ABSTRACT

This chapter concentrates on the trips that two of them took, Romain Rolland in the summer of 1935 and Lion Feuchtwanger in December of 1936. The reports on the Feuchtwanger stay were published in Sovietskie Archivy in 1989. Feuchtwanger's own book Moscow 1937 was republished in 1990 in the Soviet Union together with Andre Gide's Return from the USSR, with a long informative preface by A. Plutnik. Feuchtwanger's Soviet companion complained that despite all the precautionary measures and controls that had been made, Feuchtwanger was seeing all kinds of doubtful characters. Gide was politically more naive than Feuchtwanger. After his departure, Feuchtwanger ceased to be interested in Moscow, Stalin, and the trials. The Feuchtwanger affair and the writings of other Westerners who had whitewashed Stalin and the trials have provided ammunition for a number of Russian writers on the extreme right of the ideological spectrum.