Landscape of Placelessness: Soviet Propaganda and Space in 1930s American Travelogues

This article examines the influence of propaganda on the construction of space in the travelogues of Will Rogers and Jay Norwood Darling, two American travelers to the USSR. Their works, “There’s not a Bathing Suit in Russia and Other Bare Facts” (1927) and “Ding Goes to Russia” (1932), have received limited scholarly attention and have not been previously analyzed within this critical frame work. The paper aims to conduct a geocritical interpretation of the Soviet socio-political landscape as represented in the travelogues of Will Rogers and Jay Norwood Darling. A key objective of this study is to define the core approaches to the concept of “propaganda space” based on the spatial and place-based theories of T. Cresswell, M. Auger, and E. Relph. Given the specificity of the studied material, this research employed a combined approach to geocritical analysis, incorporating both geocentered (B. Westphal) and egocentric (R. Tally) perspectives. By focusing on how propaganda’s influence in displacing the anthropological place and replacing it with a “place-doxa” (industrial projects, proletarian streets, museums), the narrators conceptualize the Soviet landscape as a realm of placelessness, highlighting its functions of manipulation, coercion, othering, constraint, and the erosion of individual space.