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American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream
If you were an independent, adventurous, liberated American woman in the 1920s or 1930s where might you have sought escape from the constraints and compromises of bourgeois living? Paris and the Left Bank quickly come to mind. But would you have ever thought of Russia and the wilds of Siberia? This choice was not as unusual as it seems now. As Julia L. Mickenberg uncovers in American Girls in Red Russia , there is a forgotten counterpoint to the story of the Lost beginning in the late nineteenth century, Russian revolutionary ideology attracted many women, including suffragists, reformers, educators, journalists, and artists, as well as curious travelers. Some were famous, like Isadora Duncan or Lillian Hellman; some were committed radicals, though more were just intrigued by the “Soviet experiment.” But all came to Russia in search of social arrangements that would be more equitable, just, and satisfying. And most in the end were disillusioned, some by the mundane realities, others by horrifying truths.
Mickenberg reveals the complex motives that drew American women to Russia as they sought models for a revolutionary new era in which women would be not merely independent of men, but also equal builders of a new society. Soviet women, after all, earned the right to vote in 1917, and they also had abortion rights, property rights, the right to divorce, maternity benefits, and state-supported childcare. Even women from Soviet national minorities—many recently unveiled—became public figures, as African American and Jewish women noted. Yet as Mickenberg’s collective biography shows, Russia turned out to be as much a grim commune as a utopia of freedom, replete with economic, social, and sexual inequities.
American Girls in Red Russia recounts the experiences of women who saved starving children from the Russian famine, worked on rural communes in Siberia, wrote for Moscow or New York newspapers, or performed on Soviet stages. Mickenberg finally tells these forgotten stories, full of hope and grave disappointments.
Mickenberg reveals the complex motives that drew American women to Russia as they sought models for a revolutionary new era in which women would be not merely independent of men, but also equal builders of a new society. Soviet women, after all, earned the right to vote in 1917, and they also had abortion rights, property rights, the right to divorce, maternity benefits, and state-supported childcare. Even women from Soviet national minorities—many recently unveiled—became public figures, as African American and Jewish women noted. Yet as Mickenberg’s collective biography shows, Russia turned out to be as much a grim commune as a utopia of freedom, replete with economic, social, and sexual inequities.
American Girls in Red Russia recounts the experiences of women who saved starving children from the Russian famine, worked on rural communes in Siberia, wrote for Moscow or New York newspapers, or performed on Soviet stages. Mickenberg finally tells these forgotten stories, full of hope and grave disappointments.
432 pages, Hardcover
Published April 25, 2017
29 people are currently reading
465 people want to read
About the author
Julia L. Mickenberg
11 books4 followersJulia Mickenberg is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of the award-winning Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States and coeditor of Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children's Literature.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
September 8, 2017
This is a very good book on generation of US feminists who, at least for a while, perceived Soviet Union as a cultural alternative to the oppressed status of women in their own country. These women traveled to Soviet Union, worked for its people as charity workers, journalists, artists, or political activists, and went back in order to present an alternative of equality between the genders as well as, especially for these who were not white, intolerance towards any kind of racism. The author defends them from later accusations of betraying their country and cynically lying about the repression within Soviet Union. She claims, reasonably, that for them Soviet Union was an imaginary alternative and that their main concerns were in fact within the US. Sadly Soviet Union eventually proved to be too oppressive to defend even for these who wished to idealize it. Even more sadly, the former idealization of the country and connection between its policies and civil rights' struggles offered a basis for the 1950s conservatives to attack the civil rights activists as dishonest and disloyal. Still, the author claims that the existence of a Soviet alternative, even a somewhat imaginary one, created a tangible basis for feminist activism which affected a whole generation of young US women during the 1920s and 1930s, a generation which went on supporting later generations of feminists.
Indeed, there is something about these women's intentional blindness while in Soviet Union, as well as about the racism some of them managed to combine with alleged political radicalism which I found deeply annoying. Still, a history of radicalism of any kind involves people whose radicalism is limited. They are still an important part of the story.
