Somewhere in the archive of the twentieth century there is a photograph that this book keeps almost taking and never quite develops. It is Christmas Eve, 1932, in a white-painted cottage forty miles from Tashkent, and a group of Black cotton scientists from Tuskegee and Hampton are singing "Silent Night" with Langston Hughes, who has come across the mud of the new Uzbek republic to spend the holiday with them. Oliver Golden, born on a Mississippi plantation where his father had been a slave, is their host. He had come to Soviet Central Asia to grow cotton and to raise a daughter he did not want to see subjected to American racism, and here, Hughes wrote, among "these cotton-collective Negroes from America in the middle of a mud-cake oasis frosted with snow," he "didn't feel homesick at all." Paula Garb found the survivors of that world, and their children, half a century later, and wrote their lives down before they were lost. That is a real service, and it should be said first, because most of what follows is an argument about what the book cannot see.
They Came to Stay is an American anthropologist's oral history of the North Americans — workers, engineers, Communists, and above all Black Americans — who emigrated to the Soviet Union, mostly in the Depression years, and remained. Garb is not a propagandist by trade. She was a genuine ethnographer, at the time of writing a doctoral candidate at the Academy of Sciences' Institute of Ethnography under Victor Kozlov, and she went on to serious fieldwork on the Caucasus. She lived the subject: she settled in Moscow in 1975, raised two sons in Soviet schools, and the book closes with a long first-person account of her own contented Soviet life. The voices she recorded are real voices, and her affection for the people in them is not feigned. The book is warm, humane, and — this is the point of the introduction — built on a foundation it never names.
Spine and text agree for once: this is a 1987 book, and it reads like one. The latest events it can cite are the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress of 1986, a Gorbachev interview in L'Humanité of February 1986, and an Izvestia feature of April that year; Garb moved apartments in 1985 and dates her fieldwork to August of that year. The words glasnost and perestroika never appear, and Gorbachev enters only as a reformer cited approvingly for cracking down on absenteeism and drink. This is the second year of glasnost, before the great opening of 1988 — the year, it is worth remembering, that Bukharin, Kamenev, Zinoviev and Rykov were judicially rehabilitated. Garb wrote in the narrow window when the Terror had become speakable in the Soviet Union but the men it destroyed were still, officially, its enemies. That window is the pressure point of the whole book, and it explains both its unexpected candour and its limits.
Take the pull seriously, because it was serious. The Great Depression is the engine of the first half of the book, and Garb gets the texture right: skilled workers and radicals who watched mass unemployment at home and saw, in a country building itself from nothing, both a job and a cause. The Kemerovo "Kuzbas" colony of American workers in Siberia (1921–1926), the Karelian project that drew Finnish-Americans from Michigan and Minnesota with their own tools and savings, the Seyatel agricultural commune near Rostov — these were real ventures, and Garb researched them in local archives and with local historians rather than inventing them. Her Finnish-American subjects are not cardboard enthusiasts; Sally Laakso remembers being unable to bear the "easy-going attitude of many workers she saw in the 1930s," and Garb lets the complaint stand.
And then there is the moral centre of the book, which no amount of critical framing should be allowed to patronise. For Black Americans in the 1930s, the appeal of a state that outlawed racial discrimination as a matter of constitutional principle was not naïveté; it was one of the century's real moral facts, and Garb documents it concretely. Oliver Golden's whole life is here — the Klan at his heels in Mississippi, expulsion from Tuskegee after quarrelling with a white official, the first white man ever to offer him a handshake turning out to be a Communist, the theatre outside Harlem where the audience rose and left when he and his white wife Bertha sat down. A man who had heard Golden speak in Harlem in 1927 remembered, decades later, that Golden said "he had been treated with dignity for the first time in his life." Golden organised sixteen Black families, "specialists in subtropical agriculture," and took them to Uzbekistan in 1931; his cotton work, Garb says, helped lay the foundation of the republic's cotton industry, and he was elected to the Tashkent city soviet. His kidneys, which killed him in 1940, had been damaged years earlier when New York policemen breaking up a demonstration "struck Oliver repeatedly on his sides." This is history worth preserving, and preserving it is a real contribution to the record, one that a hostile reading of the book would only obscure. The USSR's promise to Black Americans was cashed, for these particular people, in dignity and work, and the book is the better for saying so.
Here is the structural fact from which everything critical follows. A collection assembled in 1987, out of the North Americans who stayed, prospered, and remained loyal enough to sit for a Progress-published interview, is by construction a survivorship sample. Garb interviewed "approximately one hundred people"; a few declined — one "bitter about his life in the Soviet Union," one afraid his "career opportunities could be hurt" — and she notes them and moves on. The immigrants who came in the 1930s and were then swept into the Great Terror, arrested as spies and shot or worked to death in the camps, are by definition not among her narrators. The question that decides the book is whether they appear at all.
