Once upon a time, Soviet socialism was cool. If you were an independent, adventurous, liberated American woman in the 1920s or 1930s, it was a place to escape the constraints and compromises of bourgeois living. In University of Chicago Press free e-book for January, American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream, Julia L. Mickenberg recovers the lives of the suffragists, reformers, educators, journalists, and artists who came to Russia in search of more just, equitable, and satisfying social arrangements. And most in the end were disillusioned, some by mundane realities, others by horrifying truths.
“[Mickenberg] recovers a lost piece of social history with this absorbing account of the adventurous American women who went to live in the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolution.”—Financial Times, Best of the Year Feature