Former compatriots and their images in American travelogues of Soviet writers

The article deals with the travelogues of the participants of the first Soviet delegation of writers and journalists who visited the United States under the program of scientific and cultural exchanges in October November 1955. This study analyses the images of the second wave emigrants - “DPs” (“displaced persons”), created by B. Polevoy, A. Adzhubei, N. Gribachev and B. Izakov, as well as the broader historical and ideological context in which these images functioned and dynamically developed. Along the way B. Polevoy and his colleagues repeatedly met their former compatriots. Among them there were White émigrés, and even Volga Molokans who fled to the States under the tsar, but only in relation to the “DPs” did the Soviet journalists take an aggressively irreconcilable position. In their travelogues, they created a collective image of a “displaced person”: a “former Nazi collaborator and policeman”, a “drunken hooligan” who every now and then tries to get involved in an anti Soviet risky venture and make some money on it. Turning to the materials of the Soviet press, which wrote about “non returnees”, we discover that the caricature image of the “DP”, constructed by B. Polevoy and his colleagues, coexisted with a more attractive and sympathetically drawn portrait of a “displaced person”. Solving current political problems, the leading Soviet newspapers viewed the “DPs” as victims of American imperialism and colonialism, who fell into the clutches of antiSoviet organizations and were literally driven to the West into labor slavery.