That knock at the door : American images of life in Soviet Russia, 1947-1953
Date
1994
Authors
Smith, David Alexander
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Abstract
Except for a brief period during the Second World War, the majority of America's political leadership, press, and public always viewed the Soviet Union with a jaundiced eye. At no time in American history, however, did its people hold more hostile attitudes toward any "enemy" than those held toward the Soviets during the first six years of the Cold War. Between 1947 and 1953, the Soviet Union was pictured as an anti-utopian world where terror, regimentation and slavery were thought to be as much a part of everyday Russian life as baseball or going to the movies in America. The timing of this pervasive "better dead than red" mentality is most peculiar. Americans had emerged from World War II victorious, tremendously powerful and on the verge of unprecedented material abundance; yet within two years much of the nation was clearly obsessed with sensational and nightmarish stories of life in the land of its former ally.
Previous studies of American anti-Soviet sentiment have focused primarily on American perceptions and fears concerning the Soviet external threat or on hostility toward domestic Communism. This thesis takes a somewhat different approach by recalling and explaining Americans' most commonly held perceptions of day-to-day life in the USSR-including education, family values, entertainment, living and working conditions, science and religion. To present these dominant images of life in Stalin's Russia and to demonstrate their pervasiveness in most forms of media and opinion, it draws on a wide range of popular American sources, including mass-circulation periodicals and newspapers, government publications, examples of popular culture, widely read writings of professionals in various fields, the statements of those who influenced and formulated domestic opinion and foreign policies, and public opinion polls.
This thesis contends that American images of life in the USSR contained in exaggerated form many of the same features that Americans of the late 1940's were most intent on denying in themselves. Stalin's Russia was commonly depicted as the embodiment of all the most negative effects of twentieth century technology and social change, including conformity, regimentation, secularization, urbanization, and mechanization. In direct contrast, anxious postwar Americans wanted to identify themselves with their visions of "the good old days"-a simpler natural order of life representing freedom, individualism, self-reliance, and "traditional" family values. Thus, American images of the Soviets were, in large part, a reflection of their own distaste for modem society. This deep-seated uneasiness and insecurity with the shape of mid-twentieth century American life led to a process of denial as Americans transferred their worst fears onto an enemy which, from the very start, had violated their deeply entrenched conceptions of morality, justice, and self-determination.
Part One of this thesis describes earlier American visions of the USSR spanning the 1917-1947 period. The main body of the paper is then divided into two sections: Part Two presents the hostile postwar images of Soviet life which so dominated American thought in the late 1940's and early 1950's; and Part Three explains how these mental pictures of Stalin's Russia reflected the fears, obsessions, and traditions, of American, and, in many respects, Western society and culture during this turbulent era.