1. Unpublished article by Eugene Lyons, "The Kremlin Conquers an American: A Russian Memoir," n.d., p. 3, in Zara Witkin Collection, Hoover Institution Archives.

2. Eugene Lyons, The Life and Death of Sacco and Vanzetti (New York, 1927). Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants to America, were philosophical anarchists executed for a murder committed during a robbery. Though the evidence was inconclusive, the judge and jury convicted them, apparently partly on the basis of their beliefs and their evasion of military duty. The case drew worldwide attention as part of the anti-Communist hysteria gripping America after World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. Though public outcry forced the governor of Massachusetts to order an investigation, and though the trial was found to have involved breaches of legal standards, the conviction was not overturned. Sacco and Vanzetti were electrocuted in August 1927, to the horror of many in America and throughout the world.

3. Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia (New York, 1937).

4. Lyons, "Kremlin," p. 1.

5. Ibid., p. 2.

4. Lyons, "Kremlin," p. 1.

5. Ibid., p. 2.

6. See Andrea Graziosi, "Foreign Workers in Soviet Russia, 1920-1940: Their Experience and Their Legacy," International Labor and Working-Class History 33 (Spring 1988): 38-59.

7. John Scott, Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia's City of Steel (Boston, 1942; Bloomington, 1989).

8. Andrew and Maria Smith, I Was a Soviet Worker (New York, 1937).

9. Fred E. Beal, Proletarian Journey: New England, Gastonia, Moscow (New York, 1937).

10. Peter Francis, I Worked in a Soviet Factory (London, 1939).

11. Walter Arnold Rukeyser, Working for the Soviets: An American Engineer in Russia (New York, 1932).

12. Allan Monkhouse, Moscow, 1911-1933 (Boston, 1934). In the Metro-Vickers trial a large group of Soviet and British engineers was convicted of deliberately sabotaging Soviet electrical generating facilities. The British engineers were deported; the Soviet engineers received terms in the labor camps. See n. 42 to the Memoirs, below.

13. Among the more facile was Alcan Hirsch. In his book Industrialized

Russia (New York, 1934), Hirsch failed to even mention food shortages at the time of the 1932/33 famine and argued that Soviet labor laws were not repressive enough. See also Maurice Edelman, How Russia Prepared: The USSR beyond the Urals (New York, 1942). Edelman was a Russian-speaking British businessman in the Soviet Union from 1932 to 1939; his book maintains Stalinism was necessary because it strengthened the USSR's defenses.

14. John D. Littlepage and Bess Demaree, In Search of Soviet Gold (New York, 1937); A. P. Serebrovskii, Na zolotom fronte (Moscow, 1936).

15. Sergei Mironovich Frankfurt, Men and Steel: Notes of a Director of Soviet Industry , trans. S. D. Kogan (Moscow and Leningrad, 1935).

16. Victor Kravchenko, I Chose Freedom: The Personal and Political Life of a Soviet Official (New York, 1946).

17. Lyons, Assignment in Utopia , p. 514.

18. Lyons, "Kremlin," pp. 9-10.

19. Ibid., p. 13.

18. Lyons, "Kremlin," pp. 9-10.

19. Ibid., p. 13.

20. This is the judgment of Anthony Sutton ("Memorandum on Zara Witkin," apparently dated 2 January 1968, in Zara Witkin Collection, Hoover Institution Archives). Sutton examined several hundred reports by and about Western engineers who had worked in the Soviet Union while researching his Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development , vol. 1, 1917-1930 ; vol. 2, 1930-1945 ; and vol. 3, 1945-1965 (Stanford, 1968-73). See the chapter "Technical Assistance to Planning and Construction Projects," 2:249-61. The Dutch Communist S. J. Rutgers also worked for the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate as a technical consultant on irrigation projects and as a member of its commission on foreign specialists in 1930 and 1931 (Gertruda Trincher and Karl Trincher, Rutgers [Moscow, 1967], pp. 172-73).

