Rasmussen)
5. Red Virtue: Ella Winter and the Soviet Union (Ros Pesman)
6. Guido Baracchi, Betty Roland and the Soviet Union (Jeff Sparrow)
7. Comrade Katya: Katharine Susannah Prichard and the Soviet Union (John McNair)
8. Eyes Left: Psychiatrist Reginald Ellery and the Soviet dream (Joy Damousi)
9. Musicians in trouble: The sad case of the Weintraub Syncopators (Kay Dreyfus)
10. Max Crawford in the Soviet Union: The historian as diplomat (Sheila Fitzpatrick)
11. Australian war correspondents on the Eastern Front (Fay Anderson)
12. Eric Ashby: A scientist in Russia (Phillip Deery)
13. Jessie Street and the Soviet Union (Lenore Coltheart)
Select bibliography
Index

About the Author

Sheila Fitzpatrick is Bernadotte E. Schmitt Professor in Modern Russian History at the University of Chicago. Her recent publications include Tear off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (2005) and Against the Grain: Brian Fitzpatrick and Manning Clark in Australian History and Politics (edited with Stuart Macintyre, 2007).

Dr Carolyn Rasmussen is a public historian and Fellow in the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her published work ranges across the history of Victorian public institutions, the history of science and technology, labour history, education history, the involvement of women therein, and biography.

978-0-522-85530-2