Kazakh Academic Kanysh Satpayev in Britain: A View from 1947

After the end of World War II, relations between the Soviet Union and Western countries began to deteriorate rapidly. Although Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union had been allies, the period known as the Cold War began. Winston Churchill’s famous speech in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, is often regarded as one of its defining early moments.

Nevertheless, just over a year after the speech, a large official Soviet delegation visited Britain in March 1947. The delegation represented the Supreme Soviet, the Soviet Union’s legislature, and arrived in London at the invitation of both houses of the British Parliament. Clement Attlee’s Labour government supported expanding contacts with the Soviet Union despite growing disagreements over the postwar settlement in Europe.

The delegation consisted of 20 people and was led by Vasily Kuznetsov, chairman of the Soviet of Nationalities, one of the Supreme Soviet’s two chambers. Among its members were Alexander Fadeev, head of the Union of Soviet Writers and author of The Young Guard, about Soviet youth resisting Nazi occupation during World War II, and the poet and writer Konstantin Simonov. Aviator Mikhail Gromov, a Hero of the Soviet Union who commanded a nonstop flight from Moscow across the North Pole to San Jacinto, California, in 1937, also joined the delegation. Kanysh Satpayev, president of the Academy of Sciences of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, was also among the invited delegates.

The delegation stayed for almost a month, from March 13 to April 11, 1947. The visitors met with Prime Minister Attlee, Conservative opposition leader Churchill, and members of Parliament.

According to Satpayev’s notes, the participants visited the University of London, the Royal Society, the British Museum, industrial enterprises, and government institutions. Outside the capital, the delegation visited Newcastle, Sheffield, Cardiff, Manchester, Oxford, Cambridge, Stratford-upon-Avon, Coventry, Edinburgh, and Glasgow.

In his report following the trip, Satpayev claimed that the British organizers had tried to overwhelm the visitors with official events and limit their contact with ordinary workers:

“It should be noted that government officials tried to organize our visits to industrial enterprises in such a way that the delegation had practically no opportunity to communicate with workers. Visits to factory workshops often coincided with lunch breaks. Sometimes the delegation was shown workshops during working hours, but these were places where there were few workers or where production processes (metal smelting or rolling) made it impossible to talk to them.

Everywhere, the delegation was ‘assisted’ by a whole crowd of British intelligence agents posing as interpreters, in whose presence the workers naturally could not speak openly. Workers who spontaneously gathered when the delegation appeared were skillfully dispersed.

Our hosts took every measure to conceal the true situation in the country from the delegates whenever possible, even resorting to ‘Potemkin village’ methods.

For example, during a visit to a kindergarten in the Finsbury district of London, an elderly woman said: ‘You should have seen what was going on here on Saturday. They were scrubbing and washing everything to somehow hide the terrible filth. The head of the kindergarten had been asking the local council for linoleum to cover the floors for several months. Who knows how much longer she would have had to ask for it if you had not come?'”

Satpayev’s notes reflect the confrontation between the two political systems. Along with the photographs provided by the Central State Archive of Film, Photographic Documents, and Sound Recordings of the Republic of Kazakhstan, they are authentic historical records of the period.