There were about seventy to eighty thousand foreigners who came to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s looking for work and equality, and a large proportion was American. We must not forget that tons of men fled to Russia also in search of work and it was told that if you moved to Russia you would find a job in less than a week. This was appealing for the people of America whose economy was failing and they looked at a communist economy thriving and said maybe that's the way to run a country. Lots of citizens were going to Russia and they got tired of it and ended up making the process way harder and stopping lots of immigration.
The Americans who traveled there sometimes formed communities of American people and got to stay together and form communes in indusrty and agriculture. This is a picture of the Americans in the Soviet Union looking happy.
I would also like to point out the sad story for these Americans. After being pushed out of their own country when Capitalism seemed like a failure, they faced no happy ending. At first, they were given more freedom in Russia. However, with the onset of Stalin's Reign of Terror, many of these Americans ended up in prison in the USSR, often as slave laborers who worked to death in the frozen gulags. In the USSR, anyone who was different was suspect, which made these new American immigrants very at risk. So, these poor Americans, trying to find a better life, ended up screwing themselves over as Stalin grew more crazy with his Reign of Terror. The 30's were an incredibly time all over the world.
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