HIST 102: U.S. History Since 1877 · Chapter 25, Lecture 3 · Richland Community College

Study Guide: Exit to Hell — Americans Who Fled to Stalin's Russia

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How to Use This Study Guide

Find the deck in your Canvas module. Click popup terms (dotted underlines) and press S for speaker notes.

Fill in your own words after reviewing the deck. Write full definitions — not copied from the slides.

Can I use this on the exam? Yes — but only if handwritten. No printouts, no copy-paste from Google or AI.

Part I: Topic Overview

During the Great Depression, thousands of American skilled workers — engineers, machinists, auto workers — made a fateful decision: they emigrated to the Soviet Union, answering Stalin's recruitment calls at a moment when U.S. unemployment had reached 25% and no federal safety net existed. Using Albert O. Hirschman's framework of exit, voice, and loyalty, the lecture frames this emigration not as naïveté but as a rational political verdict on a failed system. The Americans were welcomed initially as builders of Soviet showcase projects like Magnitogorsk and the Gorky Auto Plant. But beginning in the early 1930s, the Soviet state began confiscating their passports, voiding their contracts, and ultimately reclassifying them as foreign spies — sweeping most of them into the Great Terror of 1936–1938. The lecture traces this story through three individuals (Herman, Sgovio, and Scott), the mechanisms of Stalinist repression, and a comparative argument about visible versus concealed systems of failure.

Fill in the Blanks

Complete each statement using the lecture deck. Terms in bold appear in Part II.

Albert O. Hirschman identified three responses to a failing system: voice, loyalty, and .
In 1931, Soviet job recruiters placed ads for 6,000 skilled positions and received more than applications in eight months.
Roughly Americans were hired to work in the Soviet Union under the First Five-Year Plan, mainly in cities like Gorky and .
Victor Herman was arrested in 1938 not for espionage, but for refusing to renounce his .
Thomas Sgovio survived Kolyma by secretly drawing portraits on ; his drawings are now housed at the Hoover Institution at Stanford.
John Scott's book Behind the Urals (1942) is notable for offering neither celebration nor condemnation — only .
Beginning in 1932–33, the Soviet state began confiscating foreign workers' , making it impossible for them to leave the country.
Americans in the USSR were reclassified during the Terror as or agents of Wall Street and Roosevelt.
NKVD Order 00447 assigned arrest and execution by region — treating state killing as a production operation.
Ambassador Joseph E. Davies reported the Moscow Show Trial confessions to Washington as credible , even though the confessions had been extracted under torture.

Part II: Essential Terms & Concepts

Review each term in the deck (slides + popups). Write your definition in the space provided — in your own words.

Term	Definition & Significance
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty Section I — Exit as a Historical Category	After — deck + popups: Hirschman framework; emigration as deliberate political verdict, not apathy
Amtorg Trading Corporation Section I–II — The Rational Calculus / Scale of the Exodus	After — deck + popups: Soviet trade agency; placed U.S. newspaper job ads; 100,000 applications
First Five-Year Plan Section II — Scale and Geography of the Exodus	After — deck + popups: Stalin's 1928–32 rapid industrialization program; needed foreign technical workers
Victor Herman Section III — Three Americans	After — deck + popups: Detroit teenager → Soviet parachute champion → 18 years at Kolyma; returned 1976
Thomas Sgovio Section III — Three Americans	After — deck + popups: Buffalo artist; idealist émigré; arrested at U.S. embassy; drew Gulag on cigarette paper
John Scott / Behind the Urals Section III — Three Americans	After — deck + popups: Wisconsin welder; survived via technical utility; 1942 eyewitness account; neither propaganda nor exposé
Reclassification of Foreigners Section IV — From Guests to Enemies	After — deck + popups: Gradual administrative process: passports confiscated, contracts voided, complaints criminalized
Great Terror / Yezhovshchina Section V — Mechanisms of the Great Terror	After — deck + popups: 1936–38 mass repression; quota-driven NKVD operation; named for NKVD chief Yezhov
Troika Section V — Mechanisms of the Great Terror	After — deck + popups: Three-man NKVD tribunal; no defense, no appeal; sentenced hundreds per session
Holodomor Section V — Mechanisms of the Great Terror	After — deck + popups: Soviet-engineered Ukraine famine 1932–33; 3.5–7 million dead; now classified as genocide by many nations
Ambassador Joseph E. Davies Section IV — From Guests to Enemies	After — deck + popups: U.S. ambassador 1936–38; legitimized show trials; ignored arrested Americans; wrote pro-Stalin memoir
Walter Duranty Section V–VI — Journalistic Complicity / Double Betrayal	After — deck + popups: NYT Moscow correspondent; denied the Holodomor; won 1932 Pulitzer; prize never revoked
Kolyma Sections III & V — Three Americans / Gulag	After — deck + popups: Deadliest Gulag sector; Siberian Far East; gold mines; catastrophic mortality; Herman and Sgovio sent here
Double Betrayal Section VI — From Breadlines to Mass Graves	After — deck + popups: Forsaken by USSR (arrest, execution) AND by U.S. (Davies refused help; families told nothing)

Part III: Study Checklist

Check each item once you can explain it clearly without looking at your notes.

I can explain Hirschman's exit/voice/loyalty framework and apply it to the American emigrants' decision. (Section I — Exit as a Historical Category)
I can describe the economic conditions in 1931 that made Soviet recruitment persuasive to skilled American workers. (Section II — Scale and Geography of the Exodus)
I can compare Herman, Sgovio, and Scott — explaining why they emigrated and how their fates differed. (Section III — Three Americans)
I can explain how the Soviet state reclassified Americans from invited workers to "foreign agents" through administrative, not dramatic, procedures. (Section IV — From Guests to Enemies)
I can describe how the Great Terror operated as a quota-driven bureaucratic system, using troikas and NKVD Order 00447 as examples. (Section V — Mechanisms of the Great Terror)
I can explain the irony in the lecture's central argument: the emigrants left America because they had no faith in Roosevelt, and were then killed as Roosevelt's agents. (Section IV–VI — National Operations / Double Betrayal)
I can explain the role of Ambassador Davies and Walter Duranty in concealing Soviet atrocities from the American public. (Sections IV–V — Journalistic and Diplomatic Complicity)
I can articulate the lecture's thesis about the New Deal — that its key achievement was political, not economic — and connect it to the concept of visibility vs. concealment. (Section VI — Comparative Failure)

Part IV: Pause & Reflect

Write a substantive response to each question below. Use evidence from the lecture.

Section I — Exit as a Historical Category

(Pause & Reflect)

What is the difference between leaving a country as a refugee and leaving as an act of political protest? Does the distinction matter historically? Does it matter morally?

Section II — Scale and Geography of the Exodus

(Pause & Reflect)

What would a contemporary American worker have needed to believe — and what would they have needed to not know — for Soviet recruitment to be persuasive?

Section III — Three Americans

(Pause & Reflect)

Herman, Sgovio, and Scott made the same initial decision — but their fates diverged sharply. What variables explain the differences? Does survivorship tell us anything reliable about the system they survived?

Section IV — From Guests to Enemies

(Pause & Reflect)

Ambassador Davies reported the show trials as fair proceedings. What institutional pressures, ideological commitments, and diplomatic calculations might explain his judgment? Is this a case of deception, self-deception, or something else?

Section V — Mechanisms of the Great Terror

(Pause & Reflect)

NKVD Order 00447 assigned arrest and execution quotas by region. What does the use of production-style quotas for killing reveal about the Soviet state?