Unlike all the other foreign communes, Seattle remained and, eventually, thrived. In 1924, during their second wheat harvest, Enoch Nelson reported that an expert from the All Russian Department of Agriculture, who had been traveling the country inspecting the wheat harvest, announced that Seattle had “the best stand of wheat he had seen this year,” and directed that it all be reserved for seed. Anna Louise Strong reported a similar situation in 1933.[1] The Azov-Don Agricultural Union (Priazovdonsel’soiuz) calculated that Seattle produced approximately 306 tons of grain, making it the eleventh highest producer in the region.[2] By 1927 the commune was able to sell the government nearly five times as much grain without a significant increase in membership. In that year, the commune marketed 52 percent of all its produce, and increased that to 63 percent the next year. Given its efficient, American equipment, commune members claimed by the late 1920s to be able to expend 10-20 times less labor per hectare than peasants and to produce ten times as much grain.[3]
By the commune's tenth anniversary, kommunary could proudly point to more than a thousand square meters of dwellings, two modern dairy barns with concrete floors each able to accommodate a hundred head of cattle, two large silos for cattle feed, pigpens holding more than a thousand hogs, a sheep barn for nearly 400 head, a granary, two corn sheds, several windmills to pump water plus two large water reservoirs, a machine shop, a woodworking shop (which made doors, windows, and furniture), a brickyard, and a saw mill, and they were just completing the dining hall, able to seat 350, with a modern kitchen and bakery.[4]
As indicated by the variety of its infrastructure, the commune's members defined their mission as not just to create a successful grain farm but also to develop a self-contained community and to ensure “the full satisfaction of the material and cultural needs of its members on the basis of complete collective use of its means.”[5] Seattle aimed to produce nearly everything its members needed. The kommunary refused to specialize in one-crop agriculture, because, by doing so, they would have sacrificed their creed of self-sufficiency for one of market-based trading. In addition to raising the typical farm animals and crops—nine grains in total—the commune planted thousands of trees for windbreaks or for shade along the streets of their village and in their village park, along with American fruit trees, extensive vegetable gardens, and some of the flowers to which they had become accustomed in the United States. Anna Louise Strong, in August 1933, reported that her evening meal included ten apricots as large as peaches, because the trees had been especially productive and the nation-wide shortage of sugar meant that the commune was unable to can the fruit for later use. E. M. Dashwood, in 1936, however, reported that the commune’s orchards of apples, plums, and cherries were not doing well, though the vineyard was flourishing. The commune even grew tobacco for their members, ninety percent of whom smoked.[6]
Even though kommunary earned an hourly wage, in fact they largely gave up monetary payment. When a proportion of the crops and profits had been sent to the government, the commune could divide the remainder of the proceeds. One ruble per day for food was deducted from each person’s share. The commune kept a ledger, noting what each person had earned, but kommunary had to request and justify a request for payment. The commune was reluctant to give wages for anything other than clothing and receiving earned wages was therefore difficult. By 1928, despite its expenditures on machinery and buildings, the commune had managed to accumulate a financial reserve slightly less than 45,000 rubles (almost $23,000 at the official rate of exchange in 1928, but less than $2,600 in equivalent purchasing power for manufactured goods outside the Soviet Union in 1928, or more than $39,000 in equivalent purchasing power in 2020).[7]
Social Life in Seattle
Commune life was not all work. Some of the kommunary had comparatively large personal collections of books they had brought with them. Visitors described commune members as literate, well-rounded people. During non-working hours, they participated in both party activities and social events. The commune offered bi-lingual classes in agriculture and political science (the latter of which was, of course, a variant of party activities). For recreation, commune members had drama and radio circles and also a small “orchestra,” with instruments that had come from America.
In the evening, the commune's dining hall was regularly transformed into a “club” for performances by the orchestra or a drama group or for a film. Enoch Nelson noted in late 1924 that they tried to show a film every Saturday evening, but could not always obtain one. Most films, he explained, were educational, about farming and stock-raising, but with an occasional comedy. Such cultural activities were sometimes open to nearby peasants.
