The best books about why Russians and Americans misunderstand one another

In 1929, George Counts, a professor at Columbia Teachers College who was sympathetic to Soviet experiments in education, bought a new Ford, shipped it to Moscow, and braved 10,000 kilometers of mostly unpaved roads to see the Soviet Union, then undertaking a massive industrialization drive.

I was aware that the Soviet highway system was underdeveloped but was nonetheless shocked to learn details like the fact that the Soviet Union had no gas pumps; Counts poured pails of gas into his car through a funnel. His road trip helped me better understand Americans’ optimism about the Soviet project and Soviet visitors’ love of American technology.

The humorists Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov’s American travelogue remains a delight to read. Unlike other Soviet visitors, the coauthors, famous for their satirical novel The Twelve Chairs, leavened their criticism of American vulgarity, inequality, racism, and greed with a large helping of self-deprecating wit.

Their account of eating enchiladas, which they described as cut with gunpowder and topped with nitroglycerin, made me laugh out loud. This book offers a surprising view of Depression-era American and Soviet attitudes toward it.  

The poet Langston Hughes’s autobiography engagingly recounts his travels to Cuba, Haiti, Japan, and Spain during the Civil War. The book's centerpiece is his 1931-1932 trip to the Soviet Union. He visited as part of a contingent of twenty-two African Americans hired to make a film on race relations in the United States.

The film project never panned out, but Hughes took advantage of the situation to visit Soviet Central Asia. He understood that his hosts tried too hard to convince American visitors of the progress made under the Soviet regime. But his autobiography also conveys the wonderful strangeness of being in a country officially committed to antiracism, where people of color had opportunities for education and advancement.  

This book allows readers to see the United States through the eyes of six visitors from the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. A big part of the collection's appeal is that the authors were not neutral observers but committed socialists. Armed with preconceptions about capitalism, they offer provocative perspectives on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America.

The book includes work by three authors little-known in English translation (Grigory Machet, Vladimir Korolenko, and Vladimir Bogoraz) and travelogues by three famous writers, the novelist Maxim Gorky, who visited in 1906, and the Soviet poets Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergei Esenin, who visited in the 1920s. 

In 1980, the novelist Vassily Aksyonov, whose hipster characters loved rock’n’roll and all things American, fell afoul of the Soviet state; stripped of his Soviet citizenship while in the United States, he decided to stay.

His memoir chronicles his efforts to make sense of a country that often failed to match his idealized preconceptions. Like Ilf and Petrov, whose travelogue was one of his points of reference, Aksyonov undertook a road trip from New York to California and back.

He was sometimes overawed by American technology, critical of American cultural vacuity, and able to laugh at his own disorientation. His first thought when he saw rats in Washington, DC, was that they must be pets, maybe gerbils.