American Workers in The Soviet Union Between The Two World Wars - MA Thesis

American Workers in The Soviet Union Between the Two World Wars:
From Dream to Disillusionment

THESIS
Submitted to the College of Arts and Sciences
of
West Virginia University
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
The Degree of Master of American History
By
Vincent E. Baker
Morgantown
West Virginia
1998
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract ii
Chapter I
Introduction 3
Chapter II
Who Went to Russia, and Why 5
Chapter III
American Experiences in the U.S.S.R. 23
Chapter IV
Fates of Individual Americans 51
Chapter V
Conclusion 85
Bibliography 88
iii
ABSTRACT
AMERICAN WORKERS IN THE SOVIET UNION BETWEEN THE
TWO WORLD WARS: FROM DREAM TO DISILLUSIONMENT
By Vincent E. Baker
This is a an examination of those Americans who went to the Soviet
Union to live and work during the interwar period, and what became of them.
Why they went, how many went, and whether they survived the experience.
American attitudes, both private and public of the Soviet Union are also
discussed.
1
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
Over the years many millions left their native lands for a new start in America. This
flood of migrs, mainly from Europe, played a major role in the United States becoming one of
the world's leading industrial powers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The vast majority of migrs to the United States remained here, but there is a little-
known exception to this rulethe small but extremely important movement of skilled American
workers from the United States to the Soviet Union after World War I. The thin end of the
wedge which evolved into this thesis was the potent autobiography of a man named Victor
Herman, who went to the Soviet Union in 1931 and whose life and trials brought forth the
points to be expanded below. Unfortunately, this flow of American workers to the Soviet
Union, and the importance of the technology and know-how they brought with them, is barely
mentioned in many histories of the Soviet Union or of interwar America. As historian Thomas
Park Hughes commented in his book American Genesis:
This intensive and large-scale transfer of technology, historically
unprecedented, should be recognized as one of the major chapters in
Soviet history, but it has been virtually forgotten in both the Soviet
Union and United States. The former has denied its dependence on
capitalism and the latter does not wish to boast of its contribution to the
establishment of Soviet industrial power.
1
Hughes seems to be correct, as secondary works on both immigrants and the impact of the
technological exchange between the two nations are quite scarce, and the facts of the above
quotation are scarcely common knowledge today. Herman, who lived through the time Hughes
analyzed, commented Not many people know about it, even today, so many years after it
happened.
2

1
Thomas Parke Hughes, American Genesis - A Century of Invention and
Technological Enthusiasm 1870-1970 (New York: Viking Penguin, 1989), 254.
2
Victor Herman, Coming Out of the Ice (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1979), 14.
2
The purpose of this thesis is to support my contention that few of the Americans who
went to the Soviet Union found the workers paradise they expected, and even fewer were able
to come home when their term of employment was over. Although there is not an
overabundance of primary sources, I take heart from historians Harvey Klehr and John Earl
Haynes, who collaborated on a related subject, the American Communist Party, and who wrote
that "The lack of primary research material has never hampered interest in the subject."
3
This
thesis will help to bring together the fragmented tales, conflicting accounts and historical
analyses of this troubled period.

3
Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, The American Communist Movement -
Storming Heaven Itself (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992), 1.
3
CHAPTER TWO
WHO WENT TO RUSSIA, AND WHY
The decisions by American workers to leave home and work in the Soviet Union, some
going alone, others uprooting their entire families, were made for a variety of reasons. In order
to understand the motivations of those who went, it is necessary to consider briefly the social,
political, and economic realities of the period between the two World Wars.
Most Americans perceived bolshevism and the Soviet Union in a decidedly negative
way immediately following the Bolshevik Revolution. Even before the Soviet Union was
formed, American distrust of communist ideals was evident. In 1918 Secretary of State Robert
Lansing commented that bolshevism was "subversive of the rights of man, and hostile to justice
and liberty."
4
Moreover, the Allies condemned the Soviets for making a separate peace with
Germany, which freed more than thirty German divisions for movement to the western front in
that crucial spring of 1918. As the historian Peter Filene wrote, "The Bolsheviks' frankly
avowed goal of withdrawing Russia from the war set most of the American public
unhesitatingly against them."
5
Indeed, the Soviet decision to quit the war caused a severe
reaction in the U.S., "Many Americans were under the impression that bolshevism was a plot by
the hated German empire. . . The wartime image of bolshevism as a German covert operation
lingered for years."
6
In addition, the Soviet Union's formation of the Third International as a "spearhead for
a global proletarian revolution" further unnerved many Americans.
7
The Russian Revolution
and burgeoning Communist movements in other European countries excited the American left-
wing into strikes and an occasional bombing, which in turn intensified the reactionary Red

4
Melvyn P. Leffler, The Specter of Communism (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994), 6.
5
Peter Filene, Americans and the Soviet Experiment, 1917-1933 (Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University Press, 1967), 21.
6
Klehr and Haynes, The American Communist Movement, 27.
7
Robert K. Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920 (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1955), 15.
4
Scare. The climate of tension and distrust in America was a holdover from the Great War, with
the censoring activities of the Creel Committee and the passage of the Espionage Act of 1917
and the Sedition Act of 1918. The paranoia extended to the state level, and as historian Melvyn
Leffler noted, "Thirty-five states passed sedition laws, banned displays of red flags, and
investigated radicals."
8
On the national level, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer instigated
the notorious "Palmer raids" which resulted in the arrest and sometimes deportation of suspected
communists. As Filene commented, the Soviet Union was both "a nation and a revolution, the
combination always challenging American values."
9
In 1920 the new Secretary of State, Bainbridge Colby, set policy concerning the Soviet
Union that would last until 1933. The United States refused to recognize the Bolsheviks,
arguing that they were not representative of the will of the Russian people."
10
Even so, this
policy did not ban all contact between the two nations. Amtorg, the Soviet trade mission,
opened offices in New York City in 1919.
11
As Filene explained, "it was an official Soviet
organization and because Russia had no embassy Amtorg naturally (though tacitly) added
political and propaganda activities to its formal commercial duties."
12
Lenin established the New Economic Policy (NEP), which temporarily softened the
communist economic policies, and gave the impression to the rest of the world that the Soviet
Union was malleable, and possibly open to capitalism.
13
Bearing this in mind, according to
Leffler, "The U.S. government permitted private investment and trade, even while it frowned
upon loans and eschewed recognition.
14
Leffler further demonstrates that "Anti-Bolshevism
was institutionalized in the State Department.
15
In 1924 the Russian and East European

8
Melvyn P. Leffler, The Specter of Communism (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994) 14.
9
Filene, Americans and the Soviet Experiment, 63.
10
Leffler, The Specter of Communism, 16.
11
Victor Reuther, The Brothers Reuther and the Story of the UAW (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1976), 90.
12
13
Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, A History of Russia (New York: Oxford University Press,
1993), 489.
14
15
5
sections were combined into the Division of Eastern European affairs and placed under Robert
F. Kelley, who had no sympathy for the new Soviet regime.
So the formal U.S. government position in the 1920s was somewhat schizophrenic. It
did not like nor respect the Soviets, yet permitted Amtorg to operate and American firms to do
business with the Soviets. Thus, from the time of the establishment of the U.S.S.R., there were
informal but no formal communications between the two nations. This situation would not
change until 1933, when a new administration under president Franklin D. Roosevelt formally
recognized the Soviet Union. Recognition also caused a perception shift inside the Soviet
Union, as noted by a U.S. engineer, The Soviet press made a remarkable sudden about face. . .
Roosevelt was transformed from a Wall Street candidate, a hireling of a rotten, disinterested
society to a humane liberal doing his best.
16
One of the most famous statements made about the Soviet Union during this period, a
statement that embodies the conflicting emotions with which many Americans viewed the
U.S.S.R., came from the writer Lincoln Steffens in July 1926. Returning from a visit to the
Soviet Union, he claimed, "I am a patriot for Russia; the Future is there; Russia will win out and
it will save the world. That is my belief. But I don't want to live there."
17
The Soviets loathed capitalism but they were extremely pragmatic, for they saw the
American system, then the most productive in the world, as the model for what they wanted to
become. For example, in the Nation, reporter Marian Tyler wrote from Russia that "Gods live in
heaven, and machines, as everyone knows, live in America. Of course, America is not
considered heaven, politically almost the opposite, in fact; but there is an impression that when
the god is transferred to Russia, heaven on earth will be accomplished."
18
The Soviets were fascinated with the managerial practices of Frederick Taylor and
Henry Ford. Taylor had become famous for regulating the actions of workers to improve their

16
Michael Gelb, ed. An American Engineer in Stalin's Russia: Memoirs of Zara
Witkin 1932-1934. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 255.
17
18
Marian Tyler, "The American God in Russia" Nation, 12 January 1927, 37-38.
6
efficiency, and his system of scientific management is still widely known as "Taylorism."
19
Taylor once said, "in the past, the man has been first, in the future the system must be first."
20
This methodology held an obvious attraction for the Soviets, who were searching for the best
way to convert an agrarian society into a modern, albeit centralized, industrial power. They
believed that Taylorism provided the way by which the simple masses could be converted into
competent and efficient workers in a modern factory setting.
Henry Ford, whose plants the Soviets saw as the embodiment of Taylorism, was
revered in the Soviet Union. The Soviet-based American reporter, Maurice Hindus, wrote for
Outlook magazine that he had ". . . visited villages far from railroads, where I talked to illiterate
peasants who did not know who Stalin was or Rykov or Bukharin, but who had heard of the
man [i.e., Ford] who makes the 'iron horses.'"
21
Ford's 1922 autobiography, My Life and Work,
had gone through four printings in the Soviet Union by 1925.
22
Taylor's system, combined with Ford's assembly-line that combined all plants and
materials at a single site, the most famous being River Rouge, appealed strongly to the Soviets.
The Soviet penchant for gigantic projects was demonstrated, for example, at Magnitogorsk,
which employed some 40,000 laborers, and at the huge Dneprostroi dam. So the Soviet Union
had a need for, and an interest in, American technology and skilled American workers. With this
admiration for American know-how in mind, the Soviets set out to purchase American
technology and to make the U.S.S.R. attractive to American workers.
Of course, the European powers could have taken America's place in providing
technology and technical experts, and many did get a slice of the Soviet pie, but American
success was what the Soviets most wanted to copy and emulate. Joseph Stalin himself said
"American efficiency is that indomitable force which neither knows nor recognizes obstacles. . .

19
Hughes, American Genesis, 188.
20
21
Maurice Hindus, "Henry Ford Conquers Russia, Outlook, 29 June 1927, 280.
22
7
The combination of the Russian revolutionary sweep with American efficiency is the essence of
Leninism."
23
Unfortunately, the two sides had major misconceptions of each other. One migr to
the Soviet Union, Margaret Wettlin, wrote that "I was in the unique position of being an integral
part of two entirely different worlds, worlds that not only had no understanding of each other
but had the most distorted conceptions. . . "
24
She further commented that:
Narrow political prejudices blinded people to the fact that here were two
nations similar in that at different times each had been the pioneer of a new
way of life; and that here were two peoples similar in that both were born and
bred in lands of vast expanses and untold resources.
25
At a dinner in Moscow an American worker, Victor Herman, met the famous General
Mikhail Tukachevsky, who for all his rank, had some amazing misconceptions about conditions
in America. Herman related that General Tukachevsky believed:
Those who could drive could fly-at least in the States they could-because he
figured everybody in the States had both an automobile and an airplane. . .
The fellow thought that the entire U.S. was plastered with nothing but
skyscrapers, every square foot.
26
This is a very telling anecdote, as American misconceptions of the U.S.S.R. were widely
known, but the skewed views the other side held were rarely publicized.
In order to bring American methods and ideals into Soviet manufacturing, the Soviets
turned directly to the source. The mechanism they used was the trade mission Amtorg,
mentioned earlier in this text. The head of Amtorg, Saul Bron, commented that the "Soviets. . .
are fully awake to the value of American technology and individual skill."
27
Amtorg dealt with individual Americans workers and with corporations. On the
individual level, the Soviets hoped to entice as many workers as they could to leave America.
Initially, almost all interested and able parties who made inquiries to Amtorg were hired,

23
24
Margaret Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc.,
1992), 114.
25
Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters, 114.
26
Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 59.
27
Sylvia R. Margulies, The Pilgrimage to Russia; the Soviet Union and the Treatment
of Foreigners 1924 -1937 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 31.
8
regardless of their skills. The Soviet hope was that the presence of Americans would inspire
Soviet workers and help raise Soviet factories to American levels of productivity. As the
historian Sylvia Margulies commented in her book, Pilgrimage to Russia, these Americans
were recruited to fill technological gaps as well as train future generations of Soviet
engineers."
28
In the early days, Amtorg frequently promised not only to pay passage to the
U.S.S.R., but to do so in part with U.S. currency, valuta, not the Soviet ruble.
Amtorg also made large-scale purchases from major corporations. One was Amtorg's
deal with Ford. The two sides signed a major contract in May of 1929 in which the Soviets
agreed to purchase "$30 million worth of automobiles and parts before 1933 and Ford. . . agreed
to furnish technical assistance until 1938" to help build and run an auto plant in Gorky.
29
This
contract was in many ways a boon to Ford for it could to tap a potentially gigantic market for
automobiles and also to get rid of older equipment from their plant at River Rouge. Historian
Mira Wilkins wrote, "Since the company was going to substitute the V-8 for the Model A, it
could send the Soviets much of the used equipment that would otherwise have been
discarded."
30
And as Herman commented, that to Ford, It didnt matter what the politics were,
it only mattered where the marketplace was.
31
The actual construction of the Gorky automobile plant was handled by the Austin Co.
of Cleveland, Ohio. The owner, W.J. Austin, commented that by late 1931 the "Russians
themselves will manufacture Ford cars and trucks under the supervision of Russian engineers
and mechanics who will have been trained in the Ford factories."
32
Training was another aspect
of the contract; while the Soviet plant was being built, Soviets would come to Detroit for
training.