Indeed, there is something about these women's intentional blindness while in Soviet Union, as well as about the racism some of them managed to combine with alleged political radicalism which I found deeply annoying. Still, a history of radicalism of any kind involves people whose radicalism is limited. They are still an important part of the story.
May 1, 2023
Mickenberg's work is a fascinating collage of the experiences of American women (artists, dancers, journalists, and more) relating to late-Imperial Russia connections, lived experience in the earlier, tumultuous and rougher-living years and locales of 20s and 30s Soviet Russia, and during WW2. There's a clear depth of research shown in the overall quality and breadth of citation.
Aside from the lives of main "characters" in this narrative: Isadora Duncan, Anna Louise Strong, Ruth Epperson Kennell, Milly Bennett, Dorothy West, and several others, Mickenberg presents a litany of moving and surprisingly positive accounts and images in passing that strike a bittersweet note in hindsight. They include Ukrainian women holding up rakes as "agricultural weapons" during the Great Patriotic War to passing notes on the stories of lesser-known Soviet women, including female textile Stakhanovite Dusya Vinogradova, Uzbek Central Committee VP Jahah Obidova, and even American writer Bourke-White's account of Tatiana, a fully absolved former Gulag prisoner.
Many stories, of course, end in disappointment or disillusionment: once-prominent Bolsheviks swept up in the purges, and other activists and journalists leaving in frustration and resolving not to return due to persistent obstruction. We see well-meaning critiques of American racism done through blackface, still reflecting stereotypical attitudes inherited from pre-revolutionary days.
It's well to complicate the narrative of a clean break and to understand that the birth pangs of the old system could not be swept away with words, especially where the need for industrial specialists and rapid development meant to some degree a political-economic retreat (NEP). This had very real implications for the place of women as old pressures and nuclear family structures asserted themselves after more experimental years in the early revolutionary days (instances of subtle discrimination despite official equal opportunity employment and pay, and an unpopular ban of abortion). The lesson here is one oft-repeated: the need to think about how to build something new that's both transformative and resilient under old and new pressures.
The credit due to the author for critically highlighting these stories, positive and negative, unfortunately doesn't extend to the larger scale, where she echoes some frustrating tropes with regard to the broader geopolitical context (misconstruing the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact as either opportunistically unprincipled or an expression of actual mutual trust, repeated citing of Robert Conquest even after an admission buried in footnotes that his "numbers were revised" without further considering the implications, the absence of context in detailing Soviet fears of foreign espionage, etc.). The nuance of 'character profiles' throughout, explicit in the epilogue on spying accusations during the apex of McCarthyism, is often lacking in the geopolitical context where state-actor motives are at all considered.
Still, that's common enough in Western academia that barely pays attention to these women's stories. The price of a critical eye between the lines, which should be a habit of history readers anyway, is worth it.
Because of the quotidian subject matter of what many of these women wrote in their pursuit of presenting everyday-life narratives, some of the character-examination feels like it borders on petty. Was Milly Bennett a decadent Westerner complaining about the quality of food under hard conditions, or was it not so bad and Anna Louise Strong's acceptance of its quality in her own identical meals genuine?
Notwithstanding bizarre family dramas and the fodder for readings of inspired revolutionaries as merely housewives seeking an escape from domestic drudgery, more substantive concerns are prominent throughout the book. Particularly standing out is the documenting of the rise and ignominious fall of the "Kuzbass Autonomous Industrial Colony". Mickenberg acknowledges certain opportunistic 'critics'' sensationalism (p. 145) and that justice actually won out against mismanagement as supposedly unaccountable officials did in fact face trial and removal (p. 160)---but all of this gets seemingly glossed over in the predetermined ideological focus on bureaucratic entrenchment and control. The poor conditions were real, but the blame seems placed on bureaucratic management undermining idealism through division of labour, rather than on the ultimate geopolitical cause of resource deprivation that would feed into these problems.
