Galin Tihanov (University of Manchester)
While by now we possess considerable knowledge about emigration and exile from Eastern and Central Europe to the West in the 1920s and 1930s, we have tended to under-research and under-conceptualize the alternative destination. Moscow as a place of emigration and exile of Left East-European intellectuals in the 1930s presents a uniquely important trajectory, the study of which contributes to enriching and refining our understanding not just of the history of international communism between the World Wars, but also – and perhaps more importantly – of the formation of the intellectual and political elites that were to shape life in the countries of the Eastern bloc after 1945.
In this paper, I focus on the careers of a number of Hungarian and Polish intellectuals who found themselves in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1920s or in the 1930s. In addition to tracing their fortunes under Stalin, I am also concerned to reveal the implications of their long stays in the Soviet Union for the subsequent roles they were to play in their home cultures. How did these men of letters negotiate the many transitions and curves their lives took? How did they accommodate their previous experiences and cultural codes to the new environments, in Moscow and back home? Do exiles ever truly come home, does the boomerang return? These are the questions that inform my narrative. I begin with a broad outline of the conditions, the hurdles, and the limitations of émigré life in Moscow in the 1930s, examining some of the difficulties which exiled intellectuals in Stalin’s Moscow faced in constructing and asserting their cultural and political identities. I then offer a brief case study of one of the major intellectual achievements by a Moscow exile, Georg Lukács’s work The Young Hegel, embedding it in the wider context of power struggles and compromises with Stalinism; in the final section I examine the complex dynamics of homecoming in the years after World War Two. Ultimately, my efforts are steered by the need to begin to lay the foundations for a hermeneutics of the East-East exilic experience.