On communist holidays, notably International Workers' Day (May 1), the commune held dances and screened films to which it invited local peasants. One source describes American-style dances that lasted from Saturday evening until Sunday dawn. Aili Tarhala, who arrived in 1923 at the age of fourteen, remembered in 1984 that many young people lived nearby and attended Seattle’s dances. Grigori Flippovitsh, whose parents came in 1922, recalled that the commune also had jazz nights—probably the first jazz heard in the region.[8]
Marriage was often informal, and those who wished to live together simply asked for married quarters. Some commune members, to be certain, had been married before arriving in Seattle. Julia, a Polish kommunarka in 1936, had been married in a church in the United States. On the commune, however, there was no church and no formality regarding marriage. Those who wished a formal certificate could register their marriage in the nearest village. A 1928 newspaper account noted as one deficiency of the commune its “impropriety toward women,” and Dashwood specified, “Those who had already been married before they arrived at the Commune were generally faithful to each other . . . The young people were often very promiscuous. They changed partners frequently.” However, as Saulit’s wife reported to Dashwood, this situation caused few problems; in the commune’s twelve years there had been only one fight as a result of anger over loss of a partner, when a woman had thrown a bucket at the head of another woman.[9]
Childcare was also communal. During the fall and winter months, children had primary schooling in the commune. Older children went to Sal’sk for upper grades. Dashwood described Seattle’s school building as “one of the best of the buildings,” but thought the space inadequate for the 50-60 children, all under the age of seven. Younger children remained in childcare during the summer, but children between seven and fourteen, according to Dashwood, “ran very wild.” All the children, she thought, “looked very healthy and strong,” and “lived almost entirely in the open air.”[10] Aili Tarhala later recalled that those over fourteen were expected to work—dish washing, cleaning, fieldwork, serving meals—but, she thought, not hard work for the young.[11] According to a 1928 profile of the commune, 14 children—most likely all the children under the age of 14—belonged to the Pioneer organization. In addition, 29 adolescents and young adults belonged to the Komsomol (Communist League of Youth). [12]
Despite its promise of “full freedom of action within the frame of general lawfulness,” the commune placed some restrictions on personal behavior. The kommunary were proud that they “had no religion,” and they immediately converted the small church, one of the few usable buildings when they arrived, into their first school. (See photo, chapter 1.) The commune–or at least its leadership—also shunned alcohol, particularly samogon, home-made distilled alcohol, well known in the Russian countryside. In 1923, when a Russian journalist asked if the kommunary drank Russian samogon or whiskey in the American fashion, Hendrickson furiously responded, “What samogon? Is it not outlawed by your government? How can you ask such a question? Should we do something that has been forbidden by law, more so by a law so logical and beneficial?” Hendrickson was referring to either the Soviet imposition of prohibition, which lasted until 1923, or the Soviet monopoly on production of alcohol thereafter which was intended, in part, to eliminate samogon.[13] The Seattle commune would no more tolerate illicit drinking than it would religion.
Wesson notes that the Soviet communes in general seemed quite bizarre to the Soviet peasantry, and the strict life of the Seattle commune, its hostility to religion and illicit alcohol, and its dubious morals may have limited recruitment of new members from among local peasants, in spite of the commune’s outreach efforts. In addition to holiday celebrations and Saturday evening dances to which the local peasants were invited, the commune also helped local peasants by providing medicine and lending its expertise in mechanized farming. Nonetheless, early on, the commune found it difficult to attract new members or even to keep the members it had. The local land authority cited the commune’s members’ poor Russian in explaining their inability to attract more members.[14] Communist Party restrictions may have constrained recruitment in the US. Early in 1925, the Comintern issued "very emphatic instructions . . . not to grant permission to individuals in the United States to return to the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics,” because thousands of workers seeking to go there only added “to the difficulties of the economic problems of the Soviet Government."[15] But exceptions were possible, and by 1928 the commune had grown to 260 members, due mostly to 121 new members from abroad in 1926.
