‘Oh, no, you are not dead!’: Émigré Communards in the Soviet Union

• In Event: Soviet Legacies of the Paris Commune of 1871

Abstract

One very concrete manifestation of the newly formed Soviet Union’s high regard for the Paris Commune was the existence of a program for the emigration of elderly communards to Moscow. Facilitated by the International Organization for Aid to the Fighters of the Revolution (Mezhdunarodnaia organizatsiia pomoshchi bortsam revoliutsii, or MOPR), several communards spent their final years in Russia as ‘honored Soviet guests.’ This paper considers the case of one of those men: Gustave Isnard, who spent the last decade of his life in the Soviet Union, from 1925 to 1935. Isnard used these years to make a go of a playwriting career in which he grappled with his own legacy as a revolutionary.
This paper uses writings by and about these elder revolutionaries to interrogate the intersection of old age and revolutionary spirit in the years immediately following 1917; as Isnard himself put it, his “physical strength [was] exhausted by age” but his heart still felt “the heat of [his] youthful years” as a revolutionary. This contrast and the tensions contained within it ultimately echo the tensions in the broader relationship of the ‘young’ Russian Revolution to the ‘old’ European revolutionary legacy it claimed for itself.

Author

• Abby Holekamp, Vanderbilt U