Approximately 70,000 to 80,000 foreign workers, specialists, and political exiles, most of them skilled workers, went to live and work in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1939.' Many of them subsequently recorded their impressions of what they had encountered there, leaving us a vivid depiction of social and economic conditions, the accuracy of which has been substantiated by recent scholarship and by documents published in the USSR. 2 The purpose of this essay is to examine the origins of those foreign workers, their reports about industrialization in Soviet Russia, and the impact of their testimony on political discourse, and especially on workers' movements, in their home countries. A Quantitative Portrait The first fragmentary data about foreign workers in Soviet Russia are from 1920. They refer mainly to Russians who had emigrated to the United States, among more than three million in the previous decades, and were now returning voluntarily or being deported to their own country. According to Soviet sources, approximately ten thousand of them (but probably more) came back between 1920 and 1922. Another few thousand returned in the following years. 3 Not a few-like Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman-were famous political activists; some, like Bill Shatov, Krasnoshchekov, Melnichansky, or Dybets, became important political figures in the USSR. 4 Most, however, were unskilled laborers who entered the factories or returned to the countryside and "disappeared" in it. A certain number of Western workers, mostly Germans, also emigrated to Russia. Estimates of their number vary and are open to question. Despite the uncertainty, it seems fair to state that at the end of 1921, at least five hundred Germans were working in Soviet factories, along with a few hundred other foreigners. 5 The first wave of politemigranty (political refugees) came at roughly