Economic Success and Continued Ethnic Discord
As its membership grew, the commune expanded its efforts and brought more land under cultivation—almost half of the total by the late 1920s.[16] The commune established a productivity record when one of its American-made caterpillar tractors worked 2,501 hours in one year, the best record for any tractor in the entire country. Such an accomplishment was a reflection not only on the quality of their American-made equipment but also on the skills and equipment of the commune’s American-trained mechanics and machinists who not only did routine maintenance but also had to make complex replacement parts—and who provided similar services for nearby farms. Enoch Nelson provided an example of the mechanics’ ingenuity: they made replacement feed-mill grinding heads from an old car axle. Indeed, a newspaper article in 2002 noted that one of the original plows and some of the original wood- or metal-working machinery (it’s not clear which) were still in use.[17] As early as 1925, the Soviet government sent agricultural students from Moscow and Leningrad to work with the commune's agricultural machinery, some of which were unusual or even one-of-a-kind in the Soviet Union at that time.[18] Even so, in 1926, when the commune wanted to buy more American farm machinery, the Soviet government refused permission for them to send Russian money to the U.S. for that purpose.[19]
Beyond its state-of-the-art machinery and skilled metal workers, Seattle’s success owed something—probably a great deal—to the ideological dedication of the commune members--or at least a significant and influential proportion of them--to a vision of egalitarian, communal life, their version of communism. Almost from its inception, the local and regional media lauded Seattle as the epitome of communal living. Mikhail Kozlov, a journalist from Trudovoi Don (The Laboring Don), the regional newspaper, particularly stressed how the Seattle kommunary truly embraced the communist vision. He also wrote of the commune in 1923, “There is order, neatness, cleanliness, fresh air and no flies. I ask myself again: Why don't Russians have this? In the end these Americans are just Russians [whether from Finland or elsewhere in the old Russian empire]. They merely emigrated to America, so why did they become like people from another planet?”[20]
Such achievements seemed to bring out in Kozlov not only admiration, but also envy and even disdain. He quoted the chairman: “'We,' [he] said, 'cannot live without elementary comforts. I was shocked at how Russians live without electricity and telephone.' He walked away from me, as if I was at fault for Russians' living in the countryside without electricity and telephones. Unruffled he put a cigarette in his mouth, filled with gold and black teeth.”[21] Seattle was an international commune based on the goal of realizing communism, and the chairman, on behalf of the kommunars, spoke condescendingly, even with righteous anger, as in the case of the samogon, when he felt that others had not done as well in meeting the goals of communism.
Nonetheless, the Seattle kommunary achieved on a small scale what Russian communists desired—mechanized communism in the countryside. Its success became a model in 1929, during the lead-up to the decision to collectivize agriculture. Pravda featured Seattle as a model of machine-based agriculture that all collective farms would soon enjoy. Previous Pravda articles had praised Seattle as the “greatest in the Soviet Union in strength,” and a 1929 issue featured an article written as a letter from the commune to the workers of Moscow and Leningrad.[22]
Articles on the commune often focused on its multi-ethnic membership, but emphasized that the commune was a happy community, rather than addressing the persisting problems among the national groups. A 1927 survey of international communes by the Regional Land Authority listed Seattle's membership by nationality: one Latvian (Saulit), one Estonian (his wife), seven Russians, 27 Belorussians, 29 Ukrainians, and 135 Finns. In the survey questionnaire on the commune's deficiencies, the Russians may have formed a bloc, since exactly seven respondents cited “the Finnish nationals” as a major deficiency in the commune, and several claimed that the Finns “hated” the Russians. The Finns, they complained, excluded Russians from leadership and would not allow commune members to marry due to a shortage of housing for couples. The report noted the agricultural successes of commune but encouraged the Finns to be more attentive to the Russians. However, this intervention did not stop conflicts between the Finns and other nationalities in the commune.[23]
The growing criticism of the Finnish kommunarycoincided with a recruitment drive for Karelia, and the promise of a Soviet Finnish homeland. In 1929, the Karelian government invited a group of Seattle commune members to come to Karelia to organize a similar agricultural commune, Hiilisuo (Coal-bog).[24]
Leo Leino, one of the most ideological among the leading Finns in the commune, explained the reasons for moving to Karelia in an article in the magazine Red Karelia, in mid-December 1929. "The move is for two reasons," he wrote. "We Americans in America had a desire to build Soviet Russia when the opportunity arose, and we chose southern Russia as the place, which we thought was favorable to mechanical farming due to its geographical position and other conditions. . . . Now, after 7 years, we have come to realize that a person who is not fluent in Russian cannot take part in constructive work with all his might, which also includes the cultural front." Leino continued to explain the language problem in a way that was ideologically acceptable: "When we left America, we imagined learning the Russian language, but experience shows that for the middle-aged and above, it is almost impossible to learn the language, even in spite of good will." He noted that the language barrier inhibited working with the commune's neighbors to build socialism and concluded, "the Finns of America, after serious deliberation, have decided to leave the Don and . . . play our part in organizing collective agriculture in Soviet Karelia. We believe that the experiences we have gained, applied in an environment where language difficulties are not an obstacle to our work and activities, will help us to achieve even better results."[25]
