“I want to start a new life in the USSR” was actually a popular thing between 1918-33 roughly. Many Western communists did emigrate to build the workers’ paradi

“I want to start a new life in the USSR” was actually a popular thing between 1918-33 roughly. Many Western communists did emigrate to build the workers’ paradise. As foreigners they were of course particularly suspicious in Stalin’s paranoid purges, and most ended up dead or in Siberia. After WWII everyone in the West pretty much understood the Stalinist reality and not even the staunchest Soviet apologists would actually want to move there.