ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the transatlantic career of Maurice Hindus, a Jewish-American journalist who traveled the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, to demonstrate how the Russian Revolution not only gave birth to a political experiment of unprecedented proportions but also inspired experimentation in journalistic writing. Growing up in New York as the son of Russian immigrants, Hindus belonged to a cohort of young minority intellectuals who were fascinated by the events unfolding overseas and saw the Revolution as a unique opportunity to utilize their bicultural competence for their professional and social advancement. The essay makes three interrelated arguments. First, it contends that Hindus's journalism marked a deliberate break with bourgeois conventions of observing foreign affairs in non-Western regions of the world that were commonly viewed through the lenses of colonialism and orientalism. The essence of revolutionary journalism, according to Hindus, was to cultivate an ethos best described as “engaged authenticity.” The goal was to humanize, even sympathize with one's subjects—to understand them on their own terms, not measure them by Western notions of primitivism and progress. Second, the chapter maintains that Hindus's practices reflected the rise of a new journalistic ideal in which transnationality became an asset, rather than an impediment, offering upward mobility for people formerly on the margins of the profession. Third, it shows that the journalistic knowledge created by Hindus and his peers served different purposes, from its appropriation by Western apologists of the Soviet regime to the foundation of Cold War Sovietology.