In 1930, many—apparently the large majority—of the Finns left the commune for Karelia, where some 6,000-10,000 Finnish Americans were also arriving at about the same time. Not all the Finns left. Oscar Hendrickson's grandson, Matti Tarvala, later estimated that about 80 percent had left. His parents were among those who left, but not his grandparents. [26]
Seattle in the 1930s
Although most of the Finns left Seattle, many of its founding members remained and forged ahead and, in fact, surprisingly little changed in the nature of the farm through the 1930s. The population continued to increase, more than doubling between 1927 and 1932. Saulit remained the commune’s leader. The patterns of communal agriculture and life remained much the same.[27] And the commune still had great value for the Soviet Union, which displayed the commune to foreign visitors to demonstrate the accomplishments of Soviet agriculture. Beatrice and Sidney Webb described a 1932 visit to Seattle in their book, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization, published in 1935.[28] Such visitors typically wrote about the commune in terms that promoted Soviet collective agriculture and humanized the Soviet Union among the international Left. Such treatments often included lavish praise for the Soviet system. The Moscow Daily News, in 1932, featured a report by a commune member, Richard Gerbac, who concluded that all Seattle’s accomplishments had been made possible through “the leadership of the Communist Party and the correct policies of Soviet Government.”[29]
The next year, in August 1933, Anna Louise Strong visited Seattle and wrote an article about it for the Moscow Daily News, Moscow's English-language newspaper, which she had helped to found. Herself a resident of Seattle, Washington, before 1921 and an occasional visitor to the commune, she had lived in the Soviet Union off and one throughout much of the 1920s and 1930s. In 1933, she noted that another American, George MacDowell, had recently attributed Seattle’s success to knowing how “to combine hard-boiled business sense with real communal devotion.” Unlike Gerbac the year before, Strong said nothing about the success of the commune being due to "the leadership of the Communist Party and the correct policies Soviet government" and attributed it instead to the commune itself, especially its “care for a decent standard of living” for its members.[30]
Strong’s article also promised another article about Seattle, an interview with Saulit. It never appeared. Her biographer notes that this came at a time when Strong, theoretically an editor for the Moscow Daily News, was increasingly frustrated with limitations on her reporting; the biographer does not specify the cancellation of the projected series on Seattle but the timing is squarely on target.[31] In her autobiography, published in the United States two years later, Strong noted, “I wrote a hero story on Commune Seattle, but even this material was very guardedly handled by Moscow Daily News.” She included, in the autobiography, part of her interview with Saulit:
[Seattle’s] good crop of the previous year had been six times drained by grain collections to make up the township quota. ‘Compel us?’ said the president [Saulit], in answer to my sympathetic question. ‘Nobody had the power to compel us. We ourselves voted in general meeting for each of those extra collections. It took a lot of arguing, for it meant sacrificing a year’s litter of pigs and putting prize dairy cattle on a grainless diet. But when the state gives you credits and the workers give you tractors you can’t shirk a common emergency. The ones we were annoyed at were those slackers who left it to us to do their share; and especially those Ukrainian beet-growers who left us without sugar for two years. But we have bee-hives, and life can be very sweet without sugar.’
Thus, Saulit simultaneously proclaimed Seattle’s devotion to the Soviet cause and harshly criticized the “slackers” who displayed less commitment.[32]
Unlike the official visitors, E. M. Dashwood was neither a socialist nor accompanied by an official Soviet minder during her visit. At the urging of her publisher, she spent the summer of 1936 in Russia collecting material for a book. After learning rudimentary Russian, she planned to work on a collective farm, but she was unable to receive permission. Undeterred, in Rostov-na-Donu she located an American who had been a member of the Seattle commune, and she was eventually welcomed there, but she went on her own.[33]
When Dashwood arrived, Saulit gave her a tour of the commune. He told her that Seattle was one of only two surviving communes from those established after the revolution. A majority of the commune members, Dashwood learned, were Russians, Ukrainians, and Caucasians, with significant numbers of Belorussians, Poles, Finns, Armenians, Lithuanians, Latvians, and one “Chinaman,” who was married to a Russian. Though nearly all came originally from Europe, most had lived and worked—or been out of work—for years in the United States. Significantly, her account does not suggest ethnic animosities, nor does it place any special emphasis on the role of Seattle’s Finnish members.[34]
Dashwood recounted the story of Julia who had been born in Poland and had come to America at the age of sixteen. She married another Pole in America, worked in a silk-stocking factory, and supported her husband, who was often unemployed because of his political agitation. Asked if she regretted leaving the United States, her reply was, “Often.” To be certain, America been had difficult because of the lack of job security, and there “were no worries” of that sort at the commune. Yet she missed the social life of the United States.[35] Dashwood left Seattle because of a toothache that she was unwilling to entrust to Saulit’s wife, who was in charge of medical services, or a visiting doctor. She summarized her feelings about the commune: "The chief drawbacks to life in the Commune were the utter lack of privacy, the reversion to comparatively uncivilized standards of living, and the deadening effects of it all on individual development, both emotional and intellectual. [Yet] that an extraordinary degree of . . . ‘civic pride’ flourished there, was undeniable. It is true, too—though surprising—that the standard of health was reasonably high." Her return to Rostov, she recalled, was “like coming back to the world after being immured in a Trappist monastery.”[36]
