Those of the director Dziga Vertov were often played at ear-splitting volume.

Between 19, 40 Soviet movies were shown widely in the theatres of America. There was enthusiasm and belief and hope, and great slabs of naiveté, ignorance, and downright stupidity. As early as 1919, the investigative journalist Lincoln Steffen had remarked, on returning from Bolshevik Russia, that he had “been over to see the future-and it works.” His opinion was echoed by a sizeable cohort of the intelligentsia, including Bernard Shaw, André Gide, and Heinrich Mann. The sarcasm is lost on Florence, and she writes back, expressing a fear, if she stays in America, of falling “into the ranks of the indifferent, or, worse, the eloquent malcontents . . . I hope to set sail by spring.”įlorence Fein would not have been alone in being attracted to the Soviet Union. He writes her a letter, in which he refers, sarcastically, to “the majesty of Magnitogorsk,” an industrial town in the south of the Urals. In 1929, for example, the Ford Motor Company signed an agreement with the Soviet government to manufacture automobiles in the city of Gorki.)įlorence finds that there is no way “to satisfy your heart without deforming your mind.” This turns out to be truer than she thinks.

American companies were keen to buy into a potentially huge new market. Steel for the purchase of equipment required for a steel mill, she falls for a young Russian engineer. Sent to Cleveland to aid negotiations between the Soviets and U.S. She is exposed to the strident arguments of radical students at college, and afterward, she goes to work at the Soviet Trade Delegation. The Depression offers little in the way of hope.

always doomed to lie in the shadow of a superior power.” It is not the best of times. She grows up in Brooklyn in the 1920s and ’30s, “a territory . . . The Patriots tells the fictional story of one such victim, an American Jewess lured to the USSR by a combination of lust, curiosity, and optimism.įlorence Fein is the intelligent daughter of an atheist Jewish family. Their story is colorfully documented in British author Tim Tzouliadis’s The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia (2008), which Krasikov credits in her acknowledgements. The murderous confidence trick of Communism was played not only on millions of Russians, not only on Chechens and Georgians and countless other minorities of the Russian empire, but also on thousands of Americans who moved to the false utopia.

The patriots a novel by sana krasikov