This is funny in a historical context, because a lot of Western folks went to the USSR for ideological reasons back in the day. And if it still existed, that would absolutely still be happening.
At most it gets written off as “well, women’s rights in the US were terrible, the USSR promised women better despite that being debatably actually true, most of those people were just American women fleeing the conditions of almost every country at the time, they wouldn’t have done it if they were men and the US economy wasn’t in a once in a lifetime crash”. Without ever talking about the other Western countries people fled to the USSR from. Or the men who went in similar numbers, at least when we consider only the people who went because they were socialists and wanted to contribute to building socialism. (I’m absolutely willing to believe Western women who weren’t communists went to the USSR simply because they were told by socialist women that it was less patrarchical, or at least trying to be, than any Western country at the time.)
And then we look past the 20s and 30s surge as the first Red Scare spiraled out of control, to the end of the Great Patriotic War and the Cold War truly beginning in earnest, and… You hear every story of folks from Warsaw Pact nations defeating to the West. But the stories of all the people who defected to the Soviet Union? You don’t hear a single one. It happened, but you don’t hear about it.
Honestly, so would I. Part of me really doesn’t want to just show up on some foreign communist party’s proverbial doorstep and take advantage of someone else’s revolution, you know, but in the context of an on-going Cold War and siege socialism, I’d be fighting for it the same as anyone else there, and for some weird reason, I’m theoretically a lot more comfortable showing up on the USSR’s ideological doorstep than anywhere else that ever claimed to be socialist.
This is funny in a historical context, because a lot of Western folks went to the USSR for ideological reasons back in the day. And if it still existed, that would absolutely still be happening.
That is true. A whole generation of authors, artists, thinkers and scientists and we never question why.
At most it gets written off as “well, women’s rights in the US were terrible, the USSR promised women better despite that being debatably actually true, most of those people were just American women fleeing the conditions of almost every country at the time, they wouldn’t have done it if they were men and the US economy wasn’t in a once in a lifetime crash”. Without ever talking about the other Western countries people fled to the USSR from. Or the men who went in similar numbers, at least when we consider only the people who went because they were socialists and wanted to contribute to building socialism. (I’m absolutely willing to believe Western women who weren’t communists went to the USSR simply because they were told by socialist women that it was less patrarchical, or at least trying to be, than any Western country at the time.)
And then we look past the 20s and 30s surge as the first Red Scare spiraled out of control, to the end of the Great Patriotic War and the Cold War truly beginning in earnest, and… You hear every story of folks from Warsaw Pact nations defeating to the West. But the stories of all the people who defected to the Soviet Union? You don’t hear a single one. It happened, but you don’t hear about it.
I’d have happily moved there and never looked back years ago.
Honestly, so would I. Part of me really doesn’t want to just show up on some foreign communist party’s proverbial doorstep and take advantage of someone else’s revolution, you know, but in the context of an on-going Cold War and siege socialism, I’d be fighting for it the same as anyone else there, and for some weird reason, I’m theoretically a lot more comfortable showing up on the USSR’s ideological doorstep than anywhere else that ever claimed to be socialist.