Dashwood also noted that the commune had begun to refuse official visitors shortly before her arrival. She was told that official visitors “had to have a special meal prepared for them, and they interrupted the work, and were generally considered to have been a nuisance”—i.e., they interfered with the efficiency and discipline that had made for the commune’s success. She also got the impression that the commune’s refusal to accept such visitors had put it in disfavor with the government.[37]
From Commune to Collective Farm to Post-Soviet Joint-stock Company
The commune seems to have experienced little internal turmoil after 1930, except during the Great Terror in 1937-38, when waves of arrests and executions for supposed political crimes occurred throughout the Soviet Union. Michael Gelb, based on his research, states that the leadership of Seattle “vanished in the night” in 1937. Matti Tarhala, grandson of the Hendricksons, told an interviewer in 2018 that some seventy were arrested at the commune. Finnish Americans living in the Soviet Union were persecuted with particular ferocity as supposed agents of Finland, the United States, or both. Among the many Finnish Americans executed by the NKVD in Karelia were several former commune members, including Enoch Nelson. Though the available data is incomplete, many, perhaps most, of the former Seattle kommunary who went to Karelia faced some sort of repression, including time in the Gulag.[38]
In 1940, the original lease expired, and the commune was officially transformed into a collective farm, giving Soviet authorities control over its machinery and staff. Commune members later claimed they had voted for this change based on the success of collective farming. However, archival documents reveal an order in November 1939 from the Moscow Commissariat of Agriculture directing that the commune was to become a collective farm and prescribing a process to transfer the farm's machinery to the local Machine Tractor Station, which served all the collective farms in the region.[39] Even so, Seattle had outlasted all, or nearly all, the other communes in the Soviet Union. As Wesson states, "The Soviet communes did not die naturally . . . They were terminated by order of the Communist Party which found them no long suitable. . . . the decision against them was a political one over which they had no control." Wesson also notes that nearly all communes were phased out in the early 1930s and that a change in statute in 1935 made communes virtually illegal. Stalin had been scornful of communes almost from the beginning. As Stalin solidified his control, Wesson states, the communes “were a profoundly discordant note in an increasingly conformist and regimented social structure.”[40] With the conversion of Seattle to a collective farm, it was also renamed in honor of the party leader who had made the transformation possible—Comrade Stalin.
Despite these changes, Saulit seems to have remained the leader of the farm until World War II. That part of the Soviet Union was occupied by the Germans from August or September 1942 until early 1943. According to Mikhail Mamanov, who was the farm’s chairman, agronomist, and historian in the 1960s, Saulit was the victim of Germans when they invaded the region. However, oral accounts collected by Ivan Romanovskii, a Russian researcher, suggest that Saulit may have been killed by Soviet police, who alleged collaboration with the Germans. As a Latvian, Saulit was among the ethnic groups that had been especially targeted during the Great Terror of 1937-1938.[41]
Aili Hendrickson, the daughter of Oscar, had married Aarne Koskinen, and they were among those who went to Karelia. Koskinen and his father were among those executed in 1938. Aili's second husband, Matti Tarhala, died in the siege of Leningrad in 1944. Aili and her son, also named Matti, then returned to Seiatel' where she lived the rest of her life. Oscar Hendrickson was arrested in 1949 and imprisoned until 1955, when Khrushchev began to close down much of the Gulag. Aili's son Matti, who called himself "the last Finn," was still living in Seiatel' as of 2018. [42]
In 1961 the Twenty-Second Congress of the Soviet Communist Party accelerated de-Stalinization. The farm’s new name, the Twenty-Second Congress collective farm, may have been a not-so-subtle voicing of dissatisfaction with the Stalin era. In the post-Soviet era, the commune-turned-kolkhoz was once again transformed—this time into a private joint-stock company called Seiatel'. Some descendants of commune members still live there and in the surrounding villages. Some have maintained a command of English. According to an article in the Rostov newspaper, Molot, published in 2002 on the 80th anniversary of the founding of Seattle: "The banners that still decorate the main square of the town 'Seiatel',' are not the communists’, but rather the commune’s slogans: 'Where there is no labor--there gardens are not blooming! Where there is no labor, there the world is a desert!' Only romantics of the world revolution could have such slogans."[43]
Conclusion
This survey of the history of the Seattle commune from its founding until its transformation into a collective farm in 1940 provides some understanding of the reasons why, among all the foreign communes established in Soviet Union, only Seattle experienced such success, and also why the Seattle commune was considered so uniquely American. And, as it turns out, many of the answers to one question are also answers to the other--the commune’s success seems to have been compounded of a number of factors, some of which were understood as uniquely American.
