Heading: (Russia - Stanford Professor in Lenin's Soviet Union)
Author: Earl Barnes
Title: Original Manuscript, handwritten and typed, notes for public lectures on observations and studies of Soviet Russia, ca.1917-31.
Place Published:
Publisher:
Date Published: c.1917-1931
Description:

Approximately 185 total pages, 5 x 8", haphazardly divided by rusted paper clips into 9 groups, laid loose into a mis-labeled folder of boards and tape spine.

A first-hand and scholarly view of the first decade of Bolshevik Russia, by the founding scholar of newly-established Stanford University's Department of Education, and husband of its first female faculty member.

Barnes remained at Palo Alto for six years until he was forced to resign after the scandal of an extramarital affair. He and his wife, who was ill, then sailed for Europe, where she died. Barnes spent the rest of his life as a free-lance lecturer, speaking to American audiences about his travels in post-World War I Europe, including Lenin's then-isolated and vilified nation.

These notes reflect Barnes' assiduous study of Russian history and current events, beginning with sympathetic pages written weeks after the 1917 Revolution, followed by personal observations from visits to the country in the 1920s. He may have first visited Soviet Russia as early as 1921, recalling how he gained entry to that outcast country with the help of American Socialist economist Scott Nearing and British Labor Party leader George Lansbury. Then, and later, after Lenin's death (a 1926 Cyrillic theater leaflet is tipped in), though warned about a paranoid and starving country dominated by secret police spies, he spent two months on a 2,000-mile tour, freely visiting schools and factories, where he found "well fed and well clothed" people living in cities with "excellent tramways and handsome buildings". Still, Barnes became aware of its shortcomings, including a "crusade against belief in God", supplanted by the "religion" of Communism. The notes end about the time his son visited Russia in 1930; as Barnes lived until 1935, he may already have had a premonition about how the proletariat would fare under Stalin.

Very good.