Yes, the author acknowledges the conditions from the outset of economic blockade, invasion, and deprivation, but this deserves more than incidental contextualizing acknowledgment as it fundamentally frames everything that follows. One can't and shouldn't separate shortages, harsh living conditions, opportunism, the persistent lingering of old social attitudes, or seemingly paranoid concern about sabotage and presentation to the outside world from those conditions. Acknowledging censorship in the West (p. 183) or the domestic burdens on Western women (p. 185) while arguing that Soviet practice fell short of rhetoric isn't balanced enough without differentiating the contexts and the aims of the respective political projects in play. A materialist look would draw the lines between arresting of development and persistence of old attitudes instead of presenting it all as theatrics of Potemkin progressivism against stodgy Western conservatism for a naive global audience's benefit.
As an example of where a historical 'trope' demanded nuance: Even as Mickenberg acknowledges the genuine passion of Ukrainian women as partisans (p. 308), there is a subtle conflation of resentment toward the Soviet government in the wake of the famine with active fascist collaboration (p. 320). I'm sure, despite the assertion that starvation was a deliberate act of punishment rather than negligence and policy failure, that the author realizes the complicating nuance. The reality is that plenty of partisans who had reservations or disguised hostility to Stalin nevertheless fought fiercely against both fascists and collaborators, and if some collaborators were driven by the famine as suggested here, their motives can't be reduced to that alone. In the modern geopolitical context, though, that nuance gets lost in nefarious pursuits, so this demands spelling out.
For a deep, nuanced dive into women soldiers' and partisans' role in WW2, check out Svetlana Alexievich's "The Unwomanly Face of War".
Mickenberg simultaneously acknowledges genuine motivations for revolutionary optimism, and even sympathizes, but repeatedly follows up with a reflexive portrayal of eyewitness accounts as either self-delusion or naiveté revealed as misplaced faith by the unfolding of "Stalinism". If a writer about a collective farm fails to mention the purges in a reflexive non-sequitur while openly writing wartime propaganda, then she is admonished for lack of concern (p. 320). Acknowledgment of profound material advancements is frequently rhetorically qualified. A representative passage:
"Young women who were loyal to the regime, and who accepted restrictions on their personal autonomy, found real opportunities for education and professional advancement in the late 1930s and during the war." (p. 298)
Nevertheless, there is nuance in this book reflecting real gains and real setbacks. There are plenty of otherwise forgotten and important historical voices piled in as references to make this work a worthwhile jumping-off point for a critical feminist reading of Soviet history primarily from late-Imperial Russia to the Great Patriotic War.
Aside from the lives of main "characters" in this narrative: Isadora Duncan, Anna Louise Strong, Ruth Epperson Kennell, Milly Bennett, Dorothy West, and several others, Mickenberg presents a litany of moving and surprisingly positive accounts and images in passing that strike a bittersweet note in hindsight. They include Ukrainian women holding up rakes as "agricultural weapons" during the Great Patriotic War to passing notes on the stories of lesser-known Soviet women, including female textile Stakhanovite Dusya Vinogradova, Uzbek Central Committee VP Jahah Obidova, and even American writer Bourke-White's account of Tatiana, a fully absolved former Gulag prisoner.
Many stories, of course, end in disappointment or disillusionment: once-prominent Bolsheviks swept up in the purges, and other activists and journalists leaving in frustration and resolving not to return due to persistent obstruction. We see well-meaning critiques of American racism done through blackface, still reflecting stereotypical attitudes inherited from pre-revolutionary days.
It's well to complicate the narrative of a clean break and to understand that the birth pangs of the old system could not be swept away with words, especially where the need for industrial specialists and rapid development meant to some degree a political-economic retreat (NEP). This had very real implications for the place of women as old pressures and nuclear family structures asserted themselves after more experimental years in the early revolutionary days (instances of subtle discrimination despite official equal opportunity employment and pay, and an unpopular ban of abortion). The lesson here is one oft-repeated: the need to think about how to build something new that's both transformative and resilient under old and new pressures.