Clearly part of the explanation for Seattle’s success derives from its state-of-the-art machinery, most of it imported from the United States, and from its skilled mechanics and machinists, many of whom learned their trade in the United States. The commune’s ability to buy the most modern equipment, in turn, derived from its substantial capital, which its founding members had earned by working in the United States. George MacDowell also pointed to what was undoubtedly considered an American attribute when he singled out the commune members’ “hard-boiled business sense.” There is, of course, considerable irony in attributing the success of a fundamentally anti-capitalist undertaking to its capital and “business sense,” but the history of U.S. communes teems with failures from lack of capital and managerial acumen.
But there was more to it than that. Many of the Seattle kommunary had come from the old Russian empire to the United States, stayed for a considerable period of time—more than twenty years in some cases—then left, not to return to their native village like the birds of passage described by historians of immigration, but instead to go to a place neither they nor their parents had ever seen. Upon their arrival in the Don region, they were seen by local residents as Americans—indeed, as people so different that they might have come from another planet. Apparently their experience in the United States had changed them in significant ways. Mikhail Kozlov, the local journalist, emphasized the commune’s “order, neatness, cleanliness, fresh air and no flies”—characteristics he considered uniquely American, and other visitors to the commune also commented on its neatness and orderliness. Akin to that orderliness was the commune’s emphasis on efficiency, visible, for example, at their quickly eaten and largely silent meals. Strong also recounted the highly efficient way that the commune organized its wheat harvest which included a warm mid-day meal delivered to the fields and did not require harvest workers to sleep in the fields, as collective farms did.
Related to the commune’s orderliness and efficiency was its work ethic. Strong reported, “They tell you at the railway station of Tselina, ‘Nobody can work like that Commune Seyatel.’”[44] Commune members seem to have routinely worked long hours at a time when American workers were organizing—sometimes under Communist leadership—to fight for shorter work days. Enoch Nelson made no complaints about his eleven-to-fifteen hour days in the Seattle machine shop. However, after he left to go briefly to Leningrad where he found work firing a boiler, he observed, “There is no hard work here at all. It seems a puzzle to me how they are making any profits out of this country at all from the way they work here.”[45] The attitude he expressed brings to mind an aphorism attributed to many residents of Communist states in the late 20th century: We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. It also brings to mind the descriptions of collective farms in Mark Kramer’s book, Travels with a Hungry Bear, in which he described a typical collective farm at the end of the Soviet era as characterized by massive underemployment, widespread idleness, and rampant alcoholism, and suggested that they had been that way for decades.[46] Seattle seems to have had its own way of dealing with offenders against the work ethic. Just as Saulit voiced his disgust with “slackers” on other farms, Dashwood recorded that the most frequent misdeeds to come before the commune’s Comradely Court, after petty theft, were “bad or careless work, damage to farm property and refusal to work.” The penalties consisted of fines, but repeated occurrences could bring expulsion. [47]
Could it be that the Seattle kommunary, while living in the United States, picked up not only a taste for apricots and electric irons but also their “hard-boiled business sense” and their expectation that they would work hard and put in long hours?
But there is clearly more to the explanation of Seattle's success than its capital, equipment, skilled metal workers, American efficiency, and work ethic. Dashwoods's confidant, Julia, reported that her husband had frequently lost his job in the United States because of his agitation against poor working conditions, but seems to have not complained about the long hours at Seattle. Dashwood was surprised that the “extraordinary degree” of “civic pride” among kommunary. Strong pointed out that “care for a decent living standard for its members was the keynote of its success.” And MacDowell attributed their success to their ability “to combine hard boiled business sense with communal devotion.” Seattle commune members—or at least a significant and influential proportion of them—seem to have been committed to a vision of an egalitarian communal life, their version of communism, which persuaded them that they were, in fact, the direct beneficiaries of their own hard work. This ideological devotion to communalism included a commitment to contribute to the success of communism more generally, as demonstrated in their sacrifices to meet the local grain quota.
