In the years between the two world wars, the young Soviet Union was, for socialist intellectuals and many liberals in the West, a social laboratory, one that held the promise of a new world order. Inspired by the transforming power and promise of the October Revolution of 1917, some were drawn to admiration of the great Socialist Experiment ‘in a land where revolutionaries were trying to create a socialist society based on the principles of central economic planning’. This is how Sheila Fitzpatrick describes the lure of the Soviet Union in the preface to this collection of essays (presented originally as conference papers), which examines the experience of a small handful of Australian visitors to the Soviet Union from the 1920s to the 1940s. Twelve individual case studies are presented, including the writer Katharine Susannah Prichard, the playwright Betty Roland and the feminist Jessie Street, all well known. Others are less familiar. The sample is small, but as the overall number of Australian visitors, at least in the 1930s, was also remarkably tiny – probably less than two hundred – this may not matter very much.