From Argyll with Love: Naomi Mitchison and the Soviet Union

Naomi Mitchison, whose brother was a communist scientist, had been impressed on a trip to Soviet Russia in the 1930s by ‘the way women have reacted to economic equality’. She saw this as ‘the best advertisement for Marxism’. She was also impressed by the atmosphere of Free Love in the air at the time, and in the 1950s (according to Doris Lessing) scolded the Soviet writers and officials in her opening speech for becoming ‘so reactionary’ in matters amorous. Never a communist herself, Mitchison found herself on the barricades alongside British communists, fighting in the name of world peace, as an active member of the Authors’ World Peace Appeal. Drawing on a good deal of unpublished correspondence with members of the Foreign Commission of Soviet Writers, recently discovered by the author in an archive in Moscow, this chapter sheds new light on Mitchison’s relationship with the Soviet Union and on the work of Scottish-Soviet cultural exchange in the 1950s that she did so much to facilitate.