28
Margulies, Pilgrimage to Russia, 23.
29
Antony C. Sutton, Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development 1917-
1930, vol. 1, (Stanford: Stanford University, 1968), 246.
30
Mira Wilkins and Frank Ernest Hill, American Business Abroad (Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 1964), 223.
31
32
Frederick A. Van Fleet "Building a Ford Factory in Russia - an Interview with W.J.
Austin," Review of Reviews, 83 January 1931, 45.
9
Of course, the Soviets were importing technology and experts in many fields other than
automobile manufacturing. In July 1931 Business Week published a list of forty-four companies,
such as RCA, General Electric, Ford, and Sperry Gyroscope, which had "technical assistance
contracts" with the Soviet Union.
33
These and other firms had employees scattered throughout
the Soviet Union, from Archangel to Irkutsk, working on products ranging from rubber to radios
to fertilizer.
The magnitude of Soviet purchases in the U.S. is difficult to estimate. Indeed, in July
1930, in the midst of the Great Depression, Business Week stated that their statisticians could
not figure out, and perhaps would never tabulate, the exact value of Soviet orders which have
been brought to the U.S."
34
The Business Week article raises two interesting pointsfirst, the
economic benefit to the U.S. of Soviet purchases was seen as being significant, and, second,
Soviet business seemed good, even to such a conservative publication.
The U.S. government saw Amtorg as a stand-in, in lieu of a formal Soviet Embassy.
During that period of non-recognition, American citizens writing to the State Department asking
for information about the Soviet Union were given Amtorgs address.
35
So for more than a
decade relations between the two countries were conducted through such organizations as
Amtorg, and occasionally through such neutral third countries as Switzerland.
Several other organizations besides Amtorg fostered trade between the two nations.
One was the Society for Technical Aid to Soviet Russia, based in New York City. According to
Margulies, this group had the backing of the American Communist Party and was responsible
for arranging passage for "thousands of Americans."
36
There was also an American-Russian
Chamber of Commerce, founded by American businessmen and engineers, who needed aid in

33
"More Than 600 Americans Are Now Working for the Soviets," Business Week , 16
July 1930, 25.
34
"More than 600 Americans, 25.
35
Letter to George W. Johnson, File 361.11/17, Record Group 59, National
Archives, College Park, MD.
36
10
dealing with the two governments.
37
The Chamber of Commerce also lobbied for American
recognition of the Soviet Union.
It is difficult to establish a firm number of people who went from the United States to
the U.S.S.R. between the two World Wars. Many of the histories of this time period are
confused and conflicting on American immigrants to the Soviet Union. In 1930 the State
Department estimated that the total number of Americans in the U.S.S.R. was "between 700 and
1,000"
38
while a 1932 magazine article claimed that the number had "reached nearly 10,000."
39
These figures may reflect a large exodus in 1931, or they may reflect the general imprecision of
the data.
The confusion about numbers is also revealed by contemporary accounts from the
Gorky plant. For example, the historian Nelson Lichtenstein reported that of the 32,000 workers
at Gorky, the famous Reuther brothers were two of about "two hundred foreign workers,
including about one hundred Americans."
40
Victor Reuther, in his memoirs The Brothers
Reuther, stated that of these, "about thirty" were from the Ford Motor Company and "lived in
the American Village."
41
However, Victor Herman states at that time there were hundreds of
Americans in the American Village, so arriving at an accurate number is very difficult.
42
Perhaps the difference can be explained by the fact that the Reuthers did not arrive at Gorky
until late 1933, and it is likely that some Americans had already fulfilled their contracts and
gone home, or had been arrested.
While an exact number of migrs would be very difficult to derive, one can state with
certainty that the flow of Americans to the Soviet Union was a relatively small one, certainly not
even close to the scale of what the U.S. experienced at the heights of European immigration.

37
38
Response to Letter of Inquiry of Mr. L. Kraus, File 361.11/4041, Record Group 59.
39
Ruth Kennell and Milly Bennett, "American Immigrants in Russia," 25 American
Mercury April 1932, 464.
40
Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the
Fate of American Labor (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 37.
41
Reuther, Brothers Reuther, 90.
42
Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 89
11
However, most of those who went were in essence hand picked by the Soviets for specific
knowledge or skills, and thus had the potential for major impact on the Soviet Union.
Two major motivating factors impelled Americans to move to the
U.S.S.R., ideology and work. The emphasis placed on each factor shifted over
time, for conditions in the U.S. from 1930-1933 were vastly different than those
from 1919-1923.
Initially, there were the idealists, both white and black, who saw the Soviet Union as a
new and appealing social order. In the early twenties, leftist whites wanted to go to the U.S.S.R.
to see the great socialist experiment at work, while blacks were impressed with the Soviet
claims of being a society free from racial prejudice.
43
Two very ideological views were written by authors who departed in 1932, in the midst
of the Depression. The first originated from a Philadelphia schoolteacher, Margaret Wettlin,
who stayed in the Soviet Union for almost fifty years. She explained her reasons for going and
her initial affection for the Soviets: "I had come to the Soviet Union looking for a better design.
. . And I liked the enthusiasm of the builders and their capacity for self-sacrifice in realizing
their dream."
44
To Wettlin, it was not the physical conditions that were important, "What
mattered was that every person was guaranteed the right to work, to have a vacation, and to be
cared for when sick or old. These, for me, were the basic democratic rights."
45
A similar viewpoint was written by John Scott, author of the famous autobiography
Behind the Urals, a very insightful look into the Magnitogorsk construction. His reasons for
going to Russia were akin to Wettlin's, if more overtly critical of life in the West:
Something seemed to be wrong with America. I began to read extensively
about the Soviet Union, and gradually came to the conclusion that the
Bolsheviks had found answers to at least some of the questions Americans
were asking each other. I decided to go to Russia to work, study, and to lend a

43
Allison Blakely, Russia and the Negro - Blacks in Russian History and Thought
(Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1986).
44
45
12
hand in the construction of a society which seemed to be at least one step
ahead of the American.
46
Scott's idealism is striking, obviously at odds with the materialistic U.S. of the Roaring
Twenties in which he grew up: "I was going to be one of many who cared not to own a second
pair of shoes, but who built blast furnaces which were their own. It was September, 1932, and I
was twenty years old."
47
As the Roaring Twenties waned and the Great Depression tightened its grip on
America, there was a decided shift in public opinion toward the U.S.S.R. The Soviet claims of
guaranteed employment sounded sweet to those standing in American bread lines. As Filene
wrote, the liberals "pointedly emphasized that there was no [Soviet] unemployment, and more
important, that there was a purpose to the harsh conditions. . . Americans, on the other hand,
were suffering simply because their system had broken down and their leaders did not know
how to repair it.
48
The desperation of American workers is reflected by the fact that, as the Great
Depression snowballed stateside, in 1931 Amtorg had "More than 100,000 appeals for
immigration [from the U.S. to the U.S.S.R.] in eight months."
49
However, due to both hard
currency and food shortages in the U.S.S.R, Soviet recruitment policy shifted. In earlier days,
virtually any American was signed up. Now, the Soviets could afford to pick and choose from
the ready supply of skilled workers and specialists.
50
No longer did Amtorg have to provide
transportation or make other guarantees, as it had in the early twenties.
By this time some Americans had already undergone the Soviet experience, and the
reports of those who had returned were less than enthusiastic. However, their opinions did little
to deter desperate American workers, and, as Albert Parry commented in Outlook in 1931, in
response to queries about the U.S.S.R.:

46
John Scott, Behind the Urals (Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1942), 3.
47
Scott, Behind the Urals, 5.
48
49
Andrea Graziosi, "Foreign Workers in Soviet Russia, 1920-1940: Their Experience
and Their Legacy," International Labor and Working-Class History, Spring 1988, 41.
50
Graziosi, "Foreign Workers in Soviet Russia," 41.
13
We warn them of hardships in Russia, but they eye us suspiciously and answer
that no Russian hardships could possibly be worse than American
unemployment, that work at limited rations is better than idleness in a soup
line, that it is better to suffer for the good of the socialist ideal than for the
greed of the capitalists. Above all, they want work.
51
An interesting sidebar is that the Soviet government did not want active American
communists to emigrate. They believed that American communists could do more good by
staying home and encouraging others to go. How much recruitment the American Communist
Party did is unclear, especially as the Depression deepened and the reasons for going shifted
more towards sheer economics. Communist Party member Fred Beal recorded the pithy
comment of an unidentified American in 1931, who said to him, "Beal, I don't give a damn
about politics. All I want is a job working around machines and three square meals a day."
52
Black Americans were often motivated to go to the U.S.S.R. by the dual inducements
of work and lack of prejudice. Oliver Golden's granddaughter, Yelena Khanga, elaborated,
"How could a college-educated black man find a job commensurate with his training, when
millions of white men were out of work too?"
53
Golden, along with his wife and sixteen others,
some of whom he persuaded to join him, sailed for Russia on November 7, 1931, on the S.S.
Deutschland.
54
One man in the group, Joseph Roane, wrote that he went because "Amtorg was
offering better pay for a month than a lot of people would make in a year during the Depression.
Secondly, I was young and I wanted to see the world."
55
Robert Robinson, a black, was offered a contract in April of 1930 to work in the Soviet
Union for a year at better than double his wages at Ford. At the time he was earning $140 a
month, and was offered, "$259 a month, rent free living quarters, a maid, thirty days paid
vacation a year, a car, free passage to and from Russia, and they would deposit $150 out of each

51
Albert Parry, "A Gold Rush to Moscow," Outlook, 15 July 1931, 331.
52
Fred E. Beal, "Foreign Workers in a Soviet Tractor Plant" Co-operative Publishing
Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R., Moscow 1933, 45.
53
Yelena Khanga and Susan Jacoby, Soul to Soul - A Black Russian American Family
1865-1992 (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1992), 74.
54
Khanga, Soul to Soul, 73.
55
14
month's paycheck in an American bank."
56
His decision to go was aided by his perception that
"America is in the grip of a serious depression and I could be laid off any day at Ford. Judging
by all the applicants in the outer room [at Amtorg], white Americans are lining up for this
chance. Why not me, too?"
57
Another black, Homer Smith, claimed that "Russia was the only
place I could go and escape color discrimination entirely."
58
Besides those people motivated by politics, economics, or race a small number went
for other reasons. In 1919 a group of 249 were involuntarily deported from the United States to
the U.S.S.R.. One was Emma Goldman, who had been arrested and deported for protesting
World War I and survived to write a book critical of her experiences in the U.S.S.R..
59
A few
went on their own, seeking fame and fortune. One among this small group was John Littlepage,
who went to the U.S.S.R. in the middle 1920s and wrote of his experiences in a book titled In
Search of Soviet Gold.
60
When it suited their purposes, the Soviet government invited certain Americans to
visit, and often treated these guests with special care. For example, Margaret Bourke-White, a
renowned photographer, went in 1930 "to photograph the vast new industry which is being built
under the Five Year Plan."
61
The Soviet government was impressed with her and her work, as:
They consider the artist an important factor in the Five Year Plan, and the
photographer the artist of the machine age. It is for the artist to stir the
imagination of the people with the grandeur of the industrial program. Thus I
had come to a country where an industrial photographer is accorded the rank
of artist and prophet.
62

56
Robert Robinson, Black on Red My: 44 Years Inside the Soviet Union (Washington,
D.C.: Acropolis Books, Ltd., 1988), 29.
57
Robinson, Black on Red, 29.
58
Homer Smith, Black Man in Red Russia: A Memoir (Chicago: Johnson Publishing
Co., 1964), 1.
59
Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell
Company, 1970), v.
60
John Littlepage and Demaree Bess, In Search of Soviet Gold (New York: Arno Press,
1970).
61
Margaret Bourke-White, Eyes On Russia (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1931),
12.
62
Bourke-White, Eyes On Russia, 42.
15
With this reception, and the desire for good publicity, she was given "papers [which] conferred
the most astounding privileges. Inasmuch as I was commissioned by the Soviet Government to
take these industrial photographs, all Soviet citizens that I called upon were requested to help
me with my work."
63
Even so, she was glad to have followed the instructions of a U.S. journalist who had
advised her to ". . . buy a cheap trunk and fill it with canned food. That is not advice. It is an
order!"
64
Her travels took her through various textile and rolling mills, and through the huge
dam, Dneprostroi, and Tractorstroi, the famous tractor plant. It seems exceptional that she was
not only allowed to photograph such installations, but strongly encouraged to do so. At least it
seems so in relation to the comments of a tourist, Harry Franck, traveling about five years later:
The photography rules in the Soviet Union are puzzling to any one and burdensome to
those of us who like to give concrete illustrations of our impressions and comments. You
must not photograph a bridge, a railway train, a soldier or soldiers, or anything military or
pertaining to aviation. . . You must not photograph a queue, particularly a bread-line, or
anything that will give the outside world visual proof that your written observations on the
low standard of living and kindred sore points with the Soviet authorities are true.
65
Of course, Bourke-White was showing only the positive aspects of the Soviet Union,
and authorities examined her work before she left. Her purpose was to glorify Soviet industry,
not reveal life on the street. Also, conditions between 1930 and 1935 were quite different. In
1935 the purges were underway, and Hitler had risen to power in Germany. Bourke-White left
with a mixed opinion of Soviet Union, loving the people and progress but bemoaning the
shortages she had found.
But the majority of the migrs went to work, and their experiences were typified by
the Herman family, which had left Detroit en route to Gorky in 1931. The autobiography,
Coming Out of the Ice, written by Victor Herman, who was seventeen when his family went to
Russia, is a very powerful work, and proved invaluable as a primary source in this study.

63
64
65
Harry A. Franck, A Vagabond in Sovietland - America's Perennial Rambler Goes
Tourist (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1935), 92.
16
Victor's father, Sam, "was a laborer, a Socialist, a unionist. My mother was these things
too."
66
Sam had worked for Ford, but had been blacklisted for organizing unions in 1929. This
status changed in 1930 when "He started doing something [at] Ford's. . . There were Russians at
Ford's and he was helping the Americans talk to the Russians and the Russians talk to the
Americans."
67
Sam, fluent in both languages, may have helped negotiate the contract between
Ford and the Russians that was mentioned earlier. A number of Ford workers signed contracts to
set up a Russian version of the famed River Rouge plant in Gorky.
68
Among these workers was
Victor's father, and Victor recounted that Sam:
Saw it that he was doing something for the good of the world. Making Russia
strong meant making Socialism work, and that was for the good of everyone
everywhere--because didn't that mean there would be more fairness for
everyone and the good life for all?
69
In all, Herman notes that some 300 families from in and around Detroit were to go to Gorky.
70
In summary, some Americans went to the Soviet Union out of curiosity, some for
adventure, some because they admired the ideals espoused (if not practiced) by the Soviet
regime, but the vast majority went for that most basic of human needs, work and its rewards. As
the next chapter will demonstrate, finding those rewards, fulfilling those dreams, was difficult
indeed.

