“We are undertaking the most tremendous move ever made by labor in this country, a move which will lead—who knows where!'' editorialized Anna Louise Strong on February 4, 1917, the eve of the Seattle general strike.
These words were as much a reflection of her own enthusiasm and confusion as they were an analysis of the brave but naive Seattle working class. She found her way 15  months later to revolutionary Russia. Anna Louise Strong’s autobiography I Change Worlds (1937) is the chronicle of this journey to communism.
Drawn to the Soviet Union like so many progressives of her generation, her first assignment was famine relief on the Russian river Volga. Fresh from the Seattle general strike, Anna Louise thought she was hot stuff until she met the young Russian communist Sonia. Sonia was donating her month's vacation to help the relief efforts. Drought, civil war and imperialist invasion had left the area devastated. The world capitalists hoped to starve the new socialist state into submission with an embargo.
“It is utterly impossible,” lamented Strong upon seeing the starving thousands.
“There is nothing impossible” responded Sonia in clear firm tones.
“But millions will die!” said Anna Louise.
“Millions have already died” answered Sonia, with the steady hand of communist determination.
The NEP and U.S. aid
The New Economic Policy (NEP), instituted a year later, allowed some capitalist exploitation. In return, the U.S. sent a little food to the famine areas. Strong’s misgivings about the U.S. relief and the NEP were reflected in her reports about Puriayeff, chairman of relief in a small village near Samara. Puriayeff, near starvation because he refused to eat more than the famine-stricken villagers he organized, had to meet with a U.S. representative from Washington. Strong reported:
Full-fed and aggressively content, he (the American relief man) sat in the best rooms Samara afforded, consuming a copious meal of borsch, chicken and wine. On the floor beside him were great baskets of hams, canned goods, wines and stronger drinks with foreign labels.
Puriayeff looked not at the food; he looked at the man’s uniform - an officer’s uniform of fine cloth with shining buttons and epaulets, well brushed as if for a parade ... He had seen such uniforms before ... He had seen them on the Tsar’s officers and on the officers of the intervention. He had overthrown the men who wore them.
Then Puriayeff looked down at the hampers of food and wine; in his eyes was not the look of hunger, but of worried contempt. Was the old world he had helped overthrow coming back to rule the Volga?
The NEP ended in the late 20s. Under Joseph Stalin the Soviet five-year plans replaced NEP. The U.S. relief bureaucrats were sent packing, but not before they were caught smuggling thousands of dollars’ worth of Tsarist jewels, now the property of the Russian working class, out of the country. Pravda (the daily newspaper of the then Communist Party of the Soviet Union) publicized the scandal to Strong’s immense satisfaction.
Strong met many workers ready to work themselves to death (in fact a small number did) to build socialism during the first five-year plan. The Molvitino peasants stand out as an example. Molvitino was a small, back-water village, 50  miles from the railroad. Under the Tsar, it was plagued by pestilence and superstition. The Molvitinians, determined to become 20th  century socialists, sent a delegation to the regional center for the Party’s agricultural meeting. Sleepless, this delegation hiked and hitched, bluffed and bullied their way on horse carts, “commandeered” trucks and freight trains throughout the night to make the meeting on time at noon the next day. At the meeting they debated and decided, then fought their way home to carry out the Party’s line on agricultural production. We could learn a lot from these “backward peasants.”
Anna Louise Strong also met with Joseph Stalin to solve problems in her newspaper, The Moscow News. She described the comrades present: one was witty; the other was handsome; some were just trying to cover their asses. Stalin, the chairperson of the  Communist Party of Russia, was the least imposing. Hours later, she realized that Stalin had guided the collective to find its own will with his constant probing and questions. He was the best communist of his time, she concluded.
The “comrade-creators,” Strong’s affectionate name for Party members, shook the foundations of her liberal progressive illusions. She saw that the Roosevelt New Deal in the U.S. was “making the poor support the starving to save the rich.” She also saw how Germany could fall to fascism. “The pacifists had talked and talked and never acted. They had explained all their strengths and weaknesses, yet remained passive — just worried the capitalists into action.”
Strong’s ideas on love matured
“... I chose my husband, not from any of those emotional flurries which American romanticists call love but from a need far deeper - the deep, instinctive need of my own future. American youth, which wastes so much of life in bewildering emotion, needs to be told what I took years to know. To fall in love is very easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade through whose presence one becomes steadily the person one desires to be. This I have found and hold.
What is this thing, I thought, that I call ‘truth and frankness,’ when in Washington they tell you personal details while in Moscow they discuss a nation’s plan.” — Her very idea of truth had changed.
She was becoming a communist; she saw the value of communist theory. It had taken her 14  years of experience of revolution in three countries (Russia, China and Mexico) to know that the California co-op movement was getting nowhere. The  communists in the United States knew it just from California and a book by Marx; she observed. She saw the value of a party and party discipline. Joining the party was “not to be chosen but to choose with others'. Freedom and comradeship can always grow wider. Increasing organization does not squeeze out freedom, but multiplies its vast variety of choices.”
I Change Worlds is much more than the story of a remarkable journalist’s travels from the U.S. to Russia. Anna Louise Strong also changed sides on the barricades. She chose the working class and communism. Her autobiography is useful for those of us who also desire to change worlds.J
For a digital copy of this book, click here or go to https://tinyurl.com/ichangeworlds