Myra Page - Böcker

The Depression era closingof a Ford plant sends Andy and two companions to Moscow to find work ina Soviet automotive plant, where he meets Natasha, an exemplar of the"new Soviet woman." Based on Myra Page's own experiences in Moscow duringthe first Five-Year Plan, Natasha is a portrait of women's contradictorysocial position in the early periods of socialist construction. At thecore of this novel is a firsthand look at the developing forces and changingrelations of production forces that bring about the conversion of Andyinto a "Moscow Yankee." While revealing the political and economic policiesthat would inevitably lead to the demise of Soviet-style socialism, Moscow Yankee refutes the notion that egalitarian societies cannot succeedbecause they fail to take into account the individualism and greed of"human nature." Barbara Foley's introduction analyzes the Soviet Socialistconstruction in Page's novel and the politics of the novelistic form inrelation to Moscow Yankee.Originally published in 1935"A picture of Americans luredto Moscow by hope in the 'great experiment,' and of others driven thereby the depression, and of still others attracted by the simple desireto get good engineering jobs, Moscow Yankee; has a decidedvalue . . . a sense of life, stirring in the chaos of destruction andreconstruction." -- The New York Times Book Review

This novel is one of the most clear-eyed and compelling works of the Great Depression. As Marge Crenshaw grows up in the cotton mills, she learns to fight the forces of racial, sexual, and class oppression that hold her, her family, and her community back. With her brother Tom, who has joined the Communist Party, Marge eventually becomes a union organizer who leads the famous strike at Loray Mill in Gastonia, North Carolina—a real-life strike in 1929 that claimed numerous lives, including that of organizer and songwriter Ella May Wiggins. Myra Page was an active member of the Communist Party, and Gathering Storm stands out from other Gastonia novels because it was printed in the Soviet Union. Yet this is not a novel about outsider agitators infiltrating a peaceful Southern town. Page was born in Virginia and worked as a labor organizer throughout the South. And as Marge’s heart-wrenching story demonstrates, the fight against the forces of capitalist exploitation and inequality was entirely homegrown. Gathering Storm is a bona fide Communist novel; but with the story of Marge and her family at its heart, it is also a deeply intimate novel that proves the personal is always political.