Thus, it seems that Seattle’s prosperity stemmed from its American capital, technology, and technical ability combined with its ideological dedication to communalism. Such ideological devotion to communalism was not unknown in the United States, but there it often ran up against insuperable obstacles—lack of capital, hostility from governmental and non-governmental institutions alike, and the prevailing ideology of individual enterprise. In southern Russia, for a brief time in the 1920s and early 1930s, such ideological devotion to communalism combined with resources, managerial ability, and state support to produce Seattle’s success.
[1] Enoch Nelson to Arvid Nelson, July 9. 1924, folder 9, box 5, Nelson Letters; Strong, “Commune Seattle.”
[2] GARO 1878-1-51-1.
[3] Wesson, p. 177, 233, 269 n. 37, citing Kindeev, pp. 152-153.
[4] Gerbac; Strong, “Commune Seattle.”
[5] “S kogo brat primer.”
[6] Strong, “Commune Seattle”; Delafield, pp. 19-20; “V gostiak u amerikanstev” Oct. 5. 1923.
[7] Wesson, p. 126; Delafield, pp. 20-23. According to a 1928 article, wages were meant only for buying clothes, “whatever kind that person wants,” see “S kogo brat primer.” Chepobov and Yashchenko report that the commune had 44,525 rubles in its account as of 1928. Alexey Golubev of Petrozavodsk State University graciously answered my query on H-Russia regarding the most meaningful exchange rates, confirming that the official rate was 1 dollar to 1.95 rubles, and that the equivalent purchasing power was probably 10 rubles to the dollar for food and 20-25 rubles to the dollar for manufactured goods, but based on the Soviet economy in the early 1930s; he cited Elena Osokina, Za fasadom "stalinskogo izobiliia". Raspredeleniie i rynok v snabzhenii naseleniia v gody industrializatsii. 1927-1941 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1998), pp. 161, 164. I first converted rubles to dollars using those proportions for purchasing manufactured goods (since Seattle had no need to be buying food), then converted the result to 1928 dollars, then to current equivalent purchasing power, using “The CPI Inflation Calculator,” online at https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl.
[8] “Kommuna 'Seattle' gotovitsia Pervomaiskii karnival,” Salskii Pakhar, Apr. 26 1929; “Den v ‘Seattle,’” Salskii Pakhar, Oct. 8, 1929, p. 2; Enoch Nelson to Arvid Nelson, Dec. 7, 1924, Jan. 19, 1925, folder 9, 10, box 5, Nelson Letters; Wesson, p. 233, 268, n. 25, citing Tadeusch, p. 81; From a Hailuoto Fisherman to the Chairman of a Collective Farm. One unsubstantiated source attributes Yuri Andropov’s liking for jazz to his Finnish-Canadian driver in Karelia during the late 1930s; see http://www.d.umn.edu/~apogorel/karelia/exhibition.html.
[9] Delafield, pp. 24-25; Salskii Pakhar; Wesson notes similar patterns in other communes, p. 181.
[10] Delafield, pp. 39-40.
[11] From a Hailuoto Fisherman to the Chairman of a Collective Farm.
[12] “S kogo brat primer.”
[13] “V gostiakh u amerikantsev,” Oct. 6, 1923. The Bolsheviks extended the wartime prohibition of alcohol until 1923; see Jack S. Blocker et al., eds., Alcohol and Temperance in Modern History: An International Encyclopedia, 2 vols. (Santa Barbara: ABC Clio, 2003), 2:638. See also Anna Louise Strong, The First Time in History: Two Years of Russia’s New Life (August 1921, to December 1923) (New York: Boni and Liveright, Publishers, 1924), pp, 165-168. Other communes also banned liquor; see Wesson, p. 181. Similarly, Finnish-American Communists in Astoria, Oregon, joined with other Finns—the so-called “church Finns”—to revitalize a local temperance society; Hummasti, p. 197.
[14] Wesson, p. 181; “V gostiakh u amerikantsev,” Oct. 6, 1923; Mamanov, pp. 16-17; “Kommuna ‘Seattle,’” Salskii Pakhar, July 22, 1925, p. 3; GARO 1390-11-90-3-4; GARO 1485-1-488-207.
[15] Executive Secretary [C. E. Ruthenberg] to Tom Lewis [DO for District 13, California], May 29, 1925, RGASPI 515-1-496.
[16] “S kogo brat primer.”
[17] Gerbac; Enoch Nelson to Arvid Nelson, Jan.19, 1925, folder 10, box 5, Nelson Letters; Vera Voloshinova, “Gde net truda,” Molot [newspaper], Oct. 25, 2002.