66
67
68
69
70
17
CHAPTER THREE
AMERICAN EXPERIENCES IN THE U.S.S.R.
The information that potential migrs had about the Soviet Union was often
inaccurate and incomplete, or it was disregarded by desperate people eager for productive
employment. Therefore, it is appropriate now to examine conditions and policies within the
Soviet Union and the realities that awaited Americans who went there between the great wars.
As with American views of the Soviet Union, Soviet views on its American guests
were subject to alteration over time. At first, when the U.S.S.R. was eager to establish modern
industrial facilities and to create a skilled workforce, their policy was to recruit foreign workers
actively. The value they placed on such workers was illustrated by William Henry Chamberlin,
an American reporter in the U.S.S.R, who wrote that "It is one of the many amusing
inconsistencies of Russian life that while the Soviet Government, in principle, is strongly
opposed to any form of extraterritorial privileges, it actually concedes, in fact if not in name, an
extraterritorial status to foreigners resident in the country.
71
This was at least true of those
Americans who retained their U.S. passports.
However, as Soviet paranoia of foreigners grew, the passport question became a
critical issue. Once an American was in the Soviet Union, his or her citizenship status was
closely monitored by the Soviet authorities. It was Soviet policy to regard any former
Russian/Soviet citizen who returned to the Soviet Union as a citizen, regardless of any other
citizenship the person might have acquired while abroad. Indeed, the only way for such an
individual to lose Soviet citizenship was to "be allowed to renounce Soviet citizenship" by
permission of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the U.S.S.R., according to

71
William Henry Chamberlin, Russia's Iron Age (Boston: Little, Brown and Co.,
1934), 169.
18
U.S. State Department documents.
72
Therefore, any former citizen who returned was subject to
Soviet laws, with no protection at all afforded by their American status, especially as the U.S.
did not have an embassy there until 1933. Many migrs fell into this category, and historian
Sylvia Margulies commented that many Russian-born American citizens went to work in the
U.S.S.R. because of their . . . sentimental attachment.
73
Homesickness, especially when
combined with the possibility that all the old abuses under the Czars had been swept away, and
with Russia perhaps emerging as a fresh, powerful nation - it is easy to see how compelling a
lure that combination could be.
Certainly the State Department was aware of this policy on citizenship, as evidenced
by Chief of Eastern European Affairs Robert Kelly who wrote in a January 1930 memo,
"Persons formerly a Russian National. . . [are] considered by Soviet authorities as a citizen of
Russia."
74
There is no way to tell how many immigrants knew these facts, but most likely they
were unaware of them, unless they had asked precisely the right questions of Amtorg or the
State Department before leaving America.
Americans whose passports expired while in the Soviet Union before 1933 were at
great risk, since there was no U.S. embassy in the U.S.S.R. at which to renew it. A returning
American Finn, Wilho Kuust, who spent eighteen months in the U.S.S.R., told the State
Department that it was "an accepted fact that any American who stayed in the U.S.S.R. would,
if his passport expired, be obliged within a short time to become a Soviet citizen."
75
To do this
was to invite disaster, and minimized the chances of ever returning to America.
Those Americans who wished to extend their stay in the U.S.S.R. had to travel out of
the country to renew their American passport, then reapply for Soviet visas in order to return.
However, there was another way by which Americans could stay longer in the U.S.S.R., as

72
Memorandum to Sec. of State on Conditions in Soviet Union, File 361.00/4,
Record Group 59.
73
74
Response to Letter of Inquiry of Mr. Kinsel, File 361.11/4034, Record Group 59.
75
Memorandum of Interview with Mr. Kuust, File 861.5017/679, Record Group 59.
19
many did because of the continuing depression at home, and that was to exchange their
American for a Soviet passport voluntarily.
The Soviets kept a tight rein on their citizens indeed. Chamberlin commented on the
difference vis a vis America and the Soviet Union:
The unemployed American or Englishman who wants to go to Russia
encounters no objection on the part of his own government. The Soviet
Government, on the other hand, is most rigorous in holding its own citizens
within the country, especially if it suspects that their sentiments are not
enthusiastic.
76
And as time went by, and the great purges began to sweep the Soviet landscape,
the importance of foreign workers lessened, so that even they, non-Soviet
citizens, had difficulty leaving the country.
The American workers selected to go to Russia naturally had high
expectations, as American industry was eliminating skilled positions as fast it
could, while the Soviet Union was expanding its industrial base. In general,
however, the receptions and conditions the Americans found overseas were
rarely what they expected. Because of their foreign status and skill level, while
in Russia these workers had access to better food and housing than the natives.
Even so, these were usually far below American standards. Victor Reuther
commented that, "we got used to the diet, though each of us lost twenty
pounds."
77
As Dr. William Robinson, a tourist, commented, "People cannot
forever live like half-starved animals on the hope in that a few years everything
will be better. A corpse is indifferent to improved conditions.
78
In November,
1932, Zara Witkin, an engineer, wrote that "Living conditions by this time

76
Chamberlin, Russia's Iron Age, 195.
77
20
began to slide downward so rapidly that many foreigners found it intolerable to
remain."
79
William Henry Chamberlin, the Christian Science Monitor reporter,
wrote that the "Standard of living of the workers and employees declined to a
point where many of them are on or below the living standards of British or
American unemployed."
80
Peter Sutherland, a United Fruit Company worker,
commented upon his return in 1930 that "Sanitation did not exist outside of
Moscow and Leningrad."
81
New York Times reporter Walter Duranty wrote of a
typhus outbreak in the Stalingrad Tractor Factory involving sixteen cases of
typhoid among the American workers, two of whom died.
82
This problem
apparently continued, for Ignatz Rusek, a U.S. engineer who returned in late
1931, told the State Department that "seven Americans have died from typhoid
in the past two months."
83
Only the very highest level American overseers enjoyed a lifestyle
equivalent to that in America. Two notable examples of this exception were
Col. Hugh Cooper, who oversaw construction of the Dneprostroi dam, and the
architect Albert Kahn, who designed over five hundred factories for the Soviets,
including the auto works at Gorky and Tractorstroi at Stalingrad.
84

78
William J. Robinson, Soviet Russia As I Saw It - Its Accomplishments, Its Crimes
and Stupidities (New York: The International Press, 1932), 156.
79
Gelb, ed. An American Engineer in Stalin's Russia, 124.
80
81
"Says Soviets Hold Americans Slaves," New York Times, 28 September 1930, sec 1,
20.
82
Walter Duranty, "Soviets Seek to Speed Tractor Production," New York Times, 7
November 1930, 9.
83
Memorandum of Interview with Mr. Rusek, File 361.11/143, Record Group 59.
84
Grant Hildebrand, Designing for Industry: the Architecture of Albert Kahn
(Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1974), 129. Hughes, American Genesis, 266.
21
On first reaching Leningrad in 1920, Emma Goldman found the city
"almost in ruins" peopled by "emaciated and frostbitten men, women, and
children."
85
By contrast, she found Moscow to have "Life, motion, and
movement."
86
This difference between the two cities was remarked on by the
American reporter Harrison Salisbury in his book American in Russia. A
Russian he met commented on Leningrad's lack of materials:
They do not like us in Moscow, he said. We are the window on the West,
yes? That is what Peter [the Great] said. Peter wanted a window on the west.
But, perhaps, now a window is not wanted. Sometimes things can be seen
from a window which it is better not to see.
87
In 1930 in Leningrad, Robert Robinson commented that, "I didn't see any jewelry at all.
. . The clothing was so ill-fitting, they could hardly have looked worse in potato
sacks."
88
Wandering through Leningrad, he found the "shelves were bare" and he "got
the sense that Russia was a poor, struggling country."
89
When Margaret Wettlin
reached Moscow a few years later, she noticed that "Jewelry was taboo. Jewelry was
bourgeois. And by this time most of it had been exchanged for food coupons in the
Torgsin (Foreign Trade) stores operating on a gold and foreign currency basis, for food
was scarce in Moscow."
90
A tourist, Harry Franck, provided some interesting commentary, describing
how "On the street true communism reigns, every man--and woman--for himself, and
starvation catch[es] the hindmost."
91
On the never-ending queues for bread or any
supplies, he noted that "The dead must give up their bread-cards before they can be
buried. . . It seems rather a pity that Intourist [Soviet Tourist Agency] deprives its

85
Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia, 8.
86
87
Harrison Salisbury, An American in Russia (New York: Harper, 1955), 61.
88
89
90
91
Franck, Vagabond, 59.
22
'guests' of the national experience of standing in line for their bread."
92
He also
wondered about the government's claim that property was common to all; "Property
comes first in the U.S.S.R. too, just as in capitalistic countries. If people die in
accomplishing the building program laid out by the government, what matter, so long as
the buildings are built?"
93
Even with these shortages, it was a time of expansion in the Soviet Union.
Chamberlin reflectively wrote that:
I have lived in the Soviet Union during one of its most dynamic periods,
during the first years of its Iron Age, when a single year sometimes seemed to
crowd in as many events as a decade of life in other countries. I have seen
some of the greatest triumphs of the Iron Age in terms of steel and concrete
and witnessed some of its greatest tragedies in terms of human beings.
94
Victor Herman's first impressions on arriving in 1931 were anything but positive, "Oh,
I quickly got over my boy's anticipation of bears and lions and tigers. How could anything as
colorful as those animals live in a land as drab as this? Only people could."
95
It is interesting
how almost those exact same dreamy words were echoed, this time in a more positive manner,
by a Quaker doctor, Harry Timbres, who came to Russia in 1936 to combat malaria, "The
country is wild--forests, bears, wolves, wallaboos, and unicorns. Hotcha!"
96
Upon reaching Gorky, the Americans found living and working conditions were
extremely primitive in comparison with life in Detroit. All the Americans lived in the
"American Village [which] was situated two miles away from the factory -- a settlement of one
and two-story buildings made out of wood, plywood, and mud."
97
The Herman family received
a little more space than most did, with two rooms to their credit, as they contributed three
workers to the plant.

92
93
94
95
96
Harry and Rebecca Timbres, We Didn't Ask Utopia - A Quaker Family in Soviet
Russia, (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1939), 42.
97
23
There were certainly profound social differences between the two countries. With the
Soviet ban on religion, formalizing relationships was much more casual than in America. The
red tape the Soviet Union was famed for apparently did not apply to weddings and divorces, for
John Scott wrote of his marriage to a Soviet woman:
When our turn came, we signed our name in a registration book, I produced
three rubles, and we received a rough wrapping paper which had been
mimeographed into a marriage-license blank, which declared us man and wife
until or unless either of us should go to some ZAGS (Bureau of Civil Acts)
anywhere in the Soviet Union and pay three rubles for a divorce.
98
Franck seemed to admire the Soviet Union for its stance on sexual relations. He commented
that:
The Soviet Republic is a very materialistic civilization that faces facts without
blushing. It openly recognizes the fact that boys and girls from their later
teens onward take pleasure in sleeping together. Its attitude is Go ahead and
have your fun. You will only be young once. If you want a child, all right. If
not, it is your unalienable right to have an abortion, at the expense of the State.
It makes no particular difference whether you are married or not; there are no
bastards in the Soviet Union.
99
This statement is contradicted by what the Timbres (Quaker workers) found in 1936:
The law abolishing abortions except in case of absolute danger to health and
inherited disease has been issued. Russia is now like most other countries in
that respect. . . There is little doubt that the majority of the people were in
favor of it.
100
Of course, a year had passed between these two observations, and "A year or so is about as long
as facts stay facts in present day Russia" as Franck cynically noted.
101
Even so, that does seem
to be quite a swing in morality. However, Franck's cynicism remained intact as he wondered
"Why [have] marriage at all? There is no illegitimacy in the U.S.S.R., not much of anything to
inherit, no public opinion worth worrying about against irregular unions."
102
As religion was
illegal, marriage was merely a matter of paperwork. Coming back to the Timbres' more recent
observations, a young Russian male told them:

98
99
100
Timbres, We Didn't Ask Utopia, 20.
101
102
24
You just go to the ZAGS. . .,' Up to now either party can go alone to the
bureau and get a divorce, and the notification will be sent to the absent
member. But when the new Constitution goes into effect, both parties will
have to appear together.
103
Reducing relationships to paperwork or no, the reporter Salisbury
commented that:
The plain truth was that the Party had never devised a means of
replacing the church in those great hours of a man's life-birth,
marriage, and death. The ZAGS office would never be a
substitute for the marriage crowns of the Orthodox faith nor
would the Party orator find words more comforting that the
benediction of the priest.
104
Concerning religion, Chamberlin commented that, "It is ironically curious to see
mystical tendencies of older religions reproducing themselves in the new faith of
Communism."
105
This point is elaborated on by Franck:
Substitution is always easier than elimination, and just as the early Christian
Church substituted a new saint for an old pagan deity, usually on the same
altar and with the same functions, so the likeness of Lenin seems to take the
place of the outlawed ikon.
106
In the Soviet Union, unlike America at that time, many women worked outside the
home. According to Scott, "In many jobs. . . where reliability, dexterity, and consistency were
required. . . women largely replaced men in Magnitogorsk."
107
Victor Herman wrote that
"There was nothing soft or light in those Russian girls I saw - and they did not want there to be.
What they wanted was to work as a man worked, to dig a hole if he dug one, or lift a load if
that's what he did."
108
Another major difference between the two countries was the absolute power of the
Soviet state and the capricious way in which it treated its citizens under the law. While not
every American immigrant was subjected to the Soviet prison camp system, sooner or later all

103
Timbres, We Didn't Ask Utopia, 91.
104
Salisbury, Russia's Iron Age, 304.
105
Chamberlin, Iron Age, 19.
106
107
108
25
of the immigrants, and most of the tourists, learned of its existence, and feared it. Even the most
casual observers noted the ubiquitous presence of the security forces that served the state and
acted mainly to provide inmates for the camp system.
The communists were not the first to imprison political enemies in Russia, as the Tsars
had established that practice centuries before. The communists, however, substantially expanded
the numbers of prisoners, and increased the utility such unfortunates could have for the state.
The prison camps became not only places in which to house prisoners, but were in essence work
units whose output, such as timber and ores, enriched the state.
Perhaps the most famous work about the camps is Aleksandr Solzhenitysn's massive
three-volume Gulag Archipelago. The Gulag details the overall history of prisons and camps,
the evolution of the security services that maintained it, and tells the author's own story of his
long imprisonment. The title itself is a central metaphor of the trilogy, archipelago, of course,
meaning a scattering of islands, the title reflecting the scattering of prison islands within the
mainland of the Soviet Union. His writing style is lively and evocative, and so is used here, but
scholars dispute his figures. Details of the oppressive power of the State, and of the camp
system, will be expanded later in this paper.
The American workers who went to the Soviet Union certainly helped raise Soviet
technological levels, but very few found working conditions satisfactory. Complaints about both
bureaucratic red tape and factory floor inefficiency were prevalent in the American experience.
Many Americans became frustrated with the lack of Soviet workmanship and cooperation, for
many Soviet workers were ill-trained and ill-disposed to learn from their American mentors.
The Soviet government was aware of these difficulties, and in the newspaper Za
Industrialitatsiu reported that after three months of foreigners working there [at the Stalingrad
Tractor Works] the "results [were] still negligible."
109

109
Letter from F.W.B. Coleman [Consular officer, Riga, Latvia] to Sec. Of State,
File 361.11/4045, Record Group 59.
26
The Soviet government directly blamed the native factory workers for their lack of
progress, noting that "The fundamental cause is a lack of ability and a lack of desire to work
with the Americans."
110
Emma Goldman commented that "Russian workers resented the
eagerness and intensity" of Americans.
111
She quoted Russian workers as saying, "Wait till you
have starved as long as we. . . [then] we will see if you are so eager."
112
One positive Soviet
voice came from an engineer at Magnitogorsk, who reported that Americans knew an awful
lotdespite the fact they were in English. . . we preferred the American drawings to our
Russian ones.
113
However, as an educated individual he was an exception in refraining from
the contempt many of the common workers held.
One especially useful source on American/Soviet worker relations was written by Fred
Beal, an American Communist Party member who fled to the Soviet Union while out on bail for
plotting to "overthrow the state of Michigan" in 1929.
114
He found productive work as a
foreman in the Kharkov Tractor Plant. As Beal described the Soviets dilemma at his plant,
there were not enough skilled natives to "raise the skill of 22,000 workers" so the "Soviet
Government contracted for a number of foreign workers and specialists to bring their
experiences and skill to the Soviet Union."
115
He reported the arrival of Americans in
November 1930, of Czechs in July 1931, and Germans "from time to time."
116
Beal judged that
of the three foreign groups "Americans are the most backward politically."
117
One gets the
feeling that he personally would have gone anyway, trial or not, from his comment that the
"Soviet factory is remolding the human race, foreign as well as Russian."
118

