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As a Russian living in America, the story of an American family in Russia naturally grabbed my attention.
There’s a video making the rounds [ [link removed] ] of a woman with an unmistakable southern drawl walking around a Russian village. This is DeAnna Huffman, who, along with her husband Derek, and their young children, transplanted their family from a peaceful Texas life to Russia in order to escape “LGBT indoctrination.” [ [link removed] ]
The Huffmans, unsurprisingly, are totally out of their depth.
As she navigates her new environs, DeAnna complains that the family has not secured a proper tutor to get their children the necessary Russian vocabulary to start school. Derek joined the Russian military under the pretense that he’d be a mechanic or fill some other kind of a backend role in Vladimir Putin’s war machine.
Instead, he is being thrown into the Ukrainian meatgrinder with just a few weeks of training and zero Russian language competency. There are rumors [ [link removed] ] that he has already been killed. Whether or not those reports are true, Derek Huffman is already coming up on the one-month average life expectancy [ [link removed] ] for a Russian conscript in Ukraine. Humanity is cheap under dictatorship.
The Huffman family’s story is not a unique one. Despite the blessings of freedom, Americans have been looking everywhere but America for answers to their problems throughout the history of the United States. For decades, Russia has been one of the more popular destinations for the disillusioned. In this sense, the Huffmans are following a path charted not by likeminded family-values conservatives, but by communists, and socialists.
After the economic collapse of 1929, 100,000 Americans [ [link removed] ] applied for jobs in the USSR. The demand was greater than the young Soviet Union could handle. Some of these Americans were simply desperate for employment. Many felt a genuine affinity for the revolutionary workers’ state. In 1931, the English translation of New Russia’s Primer: The Story of the Five-Year Plan [ [link removed] ] was a US bestseller [ [link removed] ]. The collective spirit of a communist society must have seemed a refreshing contrast to President Herbert Hoover’s dogged insistence on self-reliance.
If you’re familiar with how this story ends, you’ll know that Derek Huffman is also not the first American expat in Russia to be betrayed by the Kremlin.
The socialist utopia Americans were chasing a century ago turned out to be just as bad for the new arrivals as it was for Ukrainians, Georgians, Russians, and other native Soviets. For some US-born emigres, it was arguably worse, because they were foreigners in a police state that saw external enemies around every corner. Many Americans, even devoted communists, were sent to the gulag during Stalin’s purges. Men like Arnold Preedin of Boston [ [link removed] ] once played baseball in Moscow’s Gorky Park, only to wind up dead in a ditch outside the Soviet capital, executed by the NKVD alongside untold thousands more.
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In fairness to the American emigres of the 1920s and 1930s, they were leaving behind a country caught in the throes of the Great Depression. Even then, the USSR was many times worse, but the United States was at a historic low.
Back then, people also weren’t carrying around small computers in their pockets; they lacked the instantaneous access to information that today would have given many pause before setting off for the supposed proletarian paradise on the other side of the Atlantic. As I wrote last week [ [link removed] ], contemporary American coverage of the Soviet Union wasn’t always honest.
The Huffman family and their fellow travelers have no such excuses. Video, photographic, and written testimonies from Putin’s KGB regime are readily available on the Internet and social media. American news outlets across the political spectrum, from Fox to CNN, regularly report on conditions inside the Russian Federation and in the occupied territories of Ukraine. Going in the face of overwhelming evidence is a choice motivated by ideological blindness.
Look, I certainly don’t identify with the extent of the Huffmans’ right-wing extremism, but I can get frustrated with “woke” excesses. And I certainly empathize with the plight of people caught up in the Depression and other perilous moments in American history. But if you’re fortunate enough to be born under a democracy, there is a lot that you can do to air your grievances before you throw everything away and uproot your family to an authoritarian regime.
As for the Huffmans, I can’t be your Russian language tutor, but I can teach you one word: Udachi (good luck)! You’ll need it.
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