And the Winds Blew Cold Stalinist Russia As Experienced by an American Emigrant

9780939923854

0939923858

This is the story of Eva Stolar Meltz, a Russian-American woman who emigrated with her family from Chicago, Illinois, in 1931 to the USSR, where for over 40 years she endured life in Communist Russia. This book chronicles a fascinating life that unfolded within tumultuous political, social, and economic circumstances. The perspective of an idealistic young emigrant to the USSR is unusual and provides insight into the Communist movement in Chicago in the 1920s; the preferential treatment emigrants with much-needed skills first received when they arrived in the Soviet Union in the 1930s; the evolution of Communism under Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev; the betrayal by friends during periods of political and social oppression; exile to a collective farm during World War II; the terrifying ordeal of persecution and the brutality of political imprisonment in a labour camp in the 1950s; the difficulty of living day-to-day in a closed society; and the struggle to leave the USSR in the 1970s.