I Change Worlds * The Remaking Of An American

by Anna Louise Strong

Anna Strong was an American woman who went to live in Russia. In this memoir she tells of her life in this country--at the University of Chicago--organizing Child Welfare Exhibits--in Seattle during its General Strike. With this as background she describes the tremendous impact of new standards in the U.S.S.R. She records her struggles, disillusionments and successes during fourteen years in the Soviet Union. She saw revolution in China and Mexico as well as in Russia. She wrote for Hearst and for the New York Times and the Federated Press and the Quaker Relief bulletins. She knew Russian peasants and American business men; standing between two worlds, she questioned both.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, Travel

422 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1935

About the author

American journalist and activist, best known for her reporting on and support for communist movements in the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China.

Reviews

[Meg - A Bookish Affair · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I Change Worlds" is the memoir of Anna Louise Strong, an American who left the country to go live in the Soviet Union because it aligned with her ideals. She has a very idealized view of the changes brought in the 1920s and 1930s in the Soviet Union. Being an American born in the waning years of the Cold War, this was such an interesting perspective to read about.

Even after the Cold War, the idea that people would leave the relative comfort of the United States for the Soviet Union is strange - this isn't what we typically focus on or even mention in history classes. Our history classes still seem to have a fairly rose-colored view of our country without accounting for many differing opinions. This book is one of those differing opinions. Strong is initially very hopeful for the improvement of working conditions in the USSR. She witnesses Stalin's various plans to shake various countries into production and growth. It was fascinating to see her perspective on what was going on.

Strong is also a journalist and her job takes her places that were not necessarily open to women or Americans at the time. It shed a lot of light on what it would have been like to be a person living during this time. She has some really interesting experiences in the book. At one point, she goes back to the U.S. to have conversations with Henry Ford about investing in the USSR (I did not ever realize that the USSR was so interested in investment. She talks about the American companies that would or would not invest in the USSR (it's a fascinating list. Ford entertained it. House of Morgan refused)! She also gets to meet directly with Stalin after making a complaint about her work and in the book, she calls him one of the easiest people in the world to talk to (but was he really??? that's not ever a description I've heard associated with Stalin).

I love when books make you question what you do and do not know. This book gave a perspective that I never had thought about before and definitely made me think about just how different points of view can really be!

[Julio The Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

Talk about megalomaniacal titles! Anna Louise Strong started out as a freelance radical from the American West who drew close to socialism after covering the Seattle General Strike of 1919 led by the Industrial Workers of the World. There followed a friendship and political camaraderie with John Reed and Louise Bryant, with Anna organizing a whirlwind lecture tour for Louise following the Bolshevik Revolution and the publication of SIX RED MONTHS IN RUSSIA. If John Reed understood and embraced the Bolsheviks by covering the revolution in Petrograd, and Louise sympathized with that revolution by embracing him, Anna never went being the stage of a Communist groupie, idolizing Stalin and reporting from Moscow that the Soviet people were happy as clams. This book was published in 1935, but Anna's best years were to come. Stalin rewarded her fawning by accusing Strong of being a spy for the U.S. after World War II, jailing her, and shipping Anna off to Peking, where she promptly switched her allegiance to Mao. Strong scored a scoop when, in an interview with the Chairman he told her, "All reactionaries are paper tigers. The atom bomb itself is a paper tiger". She lies buried in China today. A case of dementia precox, this.