110
Letter from F.W.B. Coleman to Sec. Of State, File 361.11/4045, Record Group
59.
111
112
113
Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization (Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1995), 413.
114
Fred E. Beal. Proletarian Journey - New England Gastonia Moscow (New York:
Hillman-Curl, Inc. 1937), 213.
115
Beal "Foreign Workers in a Soviet Tractor Plant," 16.
116
Beal, "Foreign Workers in a Soviet Tractor Plant" 16.
117
118
27
Communist ideologue or not, Beal recognized that life in the Soviet Union was not
perfect. The Americans, and presumably the other foreign groups, expected that their expertise
would be fully utilized, but that was not always the case. Beal related that the "'BRIZ' [Bureau
of Worker's Inventions] was often one of the sore spots among foreigners."
119
The BRIZ was
where workers could make suggestions, and be compensated for their ideas. A BRIZ report
from April 1933 stated that "119 foreigners made 561 suggestions, 111 accepted, 109 to be
looked over and acted upon; 341 rejected; 59,556 rubles economized. Premiums given -
7,966."
120
Obviously the workers believed that more of their suggestions had merit than they
were compensated for. One can also speculate that jealousy may have arisen between the more
technologically sophisticated foreign workers and the native workforce regarding the numbers
of suggestions made.
The lack of productive interaction among workers was commented upon in the
newspaper Za Industrialitatsiu, which reported that "In the various departments and workshops
of the plant the Americans very often worked quite isolated from the Russians. There were
found zealots of Russian 'universalism' and 'omniscience', who openly preached the idea that the
Americans were not at all necessary to the factory."
121
So it is clear that while the Soviet state
eagerly sought skilled foreign workers, the productive integration of these workers on the shop
floor was sorely lacking.
While the relations between Soviet and American workers were often
strained, the Soviet state sought and Soviet workers in general accepted
American blacks with no open hostility. Unfortunately, there was a famous
case of overt aggression between American workers of different races at the
Stalingrad Tractor Plant. There, a black machinist from Ford, Robert Robinson,
could not escape the effects of American racism. He became a cause celebre at

119
120
121
Letter from F.W.B. Coleman to Sec. Of State, File 361.11/4045.
28
the plant, and, indeed, throughout the country after he was assaulted by two
white American workers named Lewis (Louis) and Brown. According to
Robinson, Brown threatened him, saying "You have twenty-four hours to leave
this place, or you'll be sorry."
122
The two men then attacked him, and a furious
fight ensued.
123
The attack was reported by New York Times reporter Walter
Duranty, who took his facts from the Soviet newspaper, Trud, "A reactionary
group among the 300 American engineers and mechanics in the tractor plant
[Stalingrad] beat up a Negro and threw him out of the mess hall for the unique
reason that he is a Negro."
124
The Soviet police interviewed Robinson, but he was not politically astute. He later
wrote that he "Had no idea the possibilities that this incident offered. . . I did not know what
opportunity I, a black man, represented to the Soviets.
125
When he went to work the next day
many of his comrades viewed him as a hero."
126
Four days after the incident there was a massive demonstration in front of the plant, with
speeches against racism and a resolution "calling for punishment" passed by the roaring
crowd.
127
The Soviet newspaper, Trud, gave the text of the resolution in which the Soviet
workers stated, "We will not allow the ways of the bourgeois America in the U.S.S.R.. The
Negro worker is our brother like the American worker. We castigate any who dares to destroy in
the Soviet land the equality we have established for all proletarians of all nations."
128
A few
days later some of the Americans at Stalingrad got on the bandwagon, as Pravda reported that
the "Committee of American Colony. . . passed a resolution condemning the criminal acts."
129

122
123
124
Walter Duranty, "Americans Essay Color Bar in Soviet," New York Times, 10
August 1930, 9.
125
126
127
128
Duranty, "Americans Essay Color Bar in Soviet," 9.
129
Letter from F.W.B. Coleman to Sec. Of State, File 361.11/4045, Record Group
59.
29
A week after the assault, a formal trial began. Robinson was displeased by this, but felt he had
to cooperate with the Soviets else "they could ship me back home" to the Great Depression.
130
There was no jury at the trial, and the judge ordered both men deported immediately. An appeal
to a higher court allowed Brown to finish his contract, but Louis was sent home.
131
After the
trial, Robinson "was now an even greater hero to the Russians. I represented good conquering
evil."
132
The historian Allison Blakely, in his book Russia and the Negro, stated that the
Soviets used the incident like as another version of the infamous Moscow "show trials" to
improve their standing in the eyes of the emerging African states, to "glorify the Soviet attitude
against racism."
133
For his part, Robinson had no desire to be a hero as he wrote that he just
"wanted to be productive, and it was also the best way to avoid getting trapped by social and
political problems."
134
The most famous transfer of American technologythe recreation at Gorky of the
Ford River Rouge facilitywas far from a major success. In fact, the Americans found the
factory to be a shoddy version of its famous model, and Victor Herman assessed it as "pretty
much a matter of chaos."
135
Hermans opinion was echoed by the brothers Reuther, who were
"appalled at the chaos and inefficiency of the factory itself."
136
Despite the difficulties the Gorky production line, at a slow and laborious pace,
eventually began to produce a limited number of cars and trucks. While Americans found this
output laughable compared to Ford, the Soviets celebrated the results. So proud were they of
their accomplishment that thirteen trucks and three cars produced by the plant were taken to
Moscow for a parade, with one of the vehicles being driven by Victor Herman. Herman reported
that "there was hardly even any cheering, people were so moved by what they saw. They wept

130
131
132
133
Blakely, Russia and the Negro, 126.
134
135
136
Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man, 41.
30
openly--it seems incredible to me now--men and women crying to see the things that Russia had
produced."
137
At a dinner afterwards, Stalin himself made a brief appearance and "ended by
exhorting everyone to try harder, produce more, give it all you've got. I almost had to laugh. Did
the man have any notion of what working in that plant was like?"
138
Not all the Americans at Gorky worked directly in the factory. Margaret Wettlin was
there, and the job the Soviets gave her was not exactly what she had hoped for. She described
the job she was given, as a teacher for the children of Ford engineers and workers there on
contract.
139
She was initially disgruntled with the job, having preferred to be with and teach
Soviets. She wrote, "I'm not really interested in meeting all these Americans. That's not what I
came to Russia for."
140
With her inclination to avoid Americans, she spent as much time as she
could befriending Soviets. She found "These men and their wives at Autozavod as true
heroes."
141
Andrew Smith, one-time member of the American Communist Party, worked for a
while in Russia. His experiences disenchanted him to the point where he wrote home to head of
Slovak Workers Society that "You should warn every worker. . . not to come.
142
An example of
what distressed him on the factory floor was the misapplication of Taylorism. For example, he
noticed a Soviet lathe operator cutting a piece of steel ten millimeters at a time instead of five
millimeters, which was a safe level for that machine. When Smith asked why the man was
taking so deep a cut, the response was "How can I make my quota if I take a five millimeter cut?
I must do this job in twenty minutes in order to meet requirements."
143
At that pace the man
would succeed, but at the cost of ruining the machine very quickly.

137
138
139
140
141
142
Andrew Smith, I Was a Soviet Worker (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1936), 60.
143
Smith, I Was a Soviet Worker, 64.
31
The gold miner, John Littlepage, found his fellow employees unsettling at best, as
Forced labor mixes up murderers, thieves, and other ordinary criminals with such groups as
kulaks, whose offence was of a different nature.
144
As for the Soviet engineers, he found them
limited by their government, noting that, as an American, I am not compelled or expected to do
many of the things which Soviet engineers have to do, and which cut down their efficiency to a
fraction.
145
The engineer, Zara Witkin, had a variety of working experiences. Interviewed by the
State Department upon leaving the U.S.S.R. in 1933, it was noted that he "does not have a high
opinion of the ordinary Soviet construction job."
146
While in the Soviet Union, he wrote home
that "There was no precedent for rejection of poor workmanship, so accustomed had everyone
become to bad quality and low standards."
147
Witkin got so fed up with the ineptitude that he
went to work for the OGPU [i.e., the Secret Police] since, as he wrote, "They can get things
done" insofar as far as acquiring supplies and better workers.
148
Negative comments about Soviet methods and habits were common in many State
Department exit interviews. Jacob A. Munkens, who spent two years at the Moscow Tractorstroi
stated "The pace. . . was terrific but characterized by lost motion to a great degree."
149
Louis
Gephardt, who spent eighteen months abroad working for Koppers Construction Co., said that
he believed that foreigners had unusual privileges and special treatment" and "have been full of
complaints and exceedingly dissatisfied."
150
T.F. Collins, who spent three years as a miner in
Armenia and Siberia "made the usual complaints about the inefficiency of the Russian mining

144
Littlepage, In Search of Soviet Gold, 81.
145
Littlepage, In Search of Soviet Gold, 215.
146
Memorandum of Interview with Mr. Witkin, File 861.5017/737, Record Group
59.
147
Gelb, ed. An American Engineer in Stalin's Russia, 185.
148
Gelb, ed. An American Engineer in Stalins Russia, 240.
149
Memorandum of Interview with Mr. Munkens, File 861.5017/148, Record Group
59.
150
Memorandum of Interview with Mr. Gephardt, File 861.5017/569, Record Group
59.
32
administration, and their unwillingness to take responsibility."
151
On returning to America,
Thomas J. Burke of Freyn Steel Mills commented of the Soviets that "The reason that they
employ dumb men is that they are afraid of the smart ones."
152
Although the Soviet Union did manage to become an industrial power, it was at a slow
pace and tremendous cost. William Henry Chamberlin quoted an American engineer as saying,
"I don't believe any honest foreign engineer could do anything but laugh at the idea of this
country ever really becoming industrialized."
153
The importation of American technology and workers by the Soviets was never the
triumph that all parties had expected. The Americans found physical conditions, both at home
and at work, far more primitive than in the United States, and their skills and work habits were
seldom properly used on the shop floor. The Americans had to be very cautious, lest they
endanger the native co-workers. As the engineer Walter Rukeyser wrote, Americans there have
the responsibility of knowing that his every word, every gesture if adverse, may and usually
does result in disaster to some Russian.
154
The slowness with which the Soviets
Americanized their industrial base was probably the result of the vast cultural gap between the
two nations. The Americans came from a highly-industrialized, extremely productive factory
environment, while the Soviet workers and management were struggling to throw off the bonds
of feudal serfdom. In retrospect, it is not surprising that progress was slow and costly.
However, the bottom line was that the Americans did make a difference. New
manufacturing facilities were established, and new ways of working were slowly diffused into
the Soviet workforce and bureaucracy. And many of the facilities the Americans helped establish
could serve both a civilian and a military purpose. Victor Reuther noted that the Gorky plant

151
Memorandum of Interview with Mr. Collins, File 861.5017/333, Record Group
59.
152
Memorandum of Interview with Mr. Burke, File 861.5017/333, Record Group 59,
National Archives, College Park, MD.
153
154
Walter A. Rukeyser, Working for the Soviets; an American Engineer in Russia,
(New York: Covici-Friede, 1932), 58.
33
was . . . . tooled and geared to produce tanks, gun carriages, airplane parts, and the like.
155
John
Scott describes Magnitogorsk as being part of "The creation of a heavy industry base in the Urals
and Siberia out of reach of any invader, and capable of supplying the country with arms and
machines in immense quantities."
156
William Henry Chamberlin, while touring the country,
made a similar observation, "From the military standpoint, therefore, these new factories, each of
which, incidentally, possesses definite potential war utility, are almost impregnable and are
secure against hostile air raids.
157
Scott wrote of the conditions of building these factories as
being analogous to life in wartime, "The people have been sweating, shedding blood and tears.
People were wounded and killed, women and children froze to death, millions starved, thousands
were court-martialed and shot in the campaigns of collectivization and industrialization."
158
Thus, the factories that American industry and American labor helped establish gave
the young Soviet state the ability to mass-produce the weapons of modern warfare. This
manufacturing base, safe behind the Urals played an important role in the Soviet ability to
withstand the German onslaught, and eventually turn the tide during World War II.
While the impact of the Americans upon Soviet manufacturing was never as great as
either side might have wished, the impact of the Soviet state upon Americans was, in many
cases, devastating. The Americans had gone to the Soviet Union brimming with hope and
enthusiasm, yet very few of them realized their dreams there, or even came close to doing so.
The vast majority had their dreams quashed by a monolithic bureaucracy, a far cry from the
communist and socialist ideals they had expected to find. And, ironically, it was the idealists
who often found themselves in the deepest bind, for it was easy for the Soviets to talk them into
giving up their foreign passports, after which they were "easy prey for the NKVD."
159

155
156
157
158
159
34
It is true that many Americans went to the Soviet Union, worked productively for a
term, usually one to three years, and then returned to the United States. That was what the
workers expected when they had signed on with Amtorg. However, grim reality, in the form of
the brutal purges that swept the country and affected both citizens and foreign nationals, was
what many Americans faced in the Soviet Union. Here, finally, was the equality that the Soviet
state trumpeted far and wide, the equality not of production and reward but rather of arbitrary
arrest, imprisonment, slave labor in the camps, or execution.
After World War II began, hardly any Americans managed to leave the Soviet Union,
even though the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact kept the Soviet Union out of the initial stages
of the war. Only a few lucky Americans managed to survive in the Soviet Union until the war
ended, and fewer still made it home after the war. The historian Andrea Graziosi commented
that those foreigners who stayed past 1933-34, Americans and other nationalities alike, mostly
"disappeared."
160
So oppressive did the Soviet state become that American workers at Gorky
were told in 1934 that anyone writing a letter home, or receiving one from the States, would be
sent to prison for ten years.
161
Government action could be swift and unexpected, as Khanga reported that of the
group her grandfather came with, ". . . [any] non-Soviet citizen in the group was ordered to
leave the country, sometimes on forty-eight hours notice, unless he was willing to give up his
American citizenship on the spot."
162
Some of the men did go home, leaving behind Russian
wives and children. Khanga states that "When the women tried to reestablish contact with their
husbands in the United States, Soviet authorities told them the men had been arrested upon their
return and died in American prisons."
163
Just as there are no reliable figures on the number of Americans who went to work in
the Soviet Union, there are no firm numbers as to how many fell victim to the purges. However,

160
161
162
163
35
historian Adam Hochschild has done some very useful work in this area. While in the KGB
archives, he estimated that the KGB had files on several thousand Stalin-era American
victims.
164
Of the few random files he was allowed to examine, it seemed that none of the
prisoners was at all prominent but still the prison bureaucracy tracked them, one file being fifty-
four pages long.
165
As the mills and mines came on line, and as Soviet paranoia increased under Stalin, the
usefulness of the foreigners began to decline. At Magnitogorsk John Scott wrote that:
Up until 1934-35 the Soviet workers were urged by consistent propaganda to
learn from the foreigners; to master German and American technique. . . This
was the background for the reaction which came with such force in 1936 and
1937, when foreigners were dismissed, demoted, publicly discredited, sent
home, sometimes arrested.
166
The State Department had a very skewed view of what was happening to Americans
inside the Soviet Union. Some of this blindness may be forgiven, since there was no U.S.
Embassy there until 1933. There is a fascinating document written on October 20, 1933, from
the newly established U.S. Embassy, which demonstrates the limitations on U.S. power in the
Soviet Union, even with official relations established. Entitled "Memoranda on Problems
Pertaining to Russian-American Relations" it pointed out that "No treaty principles have been
devised which seriously limit the power of Soviet authorities to deal just about as they please
with foreigners or travelers. . . [the American] specialists are useful, but nothing protects them"
not even their own embassy!
167
The memorandum cynically concluded that "Foreigners will
receive good treatment whenever it is to the political advantage of the Soviet State."
168
The Embassy was obviously aware that it was essentially powerless, but did not seem
to realize all the strictures of the Soviet system. For example, in the February 28, 1935 Moscow

