American workers in Stalin's Russia

Explaining History

During the 1930s over 100,000 American workers left the USA and crossed the Atlantic to the USSR. There they worked in automobile plants and other industrial enterprises of Stalin's Five Year Plans. The crisis of capitalism that was evident through the great depression and the seeming dynamism of Stalin's USSR and its rapid construction of industry convinced many that Soviet communism was the future. This podcast explores the fortunes of Stalin's American guest workers, many of whom took Soviet citizenship and were swallowed up by the terror as Stalin's NKVD searched for spies and imagined enemies and found a ready supply of victims in the large pool of foreign workers that had come to the USSR.

• I will be running a livestream Q&A for students on Wednesday November 20th. You can access it here, subscribe to the channel to get your reminder.
• https://youtube.com/live/knBuNLBD-bU?feature=share (in case the link doesn't work)

Help the podcast to continue bringing you history each week

If you enjoy the Explaining History podcast and its many years of content and would like to help the show continue, please consider supporting it in the following ways:

If you want to go ad-free, you can take out a membership here

Or

You can support the podcast via Patreon here

Or you can just say some nice things about it here

Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/explaininghistory.

---

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.