The credit due to the author for critically highlighting these stories, positive and negative, unfortunately doesn't extend to the larger scale, where she echoes some frustrating tropes with regard to the broader geopolitical context (misconstruing the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact as either opportunistically unprincipled or an expression of actual mutual trust, repeated citing of Robert Conquest even after an admission buried in footnotes that his "numbers were revised" without further considering the implications, the absence of context in detailing Soviet fears of foreign espionage, etc.). The nuance of 'character profiles' throughout, explicit in the epilogue on spying accusations during the apex of McCarthyism, is often lacking in the geopolitical context where state-actor motives are at all considered.
Still, that's common enough in Western academia that barely pays attention to these women's stories. The price of a critical eye between the lines, which should be a habit of history readers anyway, is worth it.
Because of the quotidian subject matter of what many of these women wrote in their pursuit of presenting everyday-life narratives, some of the character-examination feels like it borders on petty. Was Milly Bennett a decadent Westerner complaining about the quality of food under hard conditions, or was it not so bad and Anna Louise Strong's acceptance of its quality in her own identical meals genuine?
Notwithstanding bizarre family dramas and the fodder for readings of inspired revolutionaries as merely housewives seeking an escape from domestic drudgery, more substantive concerns are prominent throughout the book. Particularly standing out is the documenting of the rise and ignominious fall of the "Kuzbass Autonomous Industrial Colony". Mickenberg acknowledges certain opportunistic 'critics'' sensationalism (p. 145) and that justice actually won out against mismanagement as supposedly unaccountable officials did in fact face trial and removal (p. 160)---but all of this gets seemingly glossed over in the predetermined ideological focus on bureaucratic entrenchment and control. The poor conditions were real, but the blame seems placed on bureaucratic management undermining idealism through division of labour, rather than on the ultimate geopolitical cause of resource deprivation that would feed into these problems.
Yes, the author acknowledges the conditions from the outset of economic blockade, invasion, and deprivation, but this deserves more than incidental contextualizing acknowledgment as it fundamentally frames everything that follows. One can't and shouldn't separate shortages, harsh living conditions, opportunism, the persistent lingering of old social attitudes, or seemingly paranoid concern about sabotage and presentation to the outside world from those conditions. Acknowledging censorship in the West (p. 183) or the domestic burdens on Western women (p. 185) while arguing that Soviet practice fell short of rhetoric isn't balanced enough without differentiating the contexts and the aims of the respective political projects in play. A materialist look would draw the lines between arresting of development and persistence of old attitudes instead of presenting it all as theatrics of Potemkin progressivism against stodgy Western conservatism for a naive global audience's benefit.
As an example of where a historical 'trope' demanded nuance: Even as Mickenberg acknowledges the genuine passion of Ukrainian women as partisans (p. 308), there is a subtle conflation of resentment toward the Soviet government in the wake of the famine with active fascist collaboration (p. 320). I'm sure, despite the assertion that starvation was a deliberate act of punishment rather than negligence and policy failure, that the author realizes the complicating nuance. The reality is that plenty of partisans who had reservations or disguised hostility to Stalin nevertheless fought fiercely against both fascists and collaborators, and if some collaborators were driven by the famine as suggested here, their motives can't be reduced to that alone. In the modern geopolitical context, though, that nuance gets lost in nefarious pursuits, so this demands spelling out.
For a deep, nuanced dive into women soldiers' and partisans' role in WW2, check out Svetlana Alexievich's "The Unwomanly Face of War".