164
Adam Hochschild, Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin (New York: Viking,
1994), 156.
165
Hochschild, Unquiet Ghost, 160.
166
167
Memoranda on Problems Pertaining to Russian-American Relations, File
861.5017/784, Record Group 59, National Archives, College Park, MD.
168
Memoranda on Problems Pertaining to Russian-American Relations, File
861.5017/784, Record Group 59, National Archives, College Park, MD.
36
Daily News, the Embassy printed an announcement that "All American citizens. . . are required
to register their passports" at the Embassy.
169
This order, while seemingly reasonable, is
nonsensical in light of the extreme difficulties in traveling within the U.S.S.R., given the poor
infrastructure and the necessity of getting the bureaucracys permission in order to travel.
On the other hand, the next few comments came from Loy Henderson, Charge
d'affaires, Moscow in 1937, four years after formal relations had been established. In September
1937 he wrote to the Secretary of State that "Fortunately thus far during the purge, no American
citizens have been arrested."
170
This statement is directly contradicted by the historian Roy
Medvedev, who wrote that "Some specialists, who under various agreements during the first
five year plan had come to the Soviet Union with their families, stayed on. In 1937-1938 many
of them were arrested, as were members of their families."
171
However, Henderson did admit
that "Position of foreigners in Soviet Union is becoming increasingly difficult as the result of a
violent anti-foreigners campaign."
172
The precept of a Soviet state based on the ideal of all workers being empowered and
equal was under assault from the very first days of the Revolution. Unfortunately, the power of
the Soviet state, and the horror it subjected its people to, became the norm throughout society.
As Solzhenitsyn commented, tell me--what bad is there that one cannot teach a nation? Or
people? Or all humanity?"
173
Soviet citizens, indeed, anyone within their borders, could be arrested with no
knowledge of the charges against them. They could be detained without habeas corpus, and
they were often sentenced without a formal hearing. This capricious process served dual

169
Memorandum on Passport Registration, File 361.00/11, Record Group 59
170
Letter to Sec. Of State from Loy Henderson File 361.00/19, Record Group 59,
171
Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge - The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism,
trans. George Shriver (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 436.
172
Developments Affecting the Position of Foreigners in the Soviet Union, Letter to
Sec. of State from Loy Henderson, File 361.00/11, Record Group 59, National Archives,
College Park, MD.
173
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956, vol. III-IV, trans.
Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 562..
37
functionsit gave the State absolute control over enemies real and perceived, and it made a
large workforce instantly available for a long period of slave labor. A ten-year sentence was so
common it was known as a tenner. Indeed, a bitter anecdote came from a prisoner talking with
a guard - "What is your sentence?" asked the guard. "Twenty-five years." "What did you do?"
"Nothing. I did nothing at all." "You are lying, prisoner; the sentence for nothing at all is ten
years."
174
Not all prisoners were sent to the camps, for capital punishment was a viable, often-
used option, "Thus many were shot--thousands at first, then hundreds of thousands. We divide,
we multiply, we sigh, we curse. But still and all, these are just numbers. They overwhelm the
mind and are easily forgotten."
175
Who was going to protest the vast numbers of people who
vanished? Drawing the attention of the secret police was a sure way to get oneself arrested.
Robert Robinson feared arrest so much that he never put his pajamas on until after 4 A.M., lest
he be taken away in his bedclothes.
176
Like New Deal America, the Soviets had their own "alphabet soup" of agencies that
replaced one another in running the archipelago. In 1922 it was known as the GPU (State
Political Administration), from 1922-1934 the OGPU (United State Political Administration),
from 1934-1943 the NKVD (People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs), from 1943-1946
NKGB (People's Commissariat of State Security), from 1946-1953 the MGB (Soviet Secret
Police), briefly in 1953 the MVD (Ministry of Interior), and then from 1953 to the fall of the
Soviet Union the KGB (State Security Committee).
177
The initials changed, but the intent and
power never wavered. In their accounts, some survivors gave initials incorrect for their time
period, but such errors are irrelevant, as the agency was the same, no matter what the name.

174
Alexander Dolgun and Patrick Watson, An American in the Gulag - Alexander
Dolgun's Story (U.S.A.: Ballantine Books, Inc., 1975), 287.
175
Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. I-II, 442.
176
177
38
Until recently, estimates of the number of prisoners held within the Gulag system at
any one time have varied wildly, ranging from 3.5 to almost 20 million.
178
Each side has
heatedly disputed the others numbers, with accusations of sloppy or incompetent scholarship
being thrown about.
179
With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, scholars have started to gain
access, and so begin analysis of, Soviet archival records of the Stalin era. The historian J. Arch
Getty, with several colleagues working with records from the Main Camp Administration of the
NKVD/MVS (Soviet Ministry of the Interior), calculated a camp population of 1.9 million
prisoners for the year 1938, a number that seems more reliable than any other given to date.
180
Nearly 2 million prisoners, while not the 20 million of one estimate, is still a substantial slave
labor force, and when one or a hundred prisoners died from shooting or overwork, the secret
police stepped up the arrests to bring the numbers back to par. Indeed, the KGB often went
beyond par, when in a zeal to meet quota, local enthusiasm outstripped demands of the central
bureaucracy.
181
Everyone was liable to arrest, but especially intellectuals, or anyone who was
not obviously part of the loyal Soviet proletariat.
The state security apparatus certainly took advantage of technology. As soon as motor
vehicles appeared on the streets, they were put to use other than delivering food. The secret
police trucks were known as "Black Marias" and Solzhenitsyn recorded that they "appeared at
the same time as the very first trucks on our still cobblestoned streets."
182
Even so, the
authorities took the trouble to disguise the true purpose from the general population, for "written
on the outside [was] "Bread" . . . "Meat". . . or, even, simply, "Drink Soviet Champagne!"
183
Solzhenitsyn described their interiors, some a "simple armored body or shell, an empty

178
J. Arch Getty, Gabor T. Rittersporn, and Viktor N. Zemskov, "Victims of the
Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years," American Historical Review, October 1993, 1021.
179
Getty, Rittersporn, and Zemskov, "Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-
war Years," 1018.
180
war Years," 1022.
181
war Years," 1036.
182
183
39
enclosure. . . Or it might be boxed throughout: single closets that locked like cells along the
right and left-hand walls, with a corridor in the middle for the turnkey."
184
Who was put into these lockers? The police added a word to the Russian lexicon to
describe those unfortunates, zaklyuchennye, "prisoner" which was abbreviated to zak or zks.
185
The Black Marias handled the urban transport of prisoners, but the movement from camp to
camp required other means. Solzhenitsyn continued his oceanic metaphor, "Great ports exist for
this purpose--transit prisons; and smaller ports--camp transit points. Sealed steel ships also exist;
railroad cars especially christened zak cars ("prisoner cars").
186
He further states that, "The
prisoners got used to calling this kind of railroad car a Stolypin car (after Piotr Stolypin, interior
minister from 1906-1911) or, more simply, just a Stolypin."
187
The camps became a self-perpetuating system due to their economic and political
convenience and the camp regime . . . assumed a total lack of publicity, assumed that no one
would ever complain, no one would ever be released. . ."
188
Of course, upon release or escape,
the prisoners were only free within the confines of the Soviet Union, not the world at large.
Even when some managed to report what was truly happening to millions under Soviet control,
as Solzhenitsyn himself did, he somberly noted that "Europe, of course, won't believe it. Not
until Europe itself serves time will she believe it. Europe has believed our glossy magazines and
can't get anything else into her head."
189
The American reporter Harrison Salisbury wrote of the camp system that:
Here, if you would believe the propaganda, Soviet citizens
were rehabilitating themselves and getting rid of any taint
of criminality by honest, productive labor. And if any question
should arise about their rehabilitation, a tommygunner was at
hand to remove the doubts with a quick burst from his gun.
190

184
185
186
187
188
Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. V-VII, 60.
189
Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. III-IV, 302.
190
Salisbury, An American in Russia, 272.
40
Ironically, the security apparatus was seen by citizens as the one efficient branch of the
Soviet bureaucracy. In 1931 an American tourist, Dr. William Robinson, asked an intellectual
Communist if the GPU was becoming more tolerant, "The Gay-Pay-Oo," the man answered, is
always at the height of its activity. It is the one institution in our beloved union that works day
and night, never sleeps, and has never a day off. It is the only efficient institution we have. It is
super-efficient.
191
The security apparatus was both all-powerful and whimsical. A black
American worker heard a rumor that the NKVD was coming for him, so he went to them and
said, "Arrest me if you think I'm an enemy of the people." The officer replied, "Comrade
Golden, don't get so upset. We've already fulfilled the plan of arrests for your area. Go home
and work in peace."
192
Upon arriving in the Soviet Union it is clear that few Americans got the reception that
they were looking for. It was quickly evident that living standards were not even close to
Americas, the oppressive atmosphere was a shock, and few Soviet workers welcomed them
with open arms. Most knew that Soviet living conditions were not on a par with Americas, but
few realized how pervasive and how permanent those shortages would be. The presence of the
secret police, with the corollary fact that the American government had virtually no influence
within the Soviet Union, was another rude shock. Even the more ideologically motivated
people, such as Emma Goldman, Fred Beal, and Andrew Smith were disenchanted with the
U.S.S.R. In light of these problems, that any Americans were able to significantly contribute to
the Soviet industrialization efforts is a tribute to their skills and determination.

191
Robinson, Soviet Russia As I Saw It, 107.
192
41
CHAPTER FOUR
FATES OF INDIVIDUAL AMERICANS
Obviously, the Americans who went to the Soviet Union, with the exception of the
deportees, went voluntarily and with high hopes for a better life. A few realized their dreams,
working productively, receiving decent wages, and coming home as scheduled when their terms
of employment were over. But the harsh reality for many fell far short of their expectations, and
tragedy was a common theme of their experiences.
Many Americans who went to the Soviet Union never returned, and of those who
returned fewer still left a written record of their experiences. However, those who did write
created a vivid impressions of their lives abroad. Therefore, this chapter presents a detailed look
at the experiences of several Americans in the Soviet Union, who were there for decades, as
well as two group colonization efforts. It is through an examination of their lives and struggles,
as reported in their own words, that the desperation of their situations becomes clear.
Victor Herman:
Herman was one of the few Americans to undergo a full range of experiences, both
good and bad, in the Soviet Union, and who survived to tell the world what had happened to
him.
As a teenager, Herman had already been working for Ford in Detroit, as had his father
and brother, and he could have stayed behind when his family went to the Soviet Union.
However, he did not believe the choice was really his, thinking, "Who chooses for you? Or
chose? My father chose for me--and because I loved him with all it was in me to love with, I let
him."
193
The family sailed from New York to England on a ship called the Leviathan in
September 1931. Victor Reuther seconded this account of the crossing, writing that "Ford's top
production man, Frank Bennett, set sail on the Leviathan with forty Ford technicians" so this
was likely the group with which the Hermans sailed.
194
Herman wrote of the crossing that:

193
194
42
No! I did not feel that I was leaving America. No American really does. You
feel it is a terrain that spreads out over your heart, and there really is no
leaving it ever. That's not a thought a sixteen year old boy has. That's not a
thing any American of any age ever bothers to raise to the level of thought.
Not until you're an American who can't get back. It took five days to get to
England. I wish it had taken five thousand.
195
Herman blossomed in the Soviet Union. As in Detroit with his father and brother, he worked at
the Gorky auto plant, and participated in the triumphant parade through Moscow of cars and
trucks produced at the plant. At the ceremonial dinner that followed the parade, he became
acquainted with General Mikhail Tukachevsky, whose patronage made it possible for Herman to
leave Gorky and get involved in sports, learning to fly and to parachute. It was in the field of
jumps that Herman became famous, and it was the combination of that skill, and his own
naivet, that led to his serving many years in the prison camps.
For Herman, things seemed to be going splendidly, as "I was getting a bigger and
bigger reputation [in parachute jumps]. . . I was someone who excelled--in this country I
excelled."
196
He had become an expert at high-altitude parachute jumping, and managed to
establish a world record for a free fall of 142 seconds. In order for his jump to receive
international recognition, he had to complete and sign a form that provided details of the jump.
One line of this form asked the nationality of the jumper, and Herman, naturally, entered
American. Of course, the Soviet authorities wanted credit for the record, so they sent
military, political, and NKVD people to the flying center to correct this error. They tore up
the first application and asked him to fill out another, this time showing his nationality as
U.S.S.R. Being young and cocky, and perhaps unheeding of the significance of the
disappearances at Gorky, Herman again indicated that he was American. Nineteen years old,
he felt invulnerable, and thought politics were irrelevant to him. The evidence he saw did not
sink in, to his ultimate misfortune.
At first, the consequences of his stubbornness seemed rather benign. He was expelled
from the Highest Parachute Center in 1937, located near Moscow, and went back to live in

195
196
43
Gorky. He paid little attention to the parting words of the school's political commissar, Bikov,
who screamed at him, "You are an enemy, Herman! Your kind does not belong here! All
enemies are being weeded out!"
197
Back at the American Village following the dismissal, his
father told him that "Out of hundreds [of Americans], twenty are here. The others all arrested,
taken away-- who knows where?"
198
Herman related that:
I could not get out again-at least no farther than Gorky. Those who tried did
not get very far-and it went much worse for you if you tried. They shot you
there, right where you stood, the enemy they had said you were thus
incontestably proved.
199
Unable to return to America, since his father had turned in their American family
passport for a Soviet passport, and barred from flying, Herman returned to work and athletics.
But, on July 30, 1938, Herman was arrested. After being positively identified, he was put in a
Black Maria, and confirms Solzhenitsyn's description, "There was a van, dark green, the same
sort of van you'd see used all over for bread deliveries. . . [inside] there was a narrow aisle, and
on either side was a rack of lockers. . . They pushed me in there."
200
As trucks were used as
prisoner transport as soon as they appeared, and Gorky's Autozavod was a major plant, one
wonders if Herman helped build the vehicle he was put in?
He was taken to the Spets Korpus (Special Building) in Gorky, where he spent a year
in Cell 39, "I made sixteen - sixteen men in that space, a space ten feet by five and a half feet,
and to the ceiling eight feet or an inch or so higher."
201
As he entered Cell 39, he saw all the
men with:
Hands on their knees, their backs rigid, their faces all turned toward me. . .
It was the position they sat in. . . I assumed the position - and, like them,
directed my attention to the peephole and kept it there. It was how the day
was passed. It was how the days were passed for one year.
202

197
198
199
200
201
202
44
The men were dead silent as noise would bring a guard and a beating. In the cell there
was, "Over the door, very high up, just under the ceiling, a bulb, maybe twenty-five watts. It
never went off."
203
There was also a primitive toilet, the Parasha, "the pot where the steaming
mess from us was collected. . . and as spectacular as the smell from it always was, the gas that
boiled up from the parasha it was a thousand hells worse with the lid off."
204
Lastly, set into
the door, was the muzzle, the Namordnik, a little sliding board that covered the peephole.
205
Once every ten days, the men were taken out to the bathhouse to have their hair clipped
and to shower. Their hair added "To the sea of hair that matted the floor, a mess of human
growth of every texture and shade pressed by the men who walked there into something like a
nightmare's idea of a carpet."
206
While they were in the showers, their clothing was run through
the "Zharo Kamera, the toaster, meant to kill the lice and the crabs and the vermin that
flourished on our bodies."
207
Although the cell was silent, Herman occasionally heard a tapping coming through the
wall, "a kind of cadence always. . . not some random things moving through the walls."
208
He
learned that this was a tap language, but the others in cell did not know the code. In the showers
Herman found a chunk of soap that had hardened like stone, "But what good was soap [to tap
with] until you knew the code, until you could understand tap language and use it to speak
back? It was in the fifth week I began to figure it out."
209
The figuring out occupied the mind,
and it beat dreading the future. The tap language worked in a grid, with the Russian alphabet
split into six groups of five letters each. The first tap(s) indicated the group, while the second
tap(s) gives the letter's place within the group.
210
With this primitive and laborious system men
were able to communicate both fact and rumor from cell to cell.