They do — and this is where the easy hypothesis breaks. It would be convenient to report that the Terror simply does not happen to these people, that the purges are a silence. They are not. This is a glasnost book, and it says a remarkable amount. "Immigrants were among those arrested," Garb writes flatly. "Many former North American Finns who had come to help build up Karelia were taken away to labor camps, accused of being spies. Former North American farmers who had developed the Seyatel agricultural commune in the Rostov Region vanished in the night. Some of the immigrants who had remained in Kemerovo from the Kuzbas project of the 1920s were also arrested." The international club on Herzen Street in Moscow, where the immigrants had gone to dance, "was suddenly deserted." Anna Preikshas's father, brother and husband were arrested in 1937 "as 'enemies of the people,'" perished in the camps during the war, and were "exonerated in 1957." Garb even records a second wave, the anti-cosmopolitan campaign of 1948–53, when "most of the foreign-born were affected," people lost their jobs and some were exiled, and the immigrants learned the phrase "rootless cosmopolitan." She names the Kirov-era figures too: after the Seventeenth Party Congress of 1934, she reports, "1,108 of the 1,966 delegates were arrested and later shot."
An earlier Progress volume would not have printed a line of this. Garb prints pages of it, and the honesty is real. She refuses her own subjects' consolations: many immigrants believed the purges were the work of "infiltrators" sabotaging the socialist state from within, and Garb writes, in her own voice, "there is no scholarly support for this view." She admits the epistemic hole: "Not having any archival or census data on that period, it is impossible to say what percentage of the immigrant community was arrested." She quotes Lenin's Testament against Stalin — "I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post" — in a book published by the state Stalin built. All of this deserves credit, and the credit is the precondition for the criticism, not a softening of it.
So the finding is not a silence. It is a frame, and the frame is the 1956 frame, lightly refreshed for 1986. Watch where Garb locates the cause. The Terror begins, in her telling, with the enemy outside: "false evidence planted by German intelligence linked top Soviet Party leaders and military commanders with German espionage" — she footnotes this, tellingly, not to a Soviet source but to the American Marxist sociologist Albert Szymanski's Human Rights in the Soviet Union. From there, "Josef Stalin's response to real and perceived threats turned into spy mania," and "the situation was further complicated by the illegal actions of Beria." The 1956 Central Committee decision "On Overcoming the Personality Cult and Its Consequences" supplies the verdict she adopts: the purges were "the most flagrant violations of socialist legality." The Twentieth Congress condemned the personality cult; Gorbachev, in 1986, reaffirmed the condemnation; the account is closed.
Every element of that frame does the same work: it removes the state as agent. The Terror is caused by German provocation, by one man's paranoia, by Beria's criminality, by a "personality cult" — anything but the ordinary functioning of the society these immigrants had joined. The word for the deaths is "excesses." The word for what the deaths violated is "socialist legality," which presupposes a socialist legality that the Terror merely transgressed and did not express. And the victims, crucially, keep their standing: they are "innocent," "loyal Communist Party members," "devoted Communists," "dedicated government officials." Nobody in this book who was destroyed by the state is ever anything other than a good and loyal servant of it who was destroyed by mistake.
This is the discriminator that matters, and it is not about how often a bad thing is admitted. It is about whether the category can turn on the speaker's own side. Error is admissible here — Stalin erred, Beria was criminal, mistakes were made and later corrected. What is inadmissible is that the Soviet state, as such, could be the subject rather than the accidental instrument of the crime. The purges arrive already sorted into loyal victims and external villains, with the system itself preserved intact in the middle, and the survivors' own loyalty is the proof that the system was sound: they stayed, and they were right to stay, and the dead were simply unlucky. A memoir of the loyal cannot hold the thought that the same state which welcomed them at Leningrad harbour in 1931 also, in the same years, emptied the Herzen Street club at night.
You can see the frame's outer wall in what does not appear. The Moscow show trials, as trials, are absent — the word does not occur in that sense in the entire book. The Left Opposition is named once, obliquely, as the thing Stalin overcame by "annihilating his opposition"; Trotsky appears exactly once, and only as a face Nick half-remembered from pre-revolutionary photographs. The Terror, in other words, is stripped of its politics. It becomes a weather event — spy mania, a climate, a tragedy visited on innocents — rather than what it also was: the physical destruction of the revolutionary generation and its rivals, a settling of political accounts. This was not, in 1987, wholly Garb's choice to make. The men who could have supplied the political content were still officially guilty; their rehabilitation was a year away, and in Trotsky's case never came. The 1956 frame was not merely the lazy option in 1987 but very nearly the ceiling of the sayable. That is the fairest thing that can be said about it, and it is also the sharpest, because it means the book's central silence is not a personal failing of a decent scholar but the exact shape of what the state would still not let itself think.
