This week’s book examines the fate of Americans who went to work in the Soviet Union in the 1930s to help industrialize the country, and who in many cases ended up in the Gulag – a tragic story of betrayal and misplaced idealism.
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This week’s book examines the fate of Americans who went to work in the Soviet Union in the 1930s to help industrialize the country, and who in many cases ended up in the Gulag – a tragic story of betrayal and misplaced idealism.
I’m currently taking a class on African Americans and the Soviet experience, and this is on the “recommended readings” list.
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Every single one was innocent – obviously! And all who dares to deny that and demand proof – well, that’s one unhandshakable whitewasher of the Stalinist Regime, that ought to be Democratically Lustrated!
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One of the reasons why this trope – “Innocent Americans in Stalin’s Gulag” – became so popular was, partially, due to writings of Victor Herman, who, upon his return to the USA wrote TRUTH, FIERY HONEST TRUTH and NOTHING BUT TRUTH about bloody Gulag and his innocent self. In 1982 one of his books (Coming Out of the Ice) got a screen adaptation – also, slightly less than entirely consisting of
caveman level of Russophobia and anti-SovietismFIERY TRUTH that needs no proof. Honestly, I wonder – what’ with the Westerners and “prisonXploatation” genre? The same author also wrote: “The Gray People: Hundred of Americans Murdered in the Gulag” (sexual abuse of political prisoners) and “Realities: Might and Paradox in Soviet Russia” (with Fred E. Dohrs).Herman got 10 years according to Art. 56-8 – “espionage”. 10 years. Say, what was the punishment for the espionage in the “civilized” countries?
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