“Fifty Russian Winters: An American Woman’s Life in the Soviet Union”, by Margaret Wettlin, introduction by Harrison E. Salisbury

324 pages, Pharos Books, ISBN-13: 978-0886876548

Margaret Butterworth Wettlin – “Peg” to her friends – was an American writer who was best known for her translations of Russian literature. Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1907 to a Methodist family (though raised in West Philadelphia), Wettlin attended West Philadelphia High School where she was class president; upon graduation she attended the School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania and graduated in 1928. Her first job after college was as an English teacher at various schools around Pennsylvania till 1932; after witnessing the collapse of the US economy in the Great Depression, and fascinated by the Soviet experiment of establishing a new economic polity, she traveled to the Soviet Union, planning to stay a year…and ended up remaining for fifty. She met and married the stage director Andrei Efremoff in 1934; they would have a son and a daughter together. The couple headed for Mongolia where they spent a year helping the locals build a revolutionary national theater before returning to Moscow. Until the war broke out, Wettlin’s life, like the lives of those around her, was dominated by Stalin’s hunt for his enemies. Though she had planned to return to the United States periodically, in 1936 Stalin decreed that foreigners living in the Soviet Union had to leave the country or stay and become Soviet citizens; deciding that she could not abandon her family, she stayed.

Wettlin and her family escaped the purges, but Moscow was under siege, and so the family managed to flee south to the Caucasus to wait out the war. When they returned to Moscow the couple resumed their literary and artistic passions: Efremoff began teaching at the Moscow Theater Institute, and she resumed writing, especially an account of her war experiences, Russian Road, and began translating Russian classical literature. After her husband’s death in 1968, Wettlin decided to return to this country; the State Department determined that she had become a Soviet citizen “under duress” and granted U.S. citizenship to her and her family. In 1980, accompanied by her daughter and a grandson, Wettlin arrived in West Philadelphia (it would be seven years before her son and his family were allowed to leave Russia). In West Philadelphia, Mrs. Wettlin was impressed by the immeasurable improved race relations and MAC machines (“insert a plastic card, punch a button, and out comes your money. I think it is fantastic”). She died on September 1^st, 2003, in West Philadelphia, aged 96.

Damn, what a life, and Margaret Wettlin recorded it all in Fifty Russian Winters: An American Woman’s Life in the Soviet Union. Most Russian history tends to be brutal, impersonal and boring (well, what do you expect? The Soviet Union was a brutal, impersonal and boring place…that was trying to kill you), but Wettlin did a stunning job of re-creating what she experienced, from life living under the treat of the Stalinist purges to the devastation caused by the marauding Nazis throughout the USSR. This book is a page-turning memoir of how she and her family – and millions of other Soviets – struggled to survive the hardships of famine, repression, war and purges. Amazingly, she kept her heart, her mind and her eyes open and many times survived by creating a job or filling a need in the educational system of the Soviet Union one school or university at a time, even managing to give birth to two children when there were no hospitals, no drugs and no sanitation, almost dying in the process.

The greatest weakness of the book was also the most interesting part: Wettlin’s underdeveloped and unsupported political views. She never joined the Communist Party, but she certainly supported the proclaimed Soviet ideals of equality and reform. She even became an informant for the secret police in support of this dream, but when she became disillusioned that her work didn’t seem to be making things better, she quit. She is critical of Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev because they made people’s lives worse, not better. She never would have gotten a good grade on a political science term paper, as she offers no evidence to support her beliefs. Her opinions regarding all of this really shed a lot of light (for me at least) on why so many people continued to support the Soviet Union for so long, despite the hardships they faced. The book is far from perfect, but that’s a large part of why it’s so interesting.