Interpreting the ‘Thaw’ from the ‘Third World’: The Guyanese Writer Jan Carew on Modernization and Trauma in the Early 1960s Soviet Union

Abstract

This paper analyzes how Guyanese writer Jan Carew explored the results of Soviet modernization and the trauma caused by Stalinist terror and the Gulag through the eyes of exchange students from the “Global South” in the early 1960s. His writings dismiss the USSR’s development as a model for newly emerging post-colonial states and depict racist attitudes in Soviet society. Thus, Carew defied Soviet propaganda conveyed through intensified cultural diplomacy towards “Third World” intellectuals, which brought authors such as Carew and exchange students to the USSR since the mid-1950s. However, I argue that the issues Carew addresses and the aesthetic tools he uses mirror Soviet “Thaw” literature of the time, which intended to revive communist utopianism. The Guyanese’s writings are therefore also an example of successful cultural diplomacy of the USSR, which is largely overlooked. The paper illuminates this by focusing on Carew’s portrayal of Russian peasants and the USSR’s peripheries on the one hand and Soviet society’s inability to cope with its traumatic past on the other. It highlights some commonalities to two central novels by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vladimir Dudintsev. The paper contributes to a new history of the “Cold War”, illustrating how permeable the “Iron Curtain” could be. While most studies in this field focus on how global cultural influences shaped Soviet society, few explore reverse effects.