The American women who moved to Moscow in the 1920s

Married women who dreamt of being single. They were dancers, journalists, actresses, and not satisfied with their life in the United States; they wanted a more just world, a promised land.

At least that is what Julia Mickenberg explains in her book American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream, recently published on the centennial of the 1917 Revolution, so as to settle the ambivalence of the feminist romanticism of the time – no, not all American women would dream of sitting on the terraces of Parisian cafés. Backed by children’s book publisher Ruth Epperson Kennel, 132 women moved, during the summer of 1922, from New York to Siberia, where in the industrial colony of Kuzbass, they established a community they wanted to become, as a type of modern Atlantis, New Pennsylvania. They were not put off by that fact that the builders of the New World in their day were mostly men: the feminist revolution was not just the right to vote but the right to work with one’s own hands in Siberian colonies. To be part of a class instead of a couple. To take care of children in the New World instead of the old one. Taking ad-vantage, in particular, of the need for building the Soviet Union at the time of the five-year plan, they emigrated.

A dog holding a baby in its teeth

Among the American women who followed Kennel, we find the photographer Margaret Bourke-White – the first woman allowed to photograph Soviet industry and also the first American war photojournalist, most known for her photo of Gandhi behind a spinning wheel, just before he was murdered – or even Isadora Duncan – the pioneer of modern dance who came to Moscow at the invitation of Lenin himself (!) and stayed long enough to open a dance school for the Isadorables and marry a Russian poet, Sergei Yesenin, known as ‘the blond angel of the Revolution’.

As the legend goes, before settling on Russian land, during a first trip in 1907, she fell under the charm of Stanislavski. Among this influx of women there was also the actress Frances E. William, an African-American woman who came to Moscow in 1934 to find a professional opportunity in a city that had supposedly ‘eliminated racism’. Not surprising when considering that Duncan went as far as designating the Soviet Union as the ‘only country in the world that actually supports its children’s mental and physical health as much as its commerce’.

All of these women, in this idealised Russia, were in search of models – “The human soul will be more beautiful, more generous and greater than ever dreamed by Christ… The prophesies of Beethoven, of Nietzsche, of Walt Whitman, are being realised. All men will be brothers...” Duncan continued to dream in her writing. A strange red Jerusalem, whose fantasy Julia Mickenberg resurrects as it might have looked from 1905 to 1935. The difficulty is in how to present the communist dream of the ’20s, now that we know about the mass grave it became in the ’30s. Yet it must be remembered that before coming to represent 14.5 million corpses in the service of forced collectivisation, communism’s plans were the embodiment of hope. Horrors are never pure, and in Russia, as Mickenberg tells us, this 20th century encounter gave birth to both wonder and annihilation: a ‘cruel optimism’.

From this flood of women towards Bolshevism, F. Scott Fitzgerald would also have been able to write a novella. All the ingredients are there: strong personalities, passionate vicissitudes – a tragic end. Marie M. Leder, a young woman who emigrated to Birobidzhan with her parents – a region designated by the USSR as the promised land of Jewish socialism – apparently lost her papers at the landing of the Santa Monica and was never able to obtain them again, according the rules in force. Soon after, her family was frightened by Stalin and returned to the West. But she could not, considered by the authorities as strictly Jewish and not as American, she thus remained stranded on Bolshevik land until 1964. At least things were lively. That is not the case for all the female expatriates to the red land. Bourke-White filmed the cries of one of them until she realised that she was crying into the face of her own daughter’s dead body. Miriam West saw a dog running holding a baby in its teeth. And many of these American idealists – women and men alike – were captured and then disappeared during the Stalinist purge, as described by another behind-the-scenes book about the Soviet dream: The Forsaken, An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia by Tim Tzouliadis.

Creator in chaos

A region that you could idealise only if you were just passing through: at the time, the fashion was to pay a stealth visit, in order to write about it, even if it meant inventing an Eden that was never found – as the book Political Pilgrims, written in the 1980s, recalls with irony. Astonishingly, most of the journalists who passed through Soviet land and saw the other side the dream – the prohibition of abortion, famine, death – did not denounce it in their writings. It was important that they create a positive image of Russia, leaving them to add ideology to the truth. Anna Louise Strong, a journalist and activist – unjustly arrested as a spy in the ’50s – published a glowing chronicle of this period: suffering only appears in it as a necessary condition of the paradise to come, to become a ‘creator in chaos’. For Milly Bennet, playwright and New York Times journalist, the important thing was, not without cynicism, about ‘knowing how to look the other way’. From that point to deducing that suffering might have been part of the red land’s attraction for these privileged women, there is only one step left for each person to take. Only one certainty remains on how best to interpret these adventures: the history of communism and feminism appear so complex that we only see one colour, red – which is to say, both desire and blood.

Julia Mickenberg, American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing The Soviet Dream, University of Chicago Press, 2017

Mary M. Leder, My Life in Stalinist Russia, An American Woman looks back, Indiana University Press, 2001

Indiana University Press, 2001