A Horrible, Little-Known Legacy of the Great Depression
By Robert Higgs • Tuesday January 6, 2009 11:30 AM PDT • 15 Comments
Not many people are aware that during the early 1930s, thousands of Americans emigrated from the United States to the USSR. Some, many of them unemployed engineers and technical workers, went simply in search of employment in the Soviets’ big push to industrialize; others went in search of a better society they mistakenly believed the Communists were building.
No doubt, most of them became disillusioned after a while, if not immediately. Worse, thousands of them were enmeshed in Stalin’s purges of the latter 1930s and ended up in the Gulag, where prisoners endured an extraordinarily harsh life, usually cut short by a painful death after a few months or years. Some of these victims managed to appeal to U.S. diplomats inside the USSR for help, only to be turned away by over-cautious junior-level careerists or, in effect, by supercilious higher-ups who were even more despicable.
Tim Tzouliadis has written a book about these things, The Forsaken: From the Great Depression to the Gulags Hope and Betrayal in Stalin’s Russia. For an interesting and informative review, see Adam Hochschild’s article in The Times Literary Supplement, December 23, 2008.
HT: Elizabeth Higgs
Tags: American History, Books, Great Depression, Russia 
There was a wonderful movie about this made twenty years ago called “Coming Out of the Ice”. I don’t know if it’s available anymore, but it was a remarkable depiction of one man’s struggle against this sort of barbarity.
Doug Brown | Jan 6, 2009 | Reply
Thank you for those references. By coincidence, I just read something very apropos:
http://www.city-journal.org/html/10_2_urbanities-how_to_read.html
It’s unfortunate the Marquis de Custine was not more famous.
mpolzkill | Jan 6, 2009 | Reply
Here is the link to the book, Coming out of the Ice, by Victor Herman
I remember seeing the movie, which had a very good performance by Willie Nelson.
Indeed, the New York Times, which worked hand-in-glove with Stalin to lie about the Ukraine famine, pretty much was in the tank with the Soviets and did not report on this atrocity, either. Seeing the recent performance of the Gray Lady in just about everything else, I see it still is business as usual with that paper.
Bill Anderson | Jan 6, 2009 | Reply
I first learned of this from Alexander Dolgun’s Story: An American in the Gulag. His father came during the depression to work, come WWII and he is “given” Soviet citizenship, and thus conscripted into the Red Army.
A truly horrifying, yet beautiful book. I highly recommend it to all.
Shawn | Jan 6, 2009 | Reply
Dear mpolzkill,
Thank you for the reference to Dalrymple’s essay on Custine and nineteenth-century Russia. The Marquis de Custine seems to have been a fascinating character, and Dalrymple’s writing here exceeds even his own normally high standard.
Free-market people often talk about the evils of the welfare state, but they rarely speak of its worst evil: what it does to people’s souls.
Robert Higgs | Jan 6, 2009 | Reply
The movie “Coming Out of the Ice” is available, but only in a very inferior VHS format.
http://tinyurl.com/84ydbb
The tape was not recorded at the normal SP VHS speed and tracks poorly. There is even a warning sticker about the tracking (par for the course for a tape not recorded at SP) on the tape cartridge. And it is so rare it costs $40.
I’m shocked.
However, John Savage, who plays Victor Herman, meets Willie Nelson in the Gulag.
Bob Roddis | Jan 6, 2009 | Reply
Mr Higgs,
Exactly, to lose one’s soul – there are things worse than poverty & even death. That was the truly terrifying heart of the essay. I’m very glad you read it, I knew you’d appreciate it.
mpolzkill | Jan 6, 2009 | Reply
Dear Mr. Higgs,
Thank you for sharing this book. I will definitely give it a read.
You may also be interested in Mayme Sevander and Laurie Hertzel’s They Took My Father: Finnish Americans in Stalin’s Russia.
It is a heart-breaking story of idealistic Marxist Finns from northern Minnesota’s Iron Range (the birthplace of the American Communist Party, BTW) who went to the Soviet Union to “build Socialism”:
http://books.google.com/books?id=WEv3J6hkqGIC&dq=they+took+my+father&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=4&ct=result
Kent Berdahl | Jan 6, 2009 | Reply
What a shame, tragedy that these otherwise desperate, woefully naive Americans were duped by what was considered by many a superior way of life in the Workers’ Paradise. I am very surprised by the American government’s reluctance to have these disillusioned Americans returned which would otherwise have made an incredible propaganda coup.
Marc Savoy | Jan 6, 2009 | Reply
The NY Times has not missed a beat since. Someone should write a book entitled “Cover-Up: How the NY Times has misreported or under-reported since Stalin.” They deliberately withheld information from voters about Obama’s connections to the far left, they leaked classified information, and engaged in politicking, calling it “journalism.” There was/is no Izvestia in Pravda and no Pravda in Izvestia.
Thomas Notaras | Jan 27, 2009 | Reply
A guy named Bruce Bawer, who also had a great book on the growing dhimmitude of Europe, While Europe Slept, wrote an article a while back titled something like, “The Times They Aren’t A’Changing.” It provides a good synopses of the NYTs’ support for totalitarian regimes over the last 100 years. You can find it and other good articles at brucebawer.com or maybe at cityjournal.com.
RickC | Feb 5, 2009 | Reply
malcolm muggeridge’s winter in moscow is also a worthwhile read to understand the stalinist adventure and its foreign participants.
old boy | Aug 25, 2011 | Reply