Salon Bolshevik
The term Salon Bolshevik (also Salon Communist or Salon Bolshevik ) denotes people who are enthusiastic about communism , but who are assumed to pay lip service to it. The historian Ulrike Goldschweer sees the origin of the phenomenon in the 1930s, when in Western Europe and the USA intellectuals like George Bernard Shaw , Theodore Dreiser , André Gide and Thomas Mann sympathized with the "social experiment" of the Soviet Union based on idealistic assumptions , without participating to take note of the real conditions in Stalinism . She sees the roots of this attitude in the social utopian thinking of the 19th century. The term and its variants circulated on the one hand with a clearly defamatory intention in the conservative milieu and on the other hand among Russian emigrants as an expression of disappointment at the lack of understanding that met them from Western intellectual circles. The term is occasionally still present in the current political discussion.
literature
- Ulrike Goldschweer: Salon Bolshevism in the Encyclopedia of the European East .