21. I am grateful to Professor Holland Hunter for this appraisal and for pointing out the difficulty of making absolute comparisons between the Soviet Union and other countries, or between the Soviet Union and tsarist Russia. Modern attempts to quantify Soviet economic growth include G. Warren Nutter, Growth of Industrial Production in the Soviet Union (Princeton, 1962); Richard Moorsteen and Raymond P. Powell, The Soviet Capital Stock, 1928-1962 (Homewood, Ill., 1962); Abram Bergson, Real National Income of Soviet Russia since 1928 (Cambridge, Mass., 1961); and Abram Bergson and Simon Kuznets, Economic Trends in the Soviet Union (Cambridge, Mass., 1963). R. W. Davies concludes that Witkin's estimates for Soviet construction may have been somewhat low, but in order of magnitude they were "about right" ("Capital Investment and Capital Stock in the USSR, 1928-1940: Soviet and Western Estimates," in Robert W. Davies, ed., Soviet Investment for Planned Industrialization, 1929-1937: Policy and Practice [Berkeley, 1984], pp. 149-50).

22. Lyons, "Kremlin," p. 6.

23. Ibid., p. 7.

22. Lyons, "Kremlin," p. 6.

23. Ibid., p. 7.

24. "Mlle. Zessarskaya [ sic ] is excellent as Praskova and acts the part with pleasing restraint. Despite her cumbersome peasant's costume and headgear, she often appears exceedingly attractive and gives evidence of an authentic depth of character" ("Intelligent Soviet Film," review of Her Way of Love, New York

Times , 21 August 1929). In a review of Grain , a critic commented, ''The buxom Emma Tsessarskaia [ sic ] is capable and wholesome, as usual, in the role of the pioneer kolkhoz (collective farm) girl, who is driven out of the fake cooperative group started by the kulaki [rich peasants] as a blind for their nefarious schemes early in the action and who returns later as a skilled tractor operator and helps the real kolkhoz folk make good" ("At the Cameo Theatre," New York Times , 18 January 1936). A Soviet encyclopedia describes her portrayal of Aksinia in the 1931 film Tikhii Don ( The Quiet Don ), based on Mikhail Sholokhov's novel, as "charming, full of life, and vividly temperamental" ( Kinoslovar ', [Moscow, 1970], s.v. "Tsesarskaia, Emma," p. 870).

25. Lyons, "Kremlin," p. 7.

26. Ibid.

25. Lyons, "Kremlin," p. 7.

26. Ibid.

27. Waldo Frank, Dawn in Russia: The Record of a Journey (New York, 1932), p. 172. Tsesarskaia was no stranger to prominent foreign visitors. She knew Albert Rhyss Williams and visited Armand Hammer with Witkin. Both Frank and Williams produced books typical of the naive foreigners who visited the USSR in the 1930s and believed everything their tour guides told them. See, for instance, Williams's The Soviets (New York, 1937). The purge trials disenchanted Frank with the Soviet experiment; see Chart for Rough Waters: Our Role in a New World (New York, 1940) and The Memoirs of Waldo Frank (Amherst, 1973).

28. Lyons, "Kremlin," p. 8.

29. Ibid., pp. 8, 10-11.

28. Lyons, "Kremlin," p. 8.

29. Ibid., pp. 8, 10-11.

30. Witkin and Lyons's tour of Europe is discussed in the chapter "A Tour of Tyrannies" in Lyons's Assignment in Utopia , pp. 610-23. Lyons had been assigned a series of political articles for Cosmopolitan , and the tour was oriented primarily to the investigation of fascism in Western and Central Europe.

31. Lyons wrote the following about the meeting with Rolland:

We tried to speak of Russia. But Rolland would not listen. Tremulously, in genuine panic, he shied away every time, switching the talk to Germany, France, the war and the peace. I stared in unbelieving consternation—not in all my thirty-six years had I seen a clearer show of intellectual and moral diffidence. Here were two earnest young men, reasonably intelligent, who had lived and worked for many years in Russia—who were eager to save a little of the faith they had brought with them to Russia. At the very least, Rolland might have made some inquiries about conditions in that country; about the truth or falseness of the famine reports, the direction in which that nation was tending and the temper of its humanity. He asked nothing and looked distressed each time Zara or I tried to drag the conversation back to Russia.... When we forced him to speak by point-blank questions, Rolland limited himself to a few threadbare formulas about the Soviet Union's hostile surroundings.

