In 1931, Alex Shopik had been one of a party of seventy-five American miners emigrating to the USSR from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. At the beginning of the decade, their stirring speeches had been reported in the newspaper Sovietskaya Sibir: “We the members of the fifth group of miners which have been exploited by the bosses of Amerika, and thrown out of work for our services into the thirteen million army of unemployed have decided to leave that capitalist country and help the Soviet Union . . . We, ourselves, have come to Soviet Russia not to sleep but to work and work with all our power to
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