203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
45
Another exception to sitting in the "position" were the interrogations. Taken out in the
middle of the night in a van, Herman was beaten and tortured by a man he knew only as Belov,
who "Hurt me for fifty-five nights."
211
The beatings started the first night, and "He never hit me
anywhere but in the kidneys. He would hit three times on the right side and then pause. And
then he would hit three times on the left side and pause."
212
Always he made it back to the cell
for the morning feeding, and "after fifteen mornings, they [cellmates] shared" breakfast.
213
Each
man would save a bit of food for him, so he could have a second helping. Herman wondered,
"What is it I should remember? Those fifty-five nights? Or the mornings when they shared?"
214
After fifty-five nights of "interrogation," Herman was hospitalized. After recovering from
internal injuries from the constant beatings, he signed a paper to be used as evidence against
another American.
Recovering from his interrogation, but before his sentencing, he was put into a new,
very different cell. In Cell 21 there were only nineteen men and much more space, "It was
unbelievable, all this space." As he entered the cell, he saw "Laid out there on the floor just
inside the door, where the Parasha would normally go, there was a perfectly clean white
towel."
215
He carefully stepped around the towel, whereupon some of the prisoners accosted
him, telling him to strip. Herman told them to "Go to Hell!"
216
Some others closed on him,
intending to beat him. He hit first, recounting that "It was an easy performance. These men were
not boxers-they were fighters. There is no match between the two."
217
After pummeling them, a
third man approached him with a knife. Herman beat him to death, "I went at it and held him up,
and it was like working the heavy bag, no resistance in it, just the dead weight. . . and when I
pulled back from him he went to the floor in a crazy melting motion, a sack of grain with its

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46
bottom split open and the stuff running out."
218
After this performance, no one else tried to test
his mettle.
He soon learned more about the social order of the room. A man beckoned him over, and said to
Herman, "I am the Atoman, the chief here-and you, fighter, what are you? A wolfblood, yes? One of us,
yes?"
219
Herman learned that "To him, there were Urkas, wolfbloods, real persons. . . the world divided
between those who committed the crimes of theft and murder and those others who didn't and therefore
didn't matter at all."
220
Except for what he had just done, Herman was no criminal, but the Atoman told
him, You are no Urka, but I say you are one. Hey fighter, hey Urka! Next time you wipe your feet on the
towel, yes?"
221
Herman learned that the mans title, Atoman, came from Russian playing cards in which
there are thirty-six cards in a deck. In the deck, there was only one ace, and he was the Atoman.
222
The
Atoman taught him how to pass as a criminal, as the Urkas were used to terrorize the political prisoners. So
through his physical prowess, Herman became "The one king to his ace. . . I stood my ground and looked
around for more ground. It is what a wolfblood does."
223
Eventually he was taken from the cell, and was
sentenced, never having seen judge or jury. An NKVD officer simply gave him a slip of paper with his
name and the number ten written on it, which was his sentence, ten years in the labor camps.
224
He was first sent by Stolypin to Burepolom, a work camp. The policy there, as in all of
the work camps, was that the prisoners had to fulfill their quota, known as a "norm," in order to
eat. If they did not work, no food. If they fell short of their norm, they got less food. There were
roughly 3,000 prisoners in Burepolom, which translates into "Stormbeaten."
225
Here he learned
some of the other differences between Urkas and political prisoners. The camp NKVD chief,
Bobrov, announced the rules, but all the incentives, such as writing and receiving letters or

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222
223
224
225
Herman, Coming Out of the Ice., 208.
47
watching movies did not apply to a political prisoner such as Herman.
226
Herman was assigned
to Team 1, those who did hard physical labor. These were lumberjacks, who went into the
woods surrounding the camp. His norm was to saw twenty cubic yards of wood a day to earn his
bread.
227
This is truly amazing, for Solzhenitsyn reported that the average norm at Burepolom
was merely nine cubic yards.
228
After a month in the main camp, he was then transferred to a subcamp, Nuksha 2. To
him, Nuksha 2 "was not the easy life of the main camp. It was the beginning of the inferno."
229
There the work was harder, eighteen cubic yards of birch, "because that wood is difficult to
work." The onset of winter made fulfilling that norm even harder, and the men were often out
chopping and sawing by the light of bonfires. Even so, he was "Getting a pound and a half of
bread a day-because my norm was large and I fulfilled it. . . but many men could not come near
that plan, and they ate not so well at all."
230
The next summer, he was sent north on a six-day rail trip to Fosforitnaya, a
phosphorous mining camp. The feeding times at Fosforitnaya were an adventure, to say the
least. There was hot soup, but no bowls. So those who had hats had the soup poured into them,
while Herman and others cupped the scalding liquid in their hands, "because what was the
burning alongside the starving?"
231
The man ahead of him did not wipe all the soup from his
face, and Herman saw him "lying on his back with both hands over his mouth. . . They [other
prisoners] had bitten the man's lips to get at the smear of food still on them."
232
As he put it:
It was bad in the phosphorous mine. It was bad in the forest. It was bad in the
snow. The dogs were bad, the fear was bad, the sickness was bad, the slop
they fed you, the times they beat you - it was all bad- and after a point, what is
the use to measure?
233

226
227
228
Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. III-IV, 199.
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48
Even so, he was not completely alone. The best friend he ever had in the camps was
there, a Finnish-American named Albert "Red" Loon. Loon had come to Karelia, near
Leningrad, to work in a paper mill. When arrested, "he had no beatings. . . they'd just arrested
him back in Karelia and handed him a piece of paper that said Very Dangerous Person and had
the number '3' marked on it" and shipped him off."
234
Historian Andrea Graziosi has written
that of the American-Finns who moved to Karelia, "only those who kept their passports. . . were
able to go back."
235
Those who remained "were either shot or sent to the camps" as evidently
happened to Red Loon.
236
Unlike the quiet Herman, Loon had "wild impossible laughter a
boisterous torch in the icy Arctic dark."
237
Herman credits Red with having saved his life, in
both a "spiritual" and in a more evident sense that will be shown later.
238
One of Herman's most incredible experiences came when he and most of the other
foreigners, eighteen in all, were marched into the forest and told that each man must load a
sixty-ton railroad car with wood, at which point they would be fed. It seemed impossible, with
the treeline being "a mile or more away!"
239
In front of the car he was to load was a cache of
logs, part of a ramp on which to roll timber from the treeline in better weather. Using this wood
he loaded the car, spacing the stacks of wood so the car appeared to be full. He did this without
food, in three days. He was the only one to do the impossible. He wrote, "I had stood on the
shoulders of luck, it's true. But I had to reach."
240
As punishment for his trick in loading the
car, he spent a year in an isolator (solitary punishment cell). Beaten regularly, scarcely fed, he
related that "I think I was very near death when they let me out of there."
241
To recover his strength, Herman began to eat rats. Using a trap that Loon had made for
him, he caught the rats and ate them, usually raw. Of this, he wrote, "I liked rat. It was good.

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238
239
240
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49
Does this seem expressive of what those years did to me. . .? To this day I savor that taste on
the tongue of my mind."
242
Surviving on rat and his own talents, the years passed, "I was doing
time. Take whatever you are, and add ten."
243
The prisoners scarcely knew World War II was
going on, but for poorer food, and bloody, recycled military uniforms. They also got a free day
on both VE and VJ day. So, he served out his tenner sentence, and was released in October of
1948.
Upon his release, he was not free to return to Gorky, let alone America. He was exiled
to Siberia, specifically to the city of Krasnoyarsk. His parole officer gave him the job of
coaching the local branch of Dynamo, the government sponsored sports team. Of this, Herman
wrote "And think of the irony of it! After ten years suffering at the hands of the Secret Service
and the Secret police and the NKVD, this man wanted me to get these people medals."
244
He
accepted the position, what choice did he have?
While coaching, he met and fell in love with a gymnast named Galina Galaktionova,
whom he married in 1949. After the marriage, the NKVD threatened her for living with an exile
and had her fired from her job. In response, Herman quit coaching for the NKVD, and went
over to the civilian group, Spartak. He wrote of the civilians he instructed, that "Let them hit
for me, and let me teach them how to do it so maximum damage is done. . . I admit it - every
time those men hit, it was like another inch of revenge I exacted against everything I had been
through."
245
After six months, his "Spartak boxing team won the district-wide competition.
They had to beat my old Dynamo team to do it."
246
For refusing to come back to Dynamo after the NKVD ordered him back, Herman was
again arrested in 1951. He alone was sent further north to the town of Yeniseysk, where
punishment awaited him. He was to live out in the woods, the NKVD told him that "If I set foot

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50
in Yeniseysk, the penalty would be twenty years hard labor or twenty years prison."
247
On the
advice of an old hermit, Herman built a chop-out, literally a cave hacked into the snow and
permafrost, in which to survive the Siberian winter. He could trade wood that he chopped for
food and other supplies. Galina, with their infant daughter, walked the sixty miles from
Krasnoyarsk to join him under the ice.
The chop-out was about "Ten by ten and five and a half feet deep, and I laid branches
over the top. . . It was in the chop-out that she [Svetlana, his daughter] learned to walk - and
then to talk."
248
They spent almost year there, under the ice. The food they got was "frozen
cabbage and potatoes. When there was a chunk of milk, Galya would crack off a piece and
Sveta would suck on it."
249
He told Sveta fairytales, some of America. She would ask "Two
potatoes, Papa?" and he would answer, "Yes, my sweetheart, two potatoes. In the beautiful city
of Detroit, everyone has a second potato."
250
Of this storytelling, he wrote that "It was
unimaginable. It was the outer limit of magic, as far as a fairy tale dare go. Two potatoes. What
could be more fantastic?"
251
After almost a full year in the chopout, he and his family were
freed to live in Yeniseysk, where he coached a local boxing team, which beat both of his old
teams from Krasnoyarsk.
After that, the Krasnoyarsk Spartak team asked him back to coach, which he did.
After two years of quietly living and working in Krasnoyarsk, in December 1955, he received a
letter from the Moscow Military Tribunal, which read, "The Tribunal has reviewed your case,
and finds that no case exists. As of the date of this letter, you are exonerated of all charges and
are hereby informed that you are free of any and all restraint upon your person."
252
After receiving that letter, Herman applied for repatriation to the United States at the
Soviet Foreign Ministry, and:

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51
They laughed in my face. . . Who in the world would take me for an
American citizen, a fellow who had been so many years in the Soviet Union
and who - here they actually laughed - had undergone experiences that so
deeply involved him in things Russian?
253
He wrote to members of his extended family in America, telling them he was still alive,
and asking for advice on how to get out. He followed the advice of an attorney cousin, Dave
Herman, from New Orleans, who told him to stick to the motto "I am an American citizen and I
want to return to America."
254
Herman and David eventually managed to have a brief meeting
in Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport in 1968. There, Dave reassured Victor that he would be able
to get home.
255
Perhaps Herman's stubborn nature slowed his exit, for when he first applied in 1968,
the U.S. State Department responded, "Fine, you can emigrate to the U.S. as a Russian; I wrote
back, no, I will be repatriated to the United States as an American."
256
So between this
conviction and oceans of red tape, eight years passed. Then in 1976, David Herman, who dealt
with the U.S. State Department wrote, "It is my understanding that your application to return to
your homeland has been approved by both the government of the U.S.S.R. and the U.S."
257
Herman immediately went to the American Embassy to get his passport, and "All that
time I felt as if I had the most ridiculous grin on my face. . . How long had my face been grave,
stern, sullen?"
258
He flew from Moscow to New York and then moved back to Detroit, in
February 1976.
259
It had taken eight years to cut through all the red tape to allow Herman to
return. He acidly wrote that "when it comes to dodges and runarounds and equivocations, the
Soviet bureaucracy can give cards and spades to any state on earth."
260
. Eventually his two

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52
daughters were able to follow, but as of the time of publication of his book, his wife remained in
the Soviet Union.
53
Robert Robinson:
Robinson, the black machinist attacked by white Americans while in the
Soviet Union, renewed his contract when his year was up, since "[I] knew that
times were difficult for everybody in the U.S., and especially for blacks."
261
Partway through this year, the factory administration called a meeting of all the
American workers in the plant. The group was afraid that perhaps their tasks
were considered done, and they would be sent home. Instead, they were given
thanks by the factory's Party Secretary, who was "grateful for the contribution
you have all made to our nation's economic leap forward. You are all setting an
outstanding example for the Russian worker."
262
This meeting also turned up
the pressure for American involvement in overtly government activities.
Robinson reported that, for those who chose to stay longer, the Soviet
government now showed a definite interest in wanting them "Sovietized,"
encouraging them to "join the party, or place your children in the Pioneers
[Young Communist group, similar to a political Boy Scouts]."
263
The result of
these actions was to move Americans away from "separate, foreign specialist
status, and into the mainstream of the Soviet factory life."
264
What the Soviets
would gain by this is the lack of negative publicity, since those who stayed, as
Margulies noted, could scarcely have disseminated a favorable image.
265
Robinson had planned to leave after his second contract expired, but he was persuaded
by the director of the First State Ball Bearing Plant, M. Bodrov, to work there for a year.
266
He
accepted this offer, and then took a six-week vacation to America in the summer of 1933. On

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54
leaving the Soviet Union he was "concerned. . . that a few fellow workers had suddenly left the
factory without saying a word or even hinting that they would be leaving."
267
The purges had
begun.
Seeing his mother and eating home cooking in New York was fine, but the "face of the
depression" in America left him "with a chill."
268
Returning to work in the Soviet Union,
Robinson remained aloof from the Party's pressures, but unexpectedly his fellow workers
elected him to the Moscow Soviet (city council) for a four-year term in December 1934.
269
His
election opened him to charges of being a communist sympathizer when he returned home, yet
he accepted the post, fearing revocation of his contract if he refused. He decided not to raise a
fuss, but to return to America after his contract expired.
270
The election was critical in his life,
for in response the State Department ordered him to return to America. Not willing to go at that
time, Robinson "asked the Soviet authorities if I could become a Soviet citizen for now, but then
return to the United States when I wanted to, and have the Soviets consider me an American
citizen."
271
Although this arrangement seems both complicated and naive, the Soviets assured
him it was possible and told him that it had been done for others. So he took up Soviet
citizenship "at a time when disappearances were increasing but could not yet be considered
epidemic."
272
He also wanted to stay because he had just been accepted into the Evening
Institute of Mechanical Engineering in Moscow, and he wanted the education.
273
Looking back, Robinson reflected on the ill-timing of the election, and his decision to
forsake American citizenship, since "At his [Kirov'spolitical leader assassinated in 1934]
death the preferred status of foreign specialists ended overnight."
274
After the assassination, "A