Lyons recalled that Rolland's Soviet Russian wife, "an ardent communist of the Stalinesque brand," did her best to "divert the conversation to safer channels" (ibid., pp. 618-19). See also n. 62 to the Memoirs, below.

32. Witkin's disenchantment must have been particularly painful. In the

letter of introduction he and Lyons had sent Rolland before leaving Moscow, they had written that they shared a "profound admiration for the viewpoints you exemplify"; that "the moral integrity and humane qualities in your life's work are especially precious at the present time of cynical abuse of power and ruthless destruction of human values"; and that "searching for the guiding principles needed amid the confusions and threatened dangers of our time ... we have often turned to the fundamental values running through your life and work" (Letter from Zara Witkin and Eugene Lyons to Romain Rolland, 31 January 1934, Fonds Romain Rolland, Département des Manuscrits, Division Occidentale, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris).

33. "The Home of the Future: What Will It Look Like? How Will It Be Built? How Much Will It Cost?" California Monthly , October 1934, pp. 12-15, 42-43.

34. Letters from Zara Witkin to Romain Rolland, lo April 1939, 8 August 1939, 26 December 1939, Fonds Romain Rolland, Département des Manuscrits, Division Occidentale, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

35. Lyons, "Kremlin," p. 14.

36. See David Caute, The Fellow Travellers: A Postscript to the Enlightenment (New York, 1973).

37. Freda Utley's memoirs, Odyssey of a Liberal (Washington, 1970), are largely concerned with this issue. See also the chapter "To Tell or Not to Tell?" in Lyons, Assignment in Utopia , pp. 624-36.

38. See n. 20 above.

39. I used the following additional sources in the preparation of the introduction: phone conversation with Bernard Witkin, spring 1988; "Memorandum of conversation with Mr. Zara Witkin," U.S. Embassy in Warsaw to Secretary of State, 27 December 1933, State Department Decimal File 861.5017, Living Conditions/737, National Archives; "Possible acts of reprisal," dispatch from U.S. Embassy in Warsaw to Secretary of State, 29 December 1933, State Department Decimal File 361.112, Witkin, Zara/1, National Archives; letters of Eugene Lyons to Zara Witkin, 2 December 1937, Zara Witkin Collection, Hoover Institution Archives; Antony Sutton to Eugene Lyons, 14 October 1967, Zara Witkin Collection, Hoover Institution Archives; Who's Who in Engineering: A Biographical Directory of the Engineering Profession (New York, 1937), p. 1530; America's Young Men: The Official Who's Who among the Young Men of the Nation (Los Angeles, 1936), p. 616; ibid. (1938), p. 641; obituaries in Engineering News-Record , 27 June 1940, and Los Angeles Times , 7 June 1940; Certificate of Death for Zara Witkin.

38. See n. 20 above.

39. I used the following additional sources in the preparation of the introduction: phone conversation with Bernard Witkin, spring 1988; "Memorandum of conversation with Mr. Zara Witkin," U.S. Embassy in Warsaw to Secretary of State, 27 December 1933, State Department Decimal File 861.5017, Living Conditions/737, National Archives; "Possible acts of reprisal," dispatch from U.S. Embassy in Warsaw to Secretary of State, 29 December 1933, State Department Decimal File 361.112, Witkin, Zara/1, National Archives; letters of Eugene Lyons to Zara Witkin, 2 December 1937, Zara Witkin Collection, Hoover Institution Archives; Antony Sutton to Eugene Lyons, 14 October 1967, Zara Witkin Collection, Hoover Institution Archives; Who's Who in Engineering: A Biographical Directory of the Engineering Profession (New York, 1937), p. 1530; America's Young Men: The Official Who's Who among the Young Men of the Nation (Los Angeles, 1936), p. 616; ibid. (1938), p. 641; obituaries in Engineering News-Record , 27 June 1940, and Los Angeles Times , 7 June 1940; Certificate of Death for Zara Witkin.