were unknown. Klivans spoke of the very different ideas towards love and marriage found in the Soviet Union, where it was now the case that ‘whether registered or not the marriage is legal, and the parties can separate permanently without any more ado about it. No five day waiting is required when a Russian wants to get married. He just goes ahead and gets married. If he likes, he can register the marriage, and this means that if he leaves her their property will be equally distributed.’8
Some American scaremongers peddled the myth that Communism was synonymous with an amoral society. In Klivans’s view, it was American society, whose members had sex in cars, which was promiscuous, and not the atheist Russians. Cars in Russia were few in number and used exclusively for work. It was freedom-loving Americans, she continued, who had to be deprived of alcohol by their own government’s prohibition laws. America’s deprived drinkers would be jealous of the Russians, who took their daily drinking quite seriously. And yet, despite the ready availability of alcohol, there were in her experience few real drunkards in evidence on the streets of Moscow or Leningrad. Wine and beer were the favoured tipples. Seemingly Russians could be trusted to behave themselves responsibly with alcohol, whereas Americans could not. Moreover, she believed that religion was not prohibited in Russia, although as a result of pressure brought to bear on those who attended worship most Russians did not attend church. Overall she challenged the alarmist conservative view that a lack of religious training in Russia had lowered the moral standard of the country.
Painting a picture of a society with difficult economic problems but one that had embarked on an exciting journey to a much better future, she confirmed to readers that despite the advantages of some aspects of the Communist system, there were extreme shortages of the basics in the Soviet Union. ‘One cannot buy the most trivial thing in Russia such as knives, scissors, screwdrivers, thumb tacks and the thousand and one other things that are so common in our five and ten cent store. An American five and ten cent store transplanted to Russia would probably give the Russians the impression that the millennium had arrived.’9 But Klivans was a convert, as she had found living in Russia had given her a tremendous feeling of stimulation at being part of an energetic society where everyone worked for a definite purpose. She would get her wish to go back to what she described as ‘the most exciting place on the globe’. She was not alone. Many fellow left-leaning US thinkers had already made similar pilgrimages to Moscow.
A highly perceptive observer, Klivans could have been an excellent US intelligence asset. She certainly was an important Soviet one, through her work passing on to her charges her observations on American life. She had learned during her stay exactly what was going on in the USSR. Her close friendships with her students had given her invaluable information. Her sources were impeccable, as her engineering students were at the heart of every aspect of the first Five-Year Plan. And her analysis of the state of Soviet economic development was correct. She told America the unvarnished truth that in the mind of the Russians Henry Ford was the greatest American and that they were trying to model Soviet industry on his methods. It was her view, however, that using the Ford method without Ford himself to direct them might not lead to success. She explained the importance of the mission in America her charges were about to be sent on:
The development in Russia has been so rapid that usually even after new industries have been established the training of the Russian labour has been so inadequate that they cannot run them. A tractor factory that was supposed to have turned out 100,000 tractors per year has turned out not over 2,000 in six months, and none of these would run more than 4 or 5 days without falling apart, solely because of the lack of training on the part of the workers.10
Earnestly Klivans explained that the Soviet Union was still very much a work in progress, not the finished article. Her students were now on the way to America in order to learn the skills to train Russian workers to drive the industrialisation programme. In Russia, she exclaimed, engineers were rated highest among the professional men, the value placed on them three times greater than that of a doctor. She adroitly turned the reporters’ dumbest questions to her advantage to explain the sacrifices required from the Russian people today for a brighter tomorrow: ‘There are no sleepless nights for Russian families, for no coffee is served. Food of the type familiar to us is impossible to obtain. Most of it is shipped to foreign countries, and the proceeds go towards purchasing machinery for the Soviet factories. Wheat, fish and the like are extensively imported, however, as are fine wines.’11 And the Russians, Miss Klivans declared, actually liked work. But few in the US cared to listen.
The readers of the newspapers were evidently hungry for news about the mysterious Soviet Union, a society with an answer to the world’s problems. No doubt they were confused by the conflicting accounts trickling out of Moscow. Jack Hayward, another correspondent, reported, perhaps untruthfully, in the same edition of the newspaper that when a Russian went shopping in Moscow, he was likely to find that his cheese purchase was made of wood; delicious. Klivans confirmed to readers that despite the ongoing effects of the Great Depression, standards of living were still higher for the majority in the United States than in Russia. But the gap was closing. The Ulanovskys, two ‘illegal’ Military Intelligence agents already embedded in New York at the time, agreed. They had witnessed first hand the conditions of the unemployed, homeless families in the shanty towns known as ‘Hoovervilles’ set up on the Great Lawn at Central Park and Riverside Park at 72nd Street in New York City. These Russian patriots arrived knowing that America was the classic country of capitalism,
the most disgusting in the world, and we sought to see all the evils of capitalism first hand quickly, and we found a lot of it unattractive … We saw the unemployed in line for soup, which was distributed by the Salvation Army. But the unemployed in the queue in 1931, during the Depression, were dressed better than my Moscow friends. We went looking in vain for a slum.12
• • •
But why was there such an intense American interest in news from the first Communist state? The answer lay in the grim, fatalistic mood of the US at the time. Trapped in the midst of the Great Depression, perhaps they were witnessing the death of the American dream itself. Like many of her generation, Gertrude Klivans had, through her travels, come to question the very future and purpose of liberal democracy and capitalism. She had discovered a ‘Soviet atmosphere, an atmosphere strangely free from the tradition of that brand of democracy to be found in the West’.13
The Communist state’s giant socialist experiment polarised US public opinion. Most US visitors to the Soviet Union returned home with their views reinforced. Those who had come seeking alternatives to the raging social crisis in depression-hit America found hope in the socialist experiment; others who sought it found deprivation, oppression and a rising red menace. Enthusiasm in liberal and left-leaning circles for Communism tracked the ups and downs of the US economic cycle. Initially, the Russian Revolution had been greeted with wild enthusiasm, although US banks lost billions on the default of Tsarist debt. ‘I have seen the future, and it works,’14 proclaimed American journalist Lincoln Steffens, who was targeted by Soviet Military Intelligence in 1931 for possible recruitment as an ‘agent of influence’. The Soviets approached many leading left-leaning cultural figures in this period to play an active role as advocates for socialism. Most rebuffed the approaches. Some did not. Steffens refused to join up, but as an ideologically sympathetic fellow traveller, he promised to help the Soviet Union when the interests of the US and the USSR coincided.
In the 1920s, as the US economy prospered in the post-war recovery, the Soviet Union had been roundly criticised by visiting international socialists for its failings. Despite thousands of invitations to sympathetic left-leaning artists, writers and politicians to visit, the Russians could garner few friends. Some criticised the Soviets for insufficient radicalism, as they wanted a world revolution. Many found issue with the Communists’ belief that ‘the end justifies the means’. The Communists in power were too brutal for their taste. Lincoln Steffens on the other hand found convenient excuses for the bloody excesses of the ‘Red Terror’. He concluded that the Soviets were not evil per