There is one more turn of the screw, and it is the specific fate of the foreigners. What made the émigrés from Detroit and Winnipeg peculiarly vulnerable in 1937 was precisely that they were foreign: cut off, conspicuous, and — in the case of the Americans — holding or having surrendered passports that no longer protected them. That mechanism is the one thing Garb's frame structurally cannot name, because "German intelligence" and "Beria" cannot explain why it was the international club that emptied first. Her book is full of passports, but every one of them runs the other way: immigrants happily acquiring Soviet citizenship, the Goldens "issued Soviet passports," Carl Watts's family given theirs at the new Soviet embassy in Ottawa. The American passport as a trap — surrendered at the counter, allowed to lapse, useless when the arrests came, while the US embassy under Ambassador Davies looked the other way — is nowhere. It could not be documented from inside the loyal community, and it would not have survived the frame. It was documented later, most fully in Tim Tzouliadis's The Forsaken (2008): the American emigrants who queued at the Moscow embassy for help and were turned back into the street, and then into the Gulag. Garb, writing in 1987 from within the community of those who were spared, could hold the arrests only as a rumour of the missing, at one remove, in the memories of the loyal. The forsaken themselves are, by the book's construction, unreachable.
The anti-Stalinist left did not need Tzouliadis, or 1988, or the opening of the archives, to see what Garb's frame keeps out. It saw it at the time. Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed, written in 1936 — the very moment Oliver Golden was sitting on the Tashkent city soviet and the Seyatel farmers were still alive — is the exact counter-text to the personality-cult frame, because it refuses to explain the Terror by Stalin's psychology or Beria's crimes or German provocation at all. It locates the coming slaughter in the material interests of a privileged bureaucratic caste defending its own position. "The sword of the dictatorship," Trotsky wrote, "which used to fell those who wanted to restore the privileges of the bourgeoisie, is now directed against those who revolt against the privileges of the bureaucracy. The blows fall not upon the class enemies of the proletariat, but upon the proletarian vanguard." Where Garb's 1956 decision speaks of "violations of socialist legality," Trotsky had already described the machinery of the trials — "judicial forgeries, which have become the normal thing," confessions "dictated by itself" and wrung "under threat of the firing squad" — two years before the last great Moscow trial and while the constitution Garb's sources would praise was being drafted.
And on the one point the survivors' memoir cannot reach, Trotsky is explicit. Writing in 1936, he counted the foreign victims among the rest: "During these years hundreds of Oppositionists, both Russian and foreign, have been shot, or have died of hunger strikes, or have resorted to suicide." The foreign militants who vanished were not a discovery of the glasnost press or of later American historians; their fate was named, from exile, as it was happening.
This is worth pressing, because of where these emigrants had come from. They were, most of them, formed on the American left — the Communist Party, the Finnish halls, the Pullman porters' union, the milieu that recruited Oliver Golden with a handshake. That same left was, by the late 1930s, tearing itself apart precisely over the news from Moscow: the trials, the confessions, the disappearances. The knowledge that Garb's frame keeps at arm's length was circulating, bitterly and publicly, in the very neighbourhoods her subjects had left. To notice this is not to convict anyone of bad faith. It is to locate the book's silence exactly: it is not the silence of a world that did not know, but of a community that had staked its life on the other answer, narrated by an anthropologist writing from inside the state whose 1956 verdict she could refine but not exceed. The Finnish-Americans she names — "taken away to labor camps, accused of being spies" — were among the hardest hit of all the immigrant groups, and the book can say that they suffered without being able to say that their suffering was anything other than a wrong done to loyal people by a system that was otherwise sound.
The honest contrast this book invites is therefore not between Garb's warmth and some colder truth, but between two things that were true at once and that her frame cannot hold together: the same Depression-era hope that brought the Goldens and the Laaksos to build a new world, and the terror that consumed their comrades in the building of it — a terror that their own tradition's dissidents had analysed, in real time, as intrinsic to the thing and not an aberration upon it.
None of this is a charge against the people in the book. Their idealism was real, their courage in leaving was real, and the dignity a Black cotton scientist found in Uzbekistan in 1932 was as real as the cross the Klan burned outside Anna Preikshas's house in West Virginia in 1916. Garb honoured them by writing them down, and the reader who wants to know why anyone crossed an ocean toward Stalin's Russia will learn more from her interviews than from a shelf of denunciations. The criticism falls on the frame, not the faces: on a book that can see the empty club on Herzen Street and record that the immigrants "vanished in the night," and still cannot say what made them vanish, because the only word its moment would give it was mistake. The people came to stay. So did the question the book leaves standing — the one about everyone who came, and did not.