Mickenberg simultaneously acknowledges genuine motivations for revolutionary optimism, and even sympathizes, but repeatedly follows up with a reflexive portrayal of eyewitness accounts as either self-delusion or naiveté revealed as misplaced faith by the unfolding of "Stalinism". If a writer about a collective farm fails to mention the purges in a reflexive non-sequitur while openly writing wartime propaganda, then she is admonished for lack of concern (p. 320). Acknowledgment of profound material advancements is frequently rhetorically qualified. A representative passage:
"Young women who were loyal to the regime, and who accepted restrictions on their personal autonomy, found real opportunities for education and professional advancement in the late 1930s and during the war." (p. 298)
Nevertheless, there is nuance in this book reflecting real gains and real setbacks. There are plenty of otherwise forgotten and important historical voices piled in as references to make this work a worthwhile jumping-off point for a critical feminist reading of Soviet history primarily from late-Imperial Russia to the Great Patriotic War.
February 5, 2018
Given the United States’ current relationship with Russia, it’s interesting to read about and consider what that relationship was like a century ago, specifically in terms of how the Russian revolution was perceived by American women. American Girls in Red Russia is filled with fascinating stories and details about American women who believed in the Soviet experiment and dedicated their resources to helping it succeed, even at the expense of their families, reputations, and safety.
Though full of well-researched information, I find myself unable to give American Girls in Red Russia more than three stars. I really did enjoy the content of the book and I’m happy to have finished it, but it often read like a stiff academic paper with very little to offer in terms of easy-to-follow, flowing prose. Many chapters were so overflowing with names, places, relationships, and publications that it was hard to wade through the information to get to the core of the stories. (It took a lot of work—and rereading—to see the forest for the trees.)
The layout of the book is also somewhat difficult. Instead of writing chronologically, Mickenberg divides the book into chapters about types of American women who spent time in Russia and by the activities undertaken in Russia by these women. There does seem to be a soft chronological bent, but not enough of one to provide a seamless understanding of the relationship between American women and Soviet Russia.
For anyone fascinated by and interested in Russian history, I would definitely recommend this book. Still, you really have to want to know the information to read all the way to the end.
Though full of well-researched information, I find myself unable to give American Girls in Red Russia more than three stars. I really did enjoy the content of the book and I’m happy to have finished it, but it often read like a stiff academic paper with very little to offer in terms of easy-to-follow, flowing prose. Many chapters were so overflowing with names, places, relationships, and publications that it was hard to wade through the information to get to the core of the stories. (It took a lot of work—and rereading—to see the forest for the trees.)
The layout of the book is also somewhat difficult. Instead of writing chronologically, Mickenberg divides the book into chapters about types of American women who spent time in Russia and by the activities undertaken in Russia by these women. There does seem to be a soft chronological bent, but not enough of one to provide a seamless understanding of the relationship between American women and Soviet Russia.
For anyone fascinated by and interested in Russian history, I would definitely recommend this book. Still, you really have to want to know the information to read all the way to the end.
September 16, 2024
Stumbled across this online and the premise sounded interesting. The execution was not. I barely started the book before I was getting so many names and dates thrown at me I couldn't keep up, so I stopped reading. I was expecting a few long biographical histories of particular women, instead it's a humble of high speed histories crammed into as few pages - or paragraphs - as possible, with only the most rudimentary attempt at organization or entertainment.
In a nonfiction book, you still must tell a story. And if this is meant to be a textbook, it shouldn't be presented like a novel.
In a nonfiction book, you still must tell a story. And if this is meant to be a textbook, it shouldn't be presented like a novel.
November 20, 2017
Very accessible and scholarly sound book on a topic that should be of interest to a wide audience (academic and non-academic). Highly recommended by a non-historian!
May 21, 2020
Dense and (for better and worse) more concerned with narrating lives and experiences without commentary, but very good and thorough
December 4, 2021
Extensively researched, an interesting and detailed memoir.
Read
August 6, 2022Part of history I was not aware of. Detailed research and documentation.
September 14, 2017
Perhaps not the most likable group of women but certainly passionate.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews