Fellow travellers and Soviet Russia’s guides in 1930s travel books by Antoni Słonimski, Robert Byron and Walter Citrine

Abstract

ABSTRACT Most foreign visitors who went to Soviet Russia in the 1930s were so-called “fellow travellers”: the left-wing intellectuals interested in and generally supportive of the “Soviet experiment”. Their standard way of seeing the country was through organised tours, on which they were given guides who served as interpreters and also as informers for the authorities. This article analyses and compares the ways in which such guides and fellow travellers are represented, and the narrative functions that they serve in three travel books, one Polish and two British, published during that decade. These are: Antoni Słonimski’s Moja podróż do Rosji [My Journey to Russia] (1932), Robert Byron’s First Russia, Then Tibet (1933), and Walter Citrine’s I Search for Truth in Russia (1936).