[18] “Kommuna ‘Seattle,’” July 22, 1925. An undated photograph (reproduced above) in the Seiatel' museum carries the caption, in Russian, ”The First Soviet Combine in the Fields,” but all other photographs of wheat harvesting in the 1920s show reapers and threshers. It seems likely that Seattle acquired one combine, probably shortly after 1926 since Enoch Nelson’s letters fail to mention a combine but do discuss wheat harvesting at length. Strong, in 1933, referred to combines, plural.
[19] Enoch Nelson to Arvid Nelson, Dec.16,1925, folder 10, box 5, Nelson Letters.
[20] “V gostiakh u amerikantsev,” Oct. 10, 1923.
[21] “V gostiakh u amerikantsev,” Oct. 6, 1923.
[22] “Amerikanskaia kommuna,” Pravda, May 1, 1929, p. 3.
[23] GARO 1488-1-488-221-224.
[24] Hummasti, p. 254. On the later history of Hiilisuo, see Michael Gelb, “”’Karelian Fever’: The Finnish Immigrant Community During Stalin’s Purges,” Europe Asia Studies 45 (1993): 1091-1116, esp. 1098; Reino Kero, “The Tragedy of Joonas Harju of Hiilisuo Commune, Soviet Karelia 1933-1936,” online at http://www.genealogia.fi/emi/art/article205e.htm. Gelb and Kero report that, in the mid-1930s, the Finnish leaders of Hiilisuo were accused of being bourgeois nationalists and of having sabotaged the farm, were imprisoned or “disappeared,” and were replaced by Russians. This was part of a larger attack on “Finnish nationalism” launched in 1934.
[25] Leo Leino in Red Karelia, December 18, 1929, translated and shared by Harri Vanhala.
[26] In an interview with Seth Bernstein, Matvei Tarkhalo claimed that approximately 80% of the Finns left the commune. See also Nick Baron, Karelia, Planning, Politics and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1920-1939, (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 116; Hummasti, pp. 236-272; Gelb; and Alexis Pogorelskin. "New Perspectives on Karelian Fever: The Recruitment of North American Finns to Karelia in the Early 1930's," Journal of Finnish Studies, vol.1, no.3 (Dec. 1997), 165-178, and the Karelian Fever website of Professor Pogorelskin, University of Minnesota at Duluth: http://www.d.umn.edu/~apogorel/karelia/.
[27] Mamanov, p. 32.
[28] Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization, 3rd edn. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1944), pp. 213-214.
[29] Gerbac.
[30] Strong, Moscow Daily News, Sep. 5, 1933.
[31] Strong and Keyssar, Right in Her Soul, pp. 152-159.
[32] Strong, I Change Worlds, pp. 372-3.
[33] Delafield, pp. 6-10.
[34] Delafield, p. 26.
[35] Delafield, pp. 13-14, 33-36, 41-42, 49.
[36] Delafield, p. 79, 202.
[37] Delafield, p. 26-27.
[38] Matti Tarhala, interviewed by Harri Vanhala and Teuvo Peltoniemi, Sept. 4, 2018, translation by Vanhala; Tarhala was born only in 1941, so he was reporting information that he'd heard from others. Gelb, “’Karelian Fever,’” p. 1102, does not cite a source for the claim about the commune's leadership all dispappearing one night in 1937, and that information does not appear in any of the records we consulted. Saulit’s death during World War II has been attributed variously to the Germans and to Soviet authorities; see below. For a study of victims in the Great Terror, see Aleksandr Vatlin, Terror raionnogo masshtaba, (Moscow: Rospen, 2004);
[39] GARO 3737-2-182-119.
[40] Wesson, pp. 91, 171, 222, 225.
[41] Ivan Romanovskii learned of Saulit’s execution through interviews with Seattle residents; Romanovskii to Cherny, e-mail, 11/8/2009. For the targeting of Latvians during the Great Terror, see Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 351.
[42] Some of this information comes from the Hendrickson photo album, and the rest from the interview with Aili Tarhala in the From a Hailuoto Fisherman to the Chairman of a Collective Farm documentary.
[43] Voloshinova, “Gde net truda,” translation by Lara King.
[44] Strong, “Commune Seattle."
[45] Enoch Nelson to Arvid Nelson, May 18, 1926, folder 11, box 5, Nelson Letters.
[46] Mark Kramer, Travels with a Hungry Bear: A Journey to the Russian Heartland (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996).
[47] Delafield, pp. 22-23.