Escaping to the Soviet Union

There have been a very large number of people from Eastern Bloc countries who were living abroad, and chose to return to their homeland, fully aware of the circumstances. I knew some in Romania. Milan Kundera’s book “Unberable Lightness of Being” is about a couple who returned from Switzerland to Czechoslovakia. Admittedly, not for economic reasons, but not everyone is primarily motivated by economics.

It has always amused me, now many people there are who seriously regard it as impossible for any sane person to embrace an idea different from their own, and are astonished that there might be a single example.

Coming Out of the Ice (YouTube link) was the story of Victor Herman, who left the USA for factory work in Stalin’s USSR and was sent to the gulag.