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55
day did not go by that I did not ask myself what kind of hell I had gotten into. No longer a U.S.
citizen, I could not go home."
275
The announcement of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, in light of the anti-Nazi propaganda the
government had been spewing, was a surprise to him. The reaction of the workers was negative,
yet they figured Stalin knew more than they did. Robinson noted how from that time onwards,
the propaganda changed from "Workers of the World Unite!" to "Love your country first and
always."
276
Even though Stalin had signed the pact to preserve peace, he knew that war was
coming, and reacted by promoting nationalism over party loyalty. When Germany did finally
invade the U.S.S.R. on 22 June 1941, there was an interesting response from the Soviet people:
Thousands of people-men, women, children, young and old, even party
members-were flocking to church. There was no place left even to stand. One
heard people crying, some asking God for forgiveness, others asking His
intercession during a time of such great national peril. It became clear that
twenty-four years of anti-religious propaganda had not extinguished from
Russian hearts a sense of the reality of God.
277
At the time of the German invasion, Robinson related that of the foreigners, "When I
began in 1932 there were 362 of us. Now a Hungarian and I were the only ones left."
278
He
survived the war years, and noted how during the war the "purges stopped because everybody
was needed to support the war effort."
279
After the war ended, he applied to visit his mother, but
his request was denied. "Beginning in 1945, a year never went by without my filing an
application."
280
Over twenty-seven years of filling out forms passed with no success, so he
simply worked hard and tried to keep out of trouble with the KGB.
Upon Stalin's death, he noted the intense reaction of the people, "Many called him
Father Stalin; in a sense, their god had died."
281
He also talks about the stampede that occurred

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276
277
278
279
280
281
56
during Stalin's funeral, "Hundreds of people were crushed to death. . . This was not reported in
the news or the radio."
282
Unlike some of the immigrants, Robinson never formed an attraction for a native of the
opposite sex. He feared, perhaps correctly, that some of the attentions Soviet women paid him
were for the purpose of setting him up for arrest by the KGB. He was also deeply religious, and
so casual relationships held no appeal for him, "Attempts to form deep, lasting friendships with
Russian women would in any case have been doomed. Soviet life is so regulated. I was not free,
and neither were they."
283
In 1973 he was granted a visa to visit Uganda for forty-five days, and he never returned
to the Soviet Union. Idi Amin, then ruler of Uganda, took a personal interest in Robinson,
giving him a teaching position at Uganda Technical College.
284
He taught, and married Zylpha
Mapp in December of 1976.
285
In 1978 they left for America, because Uganda was becoming
dangerous, given its war with Tanzania. On December 9, 1986, having renounced his Soviet
citizenship, he realized his "dream of forty years" to become "an American citizen once
again."
286
Margaret Wettlin:
Wettlin was the only American woman encountered in my research who went to Russia
of her own free will instead of simply following a husband. After she returned to America in
1979, she wrote an autobiography entitled Fifty Russian Winters. A schoolteacher from
Philadelphia, she had gone to the Soviet Union partly as a tourist, but hoped to find a way to
stay there for longer. Reminiscing, she wrote:
Forty-two years. I did not dream that so much time would elapse when I left
New York on the S.S. Colombia in September 1932. In my bag were tickets
for a month's tour of Soviet Russia, very little money, and a few letters of

282
283
284
Robinson, Black on Red, , 397.
285
286
57
introduction, for I harbored the hope of finding a job that would keep me in
Russia for a year.
287
Her hope proved fruitful, for the Soviet government offered her a teaching position, but as was
so typical of the Soviet way of operating, there was a catch, "I could not take it as a tourist. I had
to leave the country and be invited back by the Soviet government; if they wanted me badly
enough, they would issue me a worker's visa at a foreign consulate."
288
So, she temporarily left
Russia for a brief stay in Finland, and eventually the paperwork came through.
Another aspect of her initial stay in Moscow was that she met the man who would
eventually become her husband, Andrei Efremoff, a theater director.
289
This meant she was
happy to be living and working in the Soviet Union, at least at that point. She wrote that "I was
lucky to have arrived in Russia at the tail end of a period of revolutionary fervor that lasted, with
diminishing force, from 1917 to 1936 and was succeeded by one of such ignominy that it blotted
out the memory of its vibrant antecedent."
290
Wettlin did not have to hand over her passport, and the marriage to a Soviet citizen did
not carry any repercussions at that point, for in 1936 she was able to leave for a vacation in
America with her infant. She wrote of the trip, "We rode from New York to Philadelphia over
the new highway that vaults over the heads of towns and cities. . . I knew, oh so poignantly, that
I was back in America. My heart slipped into it like a bolt into its socket."
291
This was no mere
vacation, but also a lecture tour, speaking on her Soviet experiences. Regrettably, she recorded
neither itinerary nor speeches.
She returned to the Soviet Union, where Andrei greeted her with the stunning news
that, "We're to live on a grander scale than ever before. Two rooms this time."
292
Around this
time, she gave birth to a second child and was less than impressed with her medical treatment:

287
288
289
290
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58
"The nurses tied me down and the lady surgeon gutted me as she would have gutted a chicken
for broiling, only the chicken would have been dead and I was not quite."
293
She had accepted the country and more of its ideology than she had ever expected.
Indeed, she willingly worked with the secret police. They wanted her to give information on
foreigners that she knew. She wrote that, "I arrived home in a state of daze. And of exhilaration.
I felt that I had been chosen, been distinguished, that in this terrible period of trial I was
trusted."
294
Part of the reason she had not altered her citizenship earlier was that she had felt
that she had done nothing to help the revolution, so why should she enjoy its benefits as a
citizen?
295
This gave her the opportunity to help the revolution.
Not a cloak-and-dagger agent, her task was simply to aid the secret police to
understand those whose attitudes were not clear.
296
She commented that, "I would stoop to no
artifice, I would be but a flawless mirror giving back the image, and if the image was that of an
enemy, I would be proud to have caught it."
297
Her work had an impact, as the Russian wife of
an American man on whom she was reporting was arrested, then released. As soon as she was
released, the American husband, Herbert Habecht, was able to take "the family to America."
298
Regrettably, she provided no details as to how he managed to get out, as most Americans were
unable to do so.
When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Wettlin commented that, "To most
Soviet citizens the excitement of war. . . came almost as a relief from the purges. Here, at least,
was a concrete enemy they could pit themselves against instead of an invisible enemy against
whom no weapon could be leveled."
299
How awful life must have been, to welcome the onset of
a major invasion! Her family, like thousands of others, was moved from place to place as the

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59
Germans advanced deeper and deeper. Of these journeys during the war she wrote that, The
anti-foreigner sentiment cultivated at the time of the Stalin purges in 1937-1938 died a natural
death after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Invariable too was the question asked by
anyone meeting me for the first time, When are we going to have that second front?"
300
Her
family even made it all the way out to Siberia as the government shuffled evacuees from place
to place. Of the conditions there she wrote that, "Until December the weather had been mild for
Siberia. . . We had been buying milk at the market by the hunk; if what the milk lady offered
was too big, she took an ax and chopped it up and you took your piece home wrapped in
newspaper."
301
This is what Herman had done when living with his family in the chopout. At
least there was no worry of milk spoiling.
There were allowances made for the severity of the weather at the train stations. Rooms
were set aside for mothers and children. Wettlin described one which was exceptionally good:
The room occupied an entire wing of the station. . . It was warm and bright
and cheerful. A kindergarten teacher supervised activities while mothers who
had nothing to do until train time (which might be three hours or three days)
sat in a corner comparing stories of evacuation.
302
In the spring of 1943 they returned to Moscow, to start rebuilding both their lives and the city.
In 1944, the radio announcement of the D-Day invasion brought this reaction, "People laughed
and slapped each other on the back and treated each other to cigarettes" and hoped that would
signal a swift end to the war.
303
When Berlin fell she wrote, "What pride and jubilation filled
every Russian heart! And what mourning. TWENTY MILLION DEAD. . . Each single one of
those twenty million individuals was to himself as I am to myself. That is immeasurable. That is
awesome."
304
A month after war's end, she passed by a church, and saw people who, "Stood in

300
301
302
303
304
60
such closeness that they crossed themselves with difficulty. . . Heavy were the hearts of the
people."
305
Postbellum, life slowly returned to normal. Wettlin got a job with the Press Department
of VOKS, the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries as a translator. It
was not hard work, but "More and more the atmosphere was charged with distrust."
306
In the
two years she worked there was a suicide and a pair of arrests by the KGB. After she left,
Andrei was given a job to head the Russian Theater in Riga, the capital of Latvia.
In Latvia the KGB sought her services again. Her task was to report on several friends
she had made at her job. She lamented that "Had I sat quietly at home translating Gorky's novels
I would not have made the social contacts that caused the security men to turn their eyes on me
once again."
307
One subject was a teacher named Tamara, who had been a Young Communist
when Latvia had been independent. Wettlin's report was this:
I could report nothing but good of Tamara: her loyalty to communism sprang
from a conviction for which she and her brother had paid heavily. But neither
this nor my testimony in her favor saved Tamara and Joe from arrest in the
early fifties when Andrei and I were back in Moscow.
308
The other individual she reported on, an American woman named Davis, deeply shocked
Wettlin by going into hysterics from being constantly observed by the KGB. Wettlin wrote that,
"My experience with Mrs. Davis made it clear that I must extricate myself from the
machine."
309
After she returned to Moscow the KGB asked for her help a third time, which she
denied them, with no apparent consequences.
The family was together in Moscow when a momentous event occurred - the death of
Stalin. "Did Stalin's death cause nationwide jubilation? Far from it. People were stunned. So
consummately had they been hoodwinked that they could envision no future without the

305
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307
308
309
61
Helmsman."
310
Indeed, on the day of the funeral there was a stampede fatal to some of those
trying to see the body, "People longed to set eyes on the mysterious, almost mystical, leader
who never appeared in public except on the May first and November seventh holidays. . . Even
in death Stalin was a killer."
311
Andrei began directing in Tashkent, but family life was growing strained. Both
children had grown up and married, so they were three couples and an infant in three rooms.
312
Eventually, their children moved out, and in 1968 Andrei died. Margaret moved to a writer's
colony outside Moscow, working on a biography of the playwright Ostrovsky when, "Suddenly
one evening Adya [her son] came rushing up from the city with the news that my brother had
arrived from the states. My brother Dan! I hadn't seen or communicated with him for over thirty
years!"
313
He urged her to return, and she tentatively agreed. She somehow managed to visit
America in 1974 and decided to move back. However, she did not leave for another five years,
although the reason for the delay was not given in her account. She and her daughter and
grandchild left together, but her son decided to remain behind. They were fortunate to get out
when they did, for "Sure enough, hardly had Dasha, Fedya, and I left the country when the
Soviets invaded Afghanistan. . . and, bang, down came the Iron Curtain again."
314
A year later
her son and his wife changed their mind, but "As soon as they sent in their application to
emigrate both Adya and Lara were fired from their jobs and for the next seven years they were
held in the country as refuseniks ."
315
Eventually they were all reunited here in America, living
peacefully.
Oliver Golden:
The next work drawn from has an interesting origin indeed, a blending
of family history and autobiography written by a descendant of American

310
311
312
313
314
315
62
migrs. The author, Yelena Khanga, is the granddaughter of American
immigrants, but remained a Soviet citizen. The book recounts the exploits of her
forebears, and she writes that, "I am descended from American idealists, black
and white, who came to the new Soviet state in the 1930s with high hopes of
building a more just society through communism."
316
Her grandfather, Oliver
Golden, studied at the famous Tuskegee Institute. He became a member of the
American Communist party, and finally went to Uzbekistan to aid the cotton
industry there. Her grandmother, Bertha, was the offspring of Jewish-Polish
immigrants to America. They met at a Communist Party meeting in 1927.
Khanga firmly states that the move "was never meant to be permanent. My
grandparents intended to return to the United States--they had signed ordinary
work contracts with the Soviet government-but changed their minds after my
mother was born in 1934."
317
Her grandfather's original reasons for emigrating were similar to the Hermans.
Economics was certainly part of his reasons, but, like Sam Herman, he had political motives as
well, being a member of the burgeoning American Communist Party. On November 7, 1931,
Oliver Golden, along with his wife and sixteen others, some of whom he persuaded to come,
sailed for Russia on the S.S. Deutschland.
318
The whole group was sent to Uzbekistan to help
develop the cotton fields there. Being foreigners they were paid in hard currency, so they had
better food and housing than the natives
Golden was eventually transferred from Uzbekistan to the Institute of Irrigation and
Mechanization in Tashkent. On July 19, 1934, Khanga's mother, Lily, was born in Tashkent.
Yelena records that "This was the decisive event in my family's history; for, without a child, my
grandparents would have returned to the United States in 1937. In spite of their hatred of racism

316
317
318
63
at home, they considered themselves Americans."
319
Khanga further explained that her
grandparents became Soviet citizens rather than expose a racially mixed child to America.
320
Their life was still one of relative ease, "Luxurious by Soviet standards, even without hot water.
To have cold running water as well as separate kitchens and bathrooms was luxury enough."
321
Oliver Golden died in 1940, and the widowed Bertha Golden raised Lily, with the help
of a Russian nanny, working all the while. She taught English at the Central Asian State
University in Tashkent and occasionally worked as a radio announcer.
322
They remained in
Tashkent throughout World War II, never being shifted about as the Wettlins were. Khanga's
mother, Lily, grew up to be a fine tennis player, and got into the Moscow State University in
1952 where she studied African history. Getting a job at the Soviet African Institute, she met
and married Abdullah Khanga, a Zanzibar leader studying there.
323
Yelena was born on May 1,
1962, and her father was killed in Africa in 1964.
Khanga was raised by both her mother and grandmother, and commented that "there
was nothing unusual about an all-female Russian household as her mothers generation lost so
many men to the war.
324
Housing was cramped, with Khanga sharing a room with her
grandmother, and the other room doubled as her mothers bedroom and study.
325
Her public
education began at age three, where the kindergarten "featured a small shrine to Lenin."
326
The
schools had only ten grades, but students went six days out of the week. Khanga went to a
School No. 46, where English was taught. Although her grandmother was a loyal Soviet citizen,
she still cared for America, which aggravated the growing Khanga, "You live in a world of
ghosts. Nobody here cares what you think of civil rights in America."
327
Khanga seemingly

319
320
321
Khanga, Soul to Soul, 87
322
323
324
325
326
327
64
faced little discrimination due to skin color, but the taint of foreign connections was a much
greater source of concern. Like her mother, she entered the Moscow State University, and went
on to become a journalist. In 1987, she went to America in an exchange with the Christian
Science Monitor.
328
While in America she experienced many of the everyday things that were
still lacking in the Soviet Union, such as freedom to travel, fast food restaurants like
McDonald's, and so on. She also met members of both sides of her family, and met Joseph
Roane, the last surviving member of the party of sixteen who had gone over with her
grandfather in 1931. She also learned a startling fact - that her mother, who had been born
before her grandparents handed in their American passports, was considered by American law
to be an American citizen, that "Parents may renounce their own citizenship, but cannot give up
the citizenship of a minor child."
329
In 1992 Lily was able to come home to America, yet she
still maintains a dual citizenship.
In addition to those Americans who went to the Soviet Union under the terms of
individual work contracts signed with Amtorg, and were spread throughout the country, there
were two attempts made to establish major colonies of American industrial workers in the
Soviet Union.
One of these collectives was the ill-fated Kuzbas Colony. In an agreement with the
Soviet government, Kuzbas was founded by labor leader Big Bill Haywood (then fleeing a U.S.
jail sentence), Herbert Calvert, and a Dutchman, Sebald Rogers, in late 1921. The original intent
was to create an autonomous colony in the Soviet Union. The city of Kemerovo was to be the
for 6,000 Americans colonists.
330
While Haywood and Rutgers were hammering out the details with the Soviets, it was
Calvert's task to begin recruiting. According to historian J.P. Morray, Calvert was supposed to

