Moscow Yankee

by Myra Page

The Depression era closing of a Ford plant sends Andy and two companions to Moscow to find work in a Soviet automotive plant, where he meets Natasha, an exemplar of the “new Soviet woman.” Based on Myra Page’s own experiences in Moscow during the first Five-Year Plan, Natasha is a portrait of women's contradictory social position in the early periods of socialist construction.

At the core of this novel is a firsthand look at revolutionized relations of production in the early Soviet Union—changes that bring about the conversion of Andy into a “Moscow Yankee.” While revealing some of the political and economic policies that would eventually lead to the demise of Soviet-style socialism, Moscow Yankee refutes the notion that egalitarian societies cannot succeed because they fail to take into account the individualism and greed of human nature. Barbara Foley's introduction analyzes the portrait of Soviet socialist construction in Page's novel and the politics of novelistic form in relation to Moscow Yankee.
—from the back cover

Genres: Fiction

292 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1935

About the author

Writer, union activist, and communist Dorothy Markey (nee Dorothy Page Gary) was born in Newport News, Va., in 1897. Under the name Myra Page, Markey was an active political journalist and writer in the 1930s. In the early 1940s, she taught writing at the Writers' School sponsored by the League of American Writers in New York City. During the 1950s and 1960s, she wrote and published the juvenile biographies. Dorothy Markey died in 1993.

(from http://www2.lib.unc.edu/mss/inv/p/Pag...)

Reviews

[Brendan Babish · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting to read a novel that glorifies Stalinism (admittedly, early Stalinism) instead of demonizing it. Not that Stalinism doesn't deserve to be demonized, but this helps understand the mindset of the many Stalin apologists in the 1930s, 40s, 50s. Who knows, maybe I would have been one as well, had I come of age at the time. The worker's paradise in Moscow sure must have seemed sweet while hopping rails, eating canned beans, and looking for work in America.

[Derek Baad · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read this book for a graduate school class -- it didn't do much for me. Interesting from the historical perspective, and I learned a lot about how Americans during the Depression went to work in the Soviet Union, but the novel seemed a little trite: the workers, of course, unite to defeat the bourgeois attitudes and corruption of the factory managers.