The Eternal Road is an Indie film or independent movie that I recently watched during a film festival.  It deals with a forgotten part of Russia’s past and that is when in the time of Stalin workers from around the world were invited to come and join in the socialist revolution that was taking place in Russia.  The Russian government placed adverts in newspapers around the world encouraging the workers of the world to come to Russia for plentiful jobs and because there were no jobs in their countries, and they felt they could not look after their families, or because they believed in socialism, they took up those offers.  This is also very well covered in a book called “The Forsaken, an American tragedy in Stalin’s Russia” by Tim Tzouliadis.  The theme of the book is pretty much the same as that of the movie and I would strongly suggest to anybody, particularly those with Russian origin or Russian members of their family, that they watch the movie.  It relates to what happened to those people.  

Initially, and in the late 1920s America went through a terrible recession, life for those particular people was far better in Russia, because many of them were unemployed in America.  More than 10,000 Americans went to try out the excitement of the new experiment with socialism in Russia and many Finnish people went as well – the protagonist in the movie is Finnish.  They were put on collective farms, they even had baseball games and social gatherings in Russia, but a few years later, during the late 1930s, Stalin became paranoid of many of these people, especially when they start wanting to go back to America, believing they were Russian spies.  Their passports were confiscated and those that went to the American Embassy to try and make arrangements to get back were picked up by the secret police of Russia as soon as they left the Embassy and never seen again.  The vast majority were shipped off, put on trucks and led to wooded areas where they were executed, one after another.  That is where the title of the book comes in, because they were forsaken and in some instances their children were adopted by other Russians and given a new life, but more than 10,000 Americans and Finnish people as well as people from other countries of the world were simply executed.  

It is a good reminder, while capitalism is not perfect, that communism and socialism have not worked in other countries and it was not just 20 million Russians who were killed during this time, but other people from all over the world who went along to genuinely take part in a political system that they thought was much better and had equality for all people, also got executed.  For some reason or other the political systems that allege equality between people almost always end up, not only in disaster, but killing anybody along the road that dissents with them, disagrees with them or is even considered to be too intellectual for the system.  The first to be killed are normally the lawyers, the Judges, the writers, the thinkers and many of those who were not executed learned very quickly to give up any job of any prestige at all and quickly become a labourer, farmer, etc.  

Unfortunately for the Americans and the Finnish, who were largely working on farms as farmers, they just got executed.  Movies and books like this often never make the mainstream with the result that most people, including most Russians, would not even know this history of their country because it is largely being covered up and forgotten about.