328
329
330
Martha Ann Evans, "Kuzbas Colony 1921-1927" (Seminar Paper, College of St.
Catherine, 1976), 1.
65
recruit 2,800 technical workers by early 1922, inked to two-year contracts.
331
To fulfill this
task, the American Organization Committee for Kuzbas was founded January 2, 1922.
332
Presumably it published the prospectus "Kuzbas - An Opportunity for Engineers and Workers"
which gave an overview of the plans the colony had, as well as an application to join.
Surprisingly, the Soviets did not bankroll either transportation or life's necessities for
the group, as they so often did for individuals at this time. The prospectus reports that each
person must have "$100 worth of food. . . each should take as much clothing as possible."
333
It
also related that the total cost would be "$300 per worker - $100 for food, $100 for tools, $100
for transport."
334
The pamphlet also assured prospective colonists that they would find "a
practical plan. . . that has been formally approved by the heads of the Russian Government."
335
It also stated "Single women will also be considered, provided they are also independently
qualified, physically fit and politically reliable."
336
An interesting part of the application was the
pledge all prospective colonists had to sign, to "take into consideration the extreme nervousness
of the hungry and exhausted peasants" which hinted that not all of the U.S.S.R. was enjoying an
easy life, and that the colonists might not be warmly welcomed by the locals.
337
As economic conditions in the United States were not bad at the time and because the
immigrants left few records, their reasons for going are murky. One historian commented that
"After more than fifty years it is difficult to perceive accurately why these Americans and the
hundreds that followed them decided to pull up stakes and head for a remote region called the
Kuznetz Basin."
338

331
J.P. Morray, Project Kuzbas : American Workers in Siberia 1921-1926 (New York:
International Publishers, 1983), 78.
332
Morray "Project Kuzbas," 78.
333
Prospectus, (New York: Room 303 110 West 40th Street), 1922, 23. Note No
information as to who wrote it, whether individual or organization.
334
Prospectus, 24.
335
Prospectus, 2.
336
Prospectus, 22.
337
Prospectus, 32.
338
Evans, "Kuzbas Colony 1921-1927," 1.
66
The first Americans arrived in March 1922, a group of "sixty men and eight women
who definitely expected both a warm welcome and decent housing.
339
As historian Martha
Evans found, "All references are in agreement about one thing, that the Organization and
settlers expected some housing awaiting them.
340
They spent their first nights in Kemerovo
sleeping in railroad boxcars while they built temporary shelters during the day. To be sleeping
in boxcars must have been a blow, as many families financed their trip by selling their homes
and belongings, and so had nothing to return to, and no money on hand with which to pay
passage home.
341
The Soviets already living and working in Kemerovo disliked the new arrivals, who
put an additional strain on housing, food, and other resources. The Americans had expected to
be "saviors of Russian industry" by virtue of the promise of autonomy given them. However,
this promise proved false, Morray reporting that "opposition to an autonomous colony of foreign
workers had proved to be subtle in Kemerovo and Moscow."
342
More bluntly, Evans stated
"Russian management was reluctant to give up its position, considered soft by any standards,
and were distrustful of the American presence."
343
The Americans also expected that their
salaries would be in accordance with the profits they generated, and were rudely surprised when
they were "divided into seventeen work categories, and would be paid under the same
differential wage system as their Russian counterparts."
344
Even so, the colony became "an industrial success" to the Soviets.
345
However, it never
came close to getting the 6,000 colonists the plan called for. Only a total of six hundred
emigrated during the next two years.
346
Indeed, by then the early colonists had begun leaving.
One who came home, Thomas Doyle, reported in 1923 that there "were many others who

339
Morray, Project Kuzbas, 113.
340
341
342
Morray, Project Kuzbas, 113.
343
344
345
346
67
wished to leave but could not because of the difficulties encountered in obtaining passage home,
and fear of reprisal from the American government."
347
Indeed, as the Soviets continued to
ignore American suggestions and complaints, more and more returned home to the U.S. Evans
reported by 1928 that the "small number who had married natives and settled down in Russia
were the only ones remaining in Kemerovo. . . There was little or no indication that the
American colony had ever existed."
348
Another attempt at colonization was that made by American Finns in Soviet Karelia,
almost a decade later. The Finns constituted the single largest ethnic group to go to the Soviet
Union, and the historians Klehr and Haynes wrote that "Radicalism attracted proportionately
more Finns than members of any other immigrant group; 20-30 percent of Finnish-Americans
had some association with the Socialist, Wobbly, or Communist movements."
349
With these
leftist ideals firmly entrenched, some 6,000 American and Canadian Finns emigrated to Karelia
in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
350
A Finn returning in mid-1933, interviewed by the State
Department, put the number at 4,000 with about five or six hundred living in Petrozavodsk.
351
With such large numbers migrating, the Karelian experience generated perhaps more primary
source material than any other geographic locale in the U.S.S.R. This shared experience and
volume of information alone makes it worth examining.
The Karelian movement was fostered by the U.S.-based, Soviet-backed Karelian
Technical Help Organization, headquartered in New York City. The head of this group was a
Finnish-American Communist party member, Oscar Corgan. One American-Finn, Emil Aho,
reported to the State Department on his return that to go he had to be approved by Karelian
Technical Help.
352
The Organization did not pay the settler's way, but handled the logistics of

347
348
349
350
351
Memorandum of Interview with Mr. Salo, File 861.5017/689, Record Group 59.
352
Memorandum of Interview with Mr. Aho, File 861.5017/574, Record Group 59.
68
the trip.
353
Another returning Finn, Eino Latvala, cited his reasons for going as being "inspired
at the instigation of Bolshevik agent" Oscar Corgan.
354
Contrary to Soviet policy, which encouraged American communists to stay at home,
Corgan himself emigrated, taking his family along with him. His daughter, Mayme, managed to
survive the ordeal, and in 1992 published an autobiography of her family's experiences, They
Took My Father - A Story of Idealism and Betrayal. The Corgans reached Karelia, which is
close to Finland, in April 1934.
355
Even though life was tough, it was easier than in Kuzbas.
There was housing already waiting for them. Sevander noted that "We still had privileges and
possessions that most natives could only dream about."
356
However, they had the misfortune to
arrive in the midst of the purges, and in 1935 they were warned to leave by Yrjo Sirola, a high-
ranking Finnish communist. Oscar Corgan ignored the warning, stating that "I brought hundreds
of American-Finns over here, and I'm not leaving unless I can take all of them back with
me."
357
For a time, all continued as usual; then, in November 1937, the OGPU arrested Oscar,
and they "took our radio, our camera, Father's typewriter, all our papers and birth certificates
from America."
358
To the family, the purge seemed utterly random, "They took my friend's
fathers and sometimes my friend's mothers; they took shopkeepers and musicians and actors and
workers and teachers and men who swept the streets. And no one knew why."
359
Sevander
mentioned an interesting immigrant trait, that "As adopted Russians, we American Finns
adopted that fear."
360
Even with the arrest of her father and other family friends, their dream

353
Memorandum of Interview with Mr. Aho, Feb. 16, 1933, File 861.5017/574,
Record Group 59.
354
Memorandum of Interview with Mr. Latvala, File 861.5017/620, Record Group
59.
355
Mayme Sevander with Laurie Hertzel, They Took My Father - A Story of Idealism
and Betrayal (MN: Pfeifer-Hamilton, 1992), 47.
356
Sevander, They Took My Father, 49.
357
358
359
360
69
was still intact. Amazingly, they "still had faith in Stalin. . . that he had no knowledge."
361
They
tried to find out what had happened to Oscar, how long his sentence was for, if it was not death.
Indeed, the American-Finns had a euphemism for the death penalty, "viiden kopekoan tuoniio
[five kopek sentence]" which was the cost of a bullet.
362
The Corgans were initially told that he
was sentenced to ten years, but Oscar never returned. During the brief thaw under Khrushchev,
they were told that he had died "of cancer" in 1940.
363
Even this was a lie, for in 1991 the
government finally told Mayme that her father had been executed January 8, 1938.
364
The
Corgan family stayed on, and their woes continued, for in 1938 the remnants of the family was
exiled to Latushka on the Kern river with twenty-four hours notice.
365
Eventually Mayme grew
up and married, ironically becoming an English-language teacher.
A newly married couple, Lawrence and Sylvia Hokkanen, mentioned in their memoirs
being screened by both Karelian Technical Aid and the American Communist Party, prior to
emigrating.
366
They traveled with "what tools they had" and Lawrence enjoyed his work as a
mechanic. Sylvia became a teacher, but was forced to give up her U.S. passport for a Soviet one,
in order to do so.
367
As has been shown, giving up U.S. citizenship (or even identification as
such) was often a prelude to disaster. The Hokkanens certainly noticed the effects of the purge,
and applied for permission to leave in 1938. Surprisingly, permission was granted in December
1940, and in February 1941, they took a train across the breadth of the country to Vladivostok,
sailing home on the President Taft on April 29, 1941. They got out of the country less than two
months before Germany invaded, and reported that only one other family got out in that
fashion.
368

361
362
Lawrence Hokkanen, Sylvia Hokkanen with Anita Middleton, Karelia: A Finnish-
American Couple in Stalin's Russia (St. Cloud, Minn.: North Star Press of St. Cloud, 1991), 82.
363
364
365
366
Hokkanen, Karelia, 9.
367
368
70
One returning Finn, Karl Salo, had an interesting perspective on the reasons so many
went, and why they had yet to return to America. In July 1933 he told the State Department that
"Although some of them were real Communists. . . that 90% of [American Finns] would return
to the United States as soon as they thought they had a chance to get jobs again."
369
This
statement rebuts the theory that most Finns went for political, not economic reasons. Of course,
few were able to return when they wished, since in many cases, most of their money had gone to
pay for the trip over and they could not make enough to return home. One returnee, Emil Aho,
told State Department that conditions were so poor that all would return if they had the
opportunity to do so."
370
Poor living conditions aside, the ideal of working and being accepted
by the Soviets never materialized. Another returnee, identified by State only as "Mr. G."
commented that there was "a great deal of strong resentment among the Karelian and Russian
workers against the preferred treatment [of Americans]. . . especially as regards to food." He
added that they "also resented. . . the new methods of work" that the migrants introduced.
371
According to historians Klehr and Haynes, "About 1,200 [of the 6,000!] chiefly those who
retained American or Canadian citizenship, returned in disillusionment. Most of the rest
disappeared into the Gulag labor camps."
372
These specific cases, of both individuals and groups, presented in this chapter
constitute a continuum of misery. Whether singly or with compatriots, no one found the success
they had hoped for. Americans got arrested, had friends or family taken away, or were the
direct cause of others imprisonment! The Soviet government cynically used Americans
whenever it could, forcing Herman to coach a KGB squad after his release from the gulags,
pushing Robinson into the spotlight to gain what political edge it could from the attack on him.
What choice did those men and unknown others have? Herman literally got a year under the ice
for his disobedience, while Robinson was so terrified of arrest that he played along. As for the

369
Memorandum of Interview with Mr. Salo, File 861.5017/689, Record Group 59.
370
Memorandum of Interview with Mr. Aho, File 861.5017/574, Record Group 59.
371
Memorandum of Interview with Mr. G, File 861.5017/727, Record Group 59.
372
71
colonization groups, all the effort they expended amounted to practically nothing, as scarcely a
trace of their presence remained after the colonization efforts collapsed. Ironically it was the
scattered industrial workers and engineers who seemed to have the greater influence upon
Soviet growth. Those few who survived and wrote about their experiences presented a
uniformly graphic and appalling view of life within the Soviet Union. Many more did not live,
and that their silence is an equally telling indictment of life in the Soviet Union.
72
CHAPTER FIVE
CONCLUSION
The tragedy of American workers in the Soviet Union between the World Wars is, in
one sense, a small one. Thousands of Americans died there, some from natural causes while
they were prevented from returning, and many more as a result of direct actions taken by the
Soviet state. This loss of life is insignificant compared to the extermination of Jews in Nazi
concentration camps, or to the toll of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
However, scale means nothing to the individual victims of Soviet actions; to them, each life
embodied tragedy.
The Americans went in good faith, impelled either by admiration for a new social order
or by the prospect of steady work at decent wages. They were willing participants in a venture
that promised benefits to both host nation and guest workers; they ended, many of them, as
helpless victims of an almost barbaric state. The same Soviet state that had actively recruited
American workers became in time the instrument of their destruction, a paradox that must have
been especially vexing to the Americans trapped there, heartbreakingly vulnerable to Soviet
persecution.
While it is nearly impossible to quantify the impact of American workers and
American technology on the Soviet Union, it is clear that the transfer of technology was of
marked benefit to the Soviets. The factories and production methods established with American
assistance helped the Soviets survive and stem Nazi aggression and modernize their nation into
a global rival of the United States.
In retrospect, the unwritten motto which greeted most Americans as they entered the
Soviet Union was what Dante saw as he entered hell, Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.
373
For as time went by, it became apparent that they had no recourse against an oppressive

373
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Henry Francis Cary (U.S.A.:
Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1946), 11.
73
government that increasingly saw them as enemies, and their own government could do little to
help them. By scarcely even raising its voice in protest, the U.S. government became a silent
partner to the tragedy that was unfolding, perhaps not wishing to provoke the Soviets over a few
relative unknowns.
While it is true that the United States did not recognize the Soviet Union until 1933, the
reality is that even the establishment of an embassy in Moscow was of small value to Americans
there. Many of the excesses of Soviet aggression against Americans took place in the late 1930s,
well after diplomatic relations had been formalized. For example, a low-level employee at the
American embassy in Moscow was arrested on the street and spent over two decades in the
Gulags. The fact that the Soviets would take an American embassy employee in this way
indicates how little they feared interference from the U.S. government.
The first-hand reports of American survivors, the records of the State Department and
KGB, and the writings of historians who have examined this period plainly show` that
thousands of Americans were either executed or worked to death in the Gulags. That this was
done with little or no protest or action by the U.S. government compounds the tragedy. True,
appeals by the American government would have done little good, but it seems as if concerns
not to aggravate the Soviet authorities overrode a fundamental duty to American citizens in
distress. Washington chose to ignore their plight, perhaps husbanding its marginal strength for
some other issue.
It is the final irony in this sad chapter of history that most of the American workers
who helped create a modern industrial base in the workers paradise were disillusioned or
eliminated by the system they went to help. The words of the Roman historian Tacitus seem to
apply to this modern scene, I have to present in succession the merciless biddings of a tyrant,
incessant prosecutions, faithless friendships, the ruin of innocence, the same causes issuing in
the same results, and I am everywhere confronted by a wearisome monotony in my subject
74
matter.
374
Tacituss comments seem to apply directly to the experiences of Americans in
Russia between the two world wars. Whether we consider individuals or groups on contract, or
hundreds of colonists trying to form productive communities, they almost all met the same end,
varying only in degree frustration, despair, dissolution.

374
Moses Hadas, ed., Complete Works of Tacitus (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